Performing Arts

After motherhood disrupted her art career, Mierle Laderman Ukeles issued a radical manifesto declaring childcare and housework as performance art. Entering the male-dominated 1960s avant-garde, she challenged art’s scorn for maintenance and care. Expanding her vision, Ukeles collaborated with overlooked museum workers and, in 1977, became artist-in-residence at NYC Sanitation, honoring essential labor. Using newly digitized archives, Maintenance Artist traces her transformation of maintenance into a powerful force in contemporary art.

SOUND SPRING

Unfolding in a series of eight vignettes, Sound Spring questions the history of Yellow Springs, Ohio over hundreds of years, as narrated by its residents: one interviewee rollerblades and reads the village's water meters, another stands on his head in a breakdancing freeze. The villagers describe American history-their ancestors' settlements after slavery, a friendship with Coretta Scott King, and Ohio's Trail of Tears-among other more personal details of village life. Through performing their own previously recorded media, villagers uncover layers of time.

MEANWHILE

Centering breath as a symbol of resilience, Meanwhile captures raw, unfinished moments—dancers in rehearsal, artists midway through their work—focusing on the act of creation. Rooted in the upheavals of 2020, the film uses breath as its through-line to symbolize collective survival. It invites viewers to witness the process of liberation and be present in the “meanwhile”—a moment of creation, struggle, and hope that transcends fixed identities.

I’M “GEORGE LUCAS”: A CONNOR RATLIFF STORY

Five years into performing as renowned filmmaker George Lucas in the NY cult comedy show "The George Lucas Talk Show", comedian Connor Ratliff questions the need for its continuation and his own drive for success and fulfillment in show business. By following the live performances and behind the scenes for one year, the mysteries of Connor’s inner self are explored in this portrait of an artist, and his own feelings on his history, value, and legacy are revealed.

BLOOD, SWEAT AND BEERS OR HOW THE SLOPPY BOYS MADE AN ALBUM ON A FARM IN WEST TEXAS

In 2022, journalist and documentarian Robert Holguin reached out to the band The Sloppy Boys (Tim Kalpakis, Mike Hanford, Jefferson Dutton of IFC's The Birthday Boys sketch show) with a proposition— he would arrange for the boys to stay for a week at the legendary Sonic Ranch Studios in Texas if they’d allow him to film the making of their fourth album. Legendary producer Money Mark (Beastie Boys, Beck, David Byrne) joined them to create Sonic Ranch.

ROSIE'S THEATER KIDS

Ten years ago, inspired by the teacher who inspired her, actor-comedian Rosie O'Donnell established a school, giving kids access to dance, music, and drama. Through archival footage, interviews, first-person accounts, and performances, this heartwarming and memorable film tells of the life-changing impact that the organization has had on its students and alumni - and how the power of musical theater and the performing arts helps young people unlock their full potential.

RAMONA

Feeling unprepared for her upcoming role as a 15-year-old pregnant girl from the outskirts of Santo Domingo, an actor from a more affluent background, Camila, decides to sit down with pregnant young girls to hear their stories. Ramona is a brilliant mix of telenovela pastiche, observational documentary, filmed rehearsals, cinéma vérité and theatre that constantly plays with the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, reality and artifice.

STAND UP MY BEAUTY

Nardos, an Azmari singer from Addis Ababa, dreams of telling stories about the lives of ordinary people through her music. In her search of stories for her songs, she meets Gennet, a poet who lives on the streets with her children. As Nardos puts the lives of Ethiopian women, their visions and power at the centre of her creation, we dive deeper and deeper into a rapidly changing country.

INGRID CAVEN: MUSIC AND VOICE

Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama, Saint Laurent) seized on the idea of making a cinematic tribute to Ingrid Caven (a former member of R.W. Fassbinder’s cinematic troupe) when he first heard her sing at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, but the portrait he eventually made finds her exploring a more expansive range of performance styles and moods. A showcase for a truly sui generis musician—a sort of cabaret singer for the 21st century—and a respectful tribute to one artist from another.

HERE FOR LIFE

“A film of great compassion and political and aesthetic ambition in which the idea of a collective is prioritised for a change, but without sacrificing or downplaying the individual voices and idiosyncrasies that it comprises... Beautifully exuberant and optimistic" (Sight & Sound), Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Adrian Jackson's documentary, Here for Life, follows ten unruly Londoners as they navigate their wild and wayward way towards a co-existence far stronger than 'community'.

