François-Xavier Drouet, born in 1980, graduated from the Lussas Master’s program in documentary filmmaking after studying political science and anthropology. He lives and works on the Millevaches plateau, where part of The Time of Forests was filmed.

OVID is the only place to stream such a large number of films from throughout Chris Marker's storied career!

Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve on July 29, 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, Chris Marker was a cinematic essayist and audio-visual poet.

After the Second World War, Marker b...

Salomé Jashi (Tbilisi, 1981) is a documentary filmmaker and producer from Georgia. She has been attracted to filming micro environments from the very beginning of her career. Her visual approach is minimalist, poetical, sensitive and rough.

Salomé Jashi's Taming the Garden (2021) premiered at ...

The only Japanese director to twice win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Shohei Imamura has been described by The New York Times as "one of the most significant Japanese filmmakers of the postwar generation." Imamura began his career as an assistant to legendary director Yasujiro Ozu, ...

Marcel Ophuls was born on November 1, 1927 in Frankfurt, Germany. Having become a French citizen in 1938, his father, filmmaker Max Ophuls, left France with his family during the Occupation to escape Nazi persecution.

That is why Marcel Ophuls spent a portion of his formative years in the United...

Charles Burnett is a writer-director whose work has received extensive honors. Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, his family soon moved to the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Burnett studied creative writing at UCLA before entering the University’s graduate film program. His thesis project, Kille...

Werner Herzog was born in Munich on September 5, 1942. He grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria and studied History and German Literature in Munich and Pittsburgh. He made his first film in 1961 at the age of 19. Since then he has produced, written, and directed more than sixty feature-...

Born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1950, Chantal Akerman was a filmmaker whose work gave new meaning to the term "independent film." An Akerman film is an exercise in independence, creativity and art. Her viewers must give themselves over completely to the experience of her films and watch with open m...

Born in 1955 in Kobe, Kiyoshi Kurosawa made his feature film directorial debut in 1983 with Kandagawa Wars. He attracted global attention with Cure (1997), following it with notable works License to Live (1998), Barren Illusion (1999), and Charisma (1999). Pulse was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize at ...

Matthew Rankin was born in Winnipeg and studied history at McGill and Université Laval. As a young filmmaker, he traveled to Iran with the deluded hope of studying cinema with the great Iranian masters. While this naïve effort failed, Matthew is the director of some forty short animated, document...

Discover the complete filmography of Anand Patwardhan, for almost 50 years India’s most important – and to some, controversial – documentary filmmaker.

From his first film Waves of Revolution made in 1974 through his most recent film Reason completed in 2018, Patwardhan has recorded the modern h...

Jacques Doniol-Valcroze was a French actor, critic, screenwriter, and director. In 1951, Doniol-Valcroze was a co-founder of the renowned film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, along with André Bazin and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. The magazine was initially edited by Doniol-Valcroze between 1951-1957. As cr...

François Ozon was born in Paris in 1967. After directing numerous successful short films in the '80s and '90s, he segued to feature films.

A prolific director, he has kept the pace of directing a film a year for over two decades. Best known for SWIMMING POOL starring Ludivine Sagnier and the cri...

Kelly Anderson makes documentaries about the interplay between personal stories and the larger social forces that shape people’s lives but often remain invisible or unexamined. Her work clusters around themes of the city (New York, in particular) and issues of mental health – both of which have s...

Peter Watkins (1935-2025) was born in Surrey, England. After education at Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, he became an amateur documentary filmmaker, gaining some notoriety for shorts like The Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959) and The Forgotten Faces (1961). In these f...

Philippe Garrel was born in 1948 and made numerous short films as an adolescent. In 1967 he made his feature debut with Marie pour mémoire. Three years later he directed legendary icon, Nico, in the cult film, The Inner Scar (La Cicatrice intérieure). Garrel has directed more than twenty-five fea...

"An original filmmaker of exquisite sensibility; one of the foremost filmmakers of creative nonfiction working right now." —Richard Brody, The New Yorker

"Her three remarkable features cement Mbakam as a powerful director exploring intimacy, womanhood, and African identity in her work." —True/Fa...

Oliver Laxe is a filmmaker and actor. Born in France in 1982, he studied film at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. His first feature film You All Are Captains (2010) won the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes. His second feature Mimosas (2016) won the Nespresso Grand Prize at Cannes. Fire Will Come...

Ben Rivers was born in Somerset, UK in 1972 and lives and works in London. Rivers’ films are typically intimate portrayals of solitary beings or isolated communities; his practice as a filmmaker treads a line between documentary and fiction. Rivers uses these themes as a starting point from which...

Leyla Bouzid was born in 1984 and grew up in Tunisia. In 2003, she went to Paris to study French literature at the Sorbonne before graduating from la Fémis in Directing. In 2015, she directed Soubresauts (Mkhobbi Fi Kobba), her thesis film, in Tunisia a few months before the revolution. As I Open...

Tiffany Sia (b. 1988, Hong Kong) is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Sia has directed several short films, including Never Rest/Unrest (2020), Do Not Circulate (2021) and What Rules the Invisible (2022), which have screened at the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA ...

Jim Finn’s movies have been called ‘Utopian comedies’ and ‘trompe l’oeil films’. His Communist Trilogy is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. “Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art," The New York Times wrote that "Mr. Finn’s meticulous, deadpan mocku...

Achal Mishra (b.1996) is a filmmaker and photographer from Darbhanga, Bihar.
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His debut feature film Gamak Ghar (2019) premiered at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, where it won the Manish Acharya Award for New Voices in Indian Cinema. His medium-length film Dhuin (2022) won the Grand Prix at the ...

Celebrated photographer, photojournalist, and documentary filmmaker, Raymond Depardon was born in Villefranche-sur-Saône, France on July 6, 1942. His interest in photography began when he started taking pictures of his family’s farm at the age of 12. A prolific artist, Raymond Depardon has so far...