Stranger than Docu-Fiction
Our wide-ranging collection of films that defy easy classification.
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Charlie Victor Romeo
Directed by Robert Berger, Patrick Daniels, and Karlyn Michelson • Drama • With Patrick Daniels, Irving Gregory, Debbie Troche • 2013 • 80 minutes
A unique and riveting theatrical experience, CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO (CVR) is a performance documentary derived entirely from the “Black Box” transcript...
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Where God is Not
Directed by Mehran Tamadon • Documentary • 2023 • 112 minutes
Taghi, Homa and Mazyar were arrested and interrogated by the Iranian regime. All three testify with their bodies, with their gestures and tell what it means to resist, what it means to break. Is there any hope that the torturer will o...
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The Twentieth Century
Directed by Matthew Rankin • Drama • With Dan Beirne, Mikhaïl Ahooja • 2019 • 90 minutes
Toronto, 1899. Aspiring young politician Mackenzie King (Dan Beirne) dreams of becoming the Prime Minister of Canada. But his romantic vacillation between a British soldier and a French nurse, exacerbated by...
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The Silent Village
Directed by Humphrey Jennings • Documentary • 1943 • 36 minutes
The villagers of Cwmgiedd, southwest Wales, are the stars of Humphrey Jennings’ unforgettably inventive drama-doc. At Lidice, Czechoslovakia, a mining community’s entire male population was executed by the Nazis in 1942. Jennings (o...
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The Days to Come
Directed by Carlos Marqués-Marcet • Drama • With Maria Rodríguez Soto, David Verdaguer • 2019 • 102 minutes
Vir and Lluis have been dating for just a year, when they find out they are "pregnant". During 9 months, we will follow the adventure of this young couple from Barcelona, the great truth i...
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David Holzman's Diary
Directed by Jim McBride • Drama • With Eileen Dietz, Kit Carson • 1967 • 73 minutes
David Holzman's Diary is one of the most influential films of the 1960s, an "ingenious puzzle movie" (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader) that charts the self-destruction of a media-saturated youth. As news from the Viet...
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On the Bowery
Directed by Lionel Rogosin • Documentary • With Ray Salyer, Gorman Hendricks, Frank Matthews • 1956 • 65 minutes
On the Bowery chronicles three days in the drinking life of Ray Salyer, a part-time railroad worker adrift on New York’s skid row. When the film first opened in 1956, it exploded on t...
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Oxhide
Directed by LIU Jiayin • Documentary • 2005 • 110 minutes
Daily life in an impossibly cramped Beijing apartment takes on epic proportions in this, intimate portrait, with unprecedented access, of a working-class Chinese family.
Boldly transforming documentary into fiction, Liu Jiayin cast her p...
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Oxhide II
Directed by Liu Jiayin • Drama • With Liu Jiayin, Huifen Jia, Zaiping Liu • 2012 • 132 minutes
Breaking new ground in cinematic art, Liu Jiayin's follow-up to her masterful debut OXHIDE turns a simple dinner into a profoundly intimate study of family relationships.
Building on the stunning visi...
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Party Girl
Directed by Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger, Samuel Theis • Drama • With Angélique Litzenburger, Joseph Bour, Mario Theis, Samuel Theis, Séverine Litzenburger, Cynthia Litzenburger • 2014 • 95 minutes
Angelique is a 60-year-old bar hostess in a cabaret located near the border between France and...
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All the Cities of the North
Directed by Dane Komljen • Drama • With Boban Kaludjer, Boris Isakovic • 2016 • 97 minutes
In the darkly wooded grounds and concrete boxes of what was once a Yugoslav resort complex, two men share an enigmatic, tender life. A stranger comes to town; things change, but how, what, and why remain a...
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Tribute to Alfred Lepetit
Directed by Jean Rousselot • Drama • With Charlotte Rampling, Roman Polanski, Jean-Claude Brialy • 1999 • 8 minutes
Alfred Lepetit is a legendary French production assistant with more than 200 films to his credit. Well, not exactly to his credit, since he refuses to let his name appear on-screen...
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Female Directors
Directed by Yang Mingming • Documentary • 2012 • 43 minutes
Ah-Ming and Yueyue are two out-of-work film school grads living in Beijing who decide to turn the camera on each other and make a film about their lives.
On the surface, FEMALE DIRECTORS is the ultimate documentary for the age of overs...
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Level Five (Chris Marker)
Directed by Chris Marker • Drama • With Catherine Belkhodja, Kenji Tokitsu • 1996 • 106 minutes
A woman (Laura), a computer, an invisible interlocutor: such is the setup on which LEVEL FIVE is built. She "inherits" a task: to finish writing a video game centered on the Battle of Okinawa—a traged...
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The Human Pyramid
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1961 • 93 minutes
At the Lycée Français of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Rouch worked with students there who willingly enacted a story about the arrival of a new white girl, Nadine, and her effect on the interactions of and interracial relationships between the wh...
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Guy
Directed by Alex Lutz • Drama • With Alex Lutz, Tom Dingler, Pascale Arbillot • 2018 • 101 minutes
Gauthier (Tom Dingler), a young journalist, finds a letter suggesting he might be the son of Guy Jamet (Alex Lutz in a César award-winning performance), a 72-year-old French pop singer who was fam...
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A Man Vanishes
Directed by Shohei Imamura • Documentary • 1967 • 130 minutes
One of the most important and complex works by two-time Palme d'Or winning director Shohei Imamura, A MAN VANISHES begins as an investigation into one of the thousands of missing persons cases that occur in Japan each year.
The film ...
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Paths of the Soul
Directed by Zhang Yang • Drama • With Tsring Chodron, Tsewang Dolkar, Jiangcuo Seba • 2016 • 117 minutes
An astonishing journey of redemption, faith, and devotion. Internationally acclaimed filmmaker Zhang Yang ( Shower, Getting Home ) blurs the border between documentary and fiction to follow a...
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The Punishment
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1962 • 64 minutes
An aimless young woman is sent home from school with nothing to do. Drifting through the streets of Paris, she comes across a variety of people.
"Extraordinary and extraordinarily rare movie about public misogyny."—Richard Brody, The New ...
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A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
Directed by Ben Rivers & Ben Russell • Drama • With Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe • 2014 • 98 minutes
A SPELL follows an unnamed character through three seemingly disparate moments in his life. With little explanation, we join him in the midst of a 15-person collective on a small Estonian island; in i...