SEGUNDA VEZ

This vital, revolutionary documentary isn't merely a biopic of Oscar Masotta - a pivotal theorist in the Argentinian avant-garde from the 1950s to 1970s - but a treatise on the artistic and political climate of the nation preceding the Dirty War, eerily mirroring the world today. The title, Segunda Vez, originates from a homonymous story written by a contemporary of Masotta’s, Julio Cortázar.

LA FLOR

A decade in the making, filmed around the world, and featuring the same four remarkable actresses in six episodes (each a different genre), Mariano Llinás’ landmark 14-hour feature film La Flor is an unrepeatable labor of love and madness that redefines the concept of binge viewing; a wildly entertaining exploration of the possibilities of fiction and storytelling. A must-see.

TONY CONRAD: COMPLETELY IN THE PRESENT

From performing in Jack Smith’s legendary Flaming Creatures to creating a series of groundbreaking experimental films to playing a pivotal role in the formation of The Velvet Underground, Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present, twenty-two years in the making, examines the pioneering life and work of artist, musician, and educator, Tony Conrad.

AND WITH HIM CAME THE WEST

Filmmaker Mike Plante (Be Like an Ant) thoughtfully explores the relationship between the Wyatt Earp legend and the emergence of filmmaking as a popular medium. Featuring a wealth of clips from film adaptations of Earp’s life, alongside insightful interviews, Plante demonstrates the mutability of historical record and the power of moving images to shape our national mythology.

A BREAD FACTORY

Hailed as "a major new work by a singular American artist" by The New York Times, A Bread Factory is the latest feature from acclaimed filmmaker Patrick Wang (The Grief of Others, In The Family), a wondrous, inventive and outright dazzling film about a community arts center, aptly named the Bread Factory, in a small upstate town that appears to be at the center of some major social and cultural changes.

BISBEE '17

Named the best film of the year by The New York Times, Robert Greene’s extraordinary Bisbee ‘17 radically combines collaborative documentary, western, and musical elements to recreate a mass deportation of striking miners (mostly Mexican and Eastern European immigrants) that occurred in 1917. Greene confronts issues of immigration, unionization and environmental damage while linking a tragic moment in American history to our own turbulent times.

TOWARDS MATHILDE

Presented in the US for the first time, from filmmaker director Claire Denis (Beau Travail, 35 Shots of Rum, Let the Sunshine In), Towards Mathilde utilizes sumptuous 8mm and 16mm cinematography, striking performances and the music by PJ Harvey to craft a singular documentary portrait of choreographer and dancer Mathilde Monnier.

THE BRIDEGROOM, THE ACTRESS, AND THE PIMP

Rainer Werner Fassbinder stars alongside his future collaborators — Hanna Scyhgulla, Irm Hermann, and Peer Raben — in this short, radical condensation of Ferdinand Bruckner’s 1926 play Pains of Youth that incorporates the screeds of Mao and May '68 protesters.

MOSES AND AARON

One of Straub-Huillet's major films, this adaptation of Schoenberg’s unfinished opera is a thrilling and rigorous consideration of Biblical and archaeological history; set almost entirely within a Roman amphitheater whose history lends every precise line-reading and gesture, every startling camera move and cut, a totalizing force.

FROM TODAY UNTIL TOMORROW

Schoenberg’s rarely performed one-act opera, a withering portrait of a suffocating bourgeois marriage, gets the Weimar treatment in Straub-Huillet’s staged film.

SPETTACOLO

From the directors of Marwencol, Spettacolo tells the story of a small town in Tuscany that came up with a remarkable way to confront their issues – they turned their lives into a play. Every summer for the past 50 years, their piazza has become their stage and residents of all ages play a part – the role of themselves.

BRONX GOTHIC

From director Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times, Ivory Tower) comes an electrifying portrait of writer and performer Okwui Okpokwasili and her acclaimed one-woman show "Bronx Gothic," a story about two 12-year-old black girls coming of age in the 1980s.

SARAH WINCHESTER, PHANTOM OPERA

A film about ghosts and madness that is itself a kind of ghost, this short from master Bertrand Bonello (Nocturama, Saint Laurent) tells the story of Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune who was driven to insanity by unseen forces.

MY VOICE, MY LIFE

Academy Award winning filmmaker Ruby Yang’s My Voice, My Life follows a group of students from underprivileged families who are cast in a musical theater performance. A moving story about the importance of art education in our schools.