Stranger than Docu-Fiction
Our wide-ranging collection of films that defy easy classification.
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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
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...