First Run Features
First Run Features was founded in 1979 by a group of filmmakers to advance the distribution of independent film. Under the leadership of the late film pioneer, Fran Spielman, First Run Features quickly gained a reputation for its controversial catalog of daring documentaries and fiction films. Today First Run remains one of the largest independent distributors in North America, releasing between 15-20 films a year in theaters nationwide and an additional 30-40 films annually to schools, libraries and other educational institutions; on home video on DVD and Blu-Ray; to television broadcasters; and online through a diverse group of innovative digital partners.
Over the years, First Run Features has survived everything from FBI surveillance to the demise of so many of its competitors. First Run proudly celebrated its 30th Anniversary in August 2009 with a retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. In 2001 we were honored with a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
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Music for Black Pigeons
Directed by Jørgen Leth, Andreas Koefoed • Documentary • With Jakob Bro, Lee Konitz, Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell • 2022 • 92 minutes
An informed and intimate portrayal of the jazz scene that offers revelatory glimpses for fans of the genre, Music For Black Pigeons strikes a universal chord in its p...
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11 Flowers
Directed by Xiaoshuai Wang • Drama • With Jingchun Wang, Wenqing Liu • 2011 • 115 minutes
One of China's foremost directors, Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle, Shanghai Dreams) has created a moving coming-of-age tale set in the final days of China's Cultural Revolution.
11-year-old Wang lives w... -
Deserted Station
Directed by Alireza Raisian • Drama • With Leila Hatami • 2002 • 90 minutes
In this lyrical and intimately nuanced story conceived by Abbas Kiarostami and starring Leila Hatami (from Dariush Mehrjui's Leila), a photographer and his young wife are stranded in a remote Iranian village after their ...
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Leila
Directed by Dariush Mehrjui • Drama • With Leila Hatami, Ali Mosaffa • 1999 • 125 minutes
Reza and Leila, an attractive and affluent young couple deeply in love and recently married, discover that Leila is unable to conceive. Invoking tradition, Reza's mother convinces her daughter-in-law that R...
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Aberdeen
Directed by Hans Petter Moland • Drama • With Lena Headey, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgard • 2000 • 103 minutes
Kaisa (Lena Headey), a beautiful and feisty Scottish woman, finally has her life together...at least until her mother (Charlotte Rampling) asks an enormous favor: to bring back t...
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The Second Time Around
Directed by Leon Marr • Drama • With Linda Thorson, Stuart Margolin • 2017 • 108 minutes
Leaving OVID on Sept. 30th!
Katherine Mitchell (Linda Thorson), a widowed yet vibrant senior, wasn't looking for love a second time - not at her age, and certainly not with grumpy Isaac Shapiro (Stuart Marg...
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Torremolinos 73
Directed by Pablo Berger • Drama • With Javier Cámara, Candela Peña • 2003 • 91 minutes
Spain, circa 1973. Alfredo is a struggling door to door encyclopedia salesman. Meanwhile his wife Carmen is obsessed with becoming a mother. Alfredo’s boss gives Alfredo a choice: make 'educational' sex films...
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Radioactive: The Women of Three Mile Island
Directed by Heidi Hutner • Documentary • 2023 • 77 minutes
In this thrilling feminist documentary, indomitable women fight back against the nuclear industry to expose one of the worst cover-ups in U.S. history.
RADIOACTIVE: The Women of Three Mile Island is an award-winning film about the 1979 ...
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Glow
Directed by Gabriel Baur • Documentary • With Irene Staub, Ursula Rodel • 2017 • 100 minutes
Meet Irene Staub, aka Lady Shiva, one of the greatest of all Swiss divas – a top model as well as a singer in a legendary underground band. This enchanting new documentary reveals her remarkable life in ...
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The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg
Directed by Jerry Aronson • Documentary • With Joan Baez, William F. Buckley, William S. Burroughs • 2005 • 84 minutes
This documentary chronicles the life of American beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Born and raised in New Jersey, Ginsberg attends Columbia University alongside fellow beats Jack Keroua...
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Scrap
Directed by Stacey Tenenbaum • Documentary • 2022 • 78 minutes
Discover the vast and strangely beautiful places where things go to die and meet the people who collect, restore, and recycle the world’s scrap. SCRAP is a love letter to the things we use in our daily lives. This cinematic documenta...
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Riders of the Purple Sage: The Making of a Western Opera
Directed by Kristin Atwell Ford • Documentary • With Peter Coyote • 2020 • 82 minutes
Riders of the Purple Sage: The Making of a Western Opera follows a classically trained composer as he adapts a dime novel masterpiece into a grand opera. In 1912, Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage flew off ...
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A Life's Work
Directed by David Licata • Documentary • With Jill Tarter, Paolo Soleri • 2021 • 90 minutes
What’s it like to dedicate your life to work that won’t be completed in your lifetime? 15 years ago, filmmaker David Licata focused on four projects and the people behind them in an effort to answer this ...
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Shusenjo: Comfort Women and Japan's War on History
Directed by Miki Dezaki • Documentary • 2019 • 120 minutes
One of the most heated issues in Japan and Asia today is over something that occurred 80 years ago: the Japanese Imperial Army's sexual enslavement of an estimated tens of thousands of Korean women and others in military brothels during ...
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Unmarked
Directed by Brad Bennett, Chris Haley • Documentary • 2021 • 40 minutes
Throughout the South, vast numbers of African-American gravesites and burial grounds for enslaved persons have been lost or are disappearing through neglect and nature reclaiming the solemn tombstones and markers. Recently, ...
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Concrete Love: The Bohm Family
Directed by Maurizius Staerkle Drux • Documentary • With Gottfried Bohm, Elisabeth Bohm, Stephan Bohm, Peter Bohm, Paul Bohm • 2016 • 88 minutes
Pritzker Prize laureate Gottfried Böhm is widely regarded as Germany’s preeminent architect. The son of a master builder of churches, he’s also the pat...
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From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China
Directed by Murray Lerner • Documentary • 1979 • 84 minutes
This Oscar-winning film chronicles with affection and intelligence the great violinist’s 1979 visit to China. Stern was supposed to attend a rehearsal and give one recital but instead wound up playing a formal concert, touring two citie...
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Venus Boyz
Directed by Gabriel Baur • Documentary • With Mo B. Dick, Diane Torr, DRED, Bridge Markland • 2002 • 104 minutes
Club Casanova, home of the legendary Drag King Night in New York City, is the point of departure for an iconic gender odyssey, where women become men – some for a night, others for a ...
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Creating a Character: The Moni Yakim Legacy
Directed by Rauzer Alexander • Documentary • With Oscar Isaac, Laura Linney, Michael Stuhlbarg • 2019 • 76 minutes
What do Jessica Chastain, Kevin Kline, Viola Davis and Anthony Mackie all have in common? They are but a few of the extraordinary actors who have studied under the renowned acting t...
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The Celluloid Bordello
Directed by Juliana Piccillo • Documentary • With Annie Sprinkle, Carol Leigh, David Henry Sterry • 2021 • 86 minutes
Since the dawn of cinema, sex workers have served as muses to movie-makers. From the early white slavery pictures like The Girl Who Went Astray from 1900 to countless dramas and ...
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For the Bible Tells Me So
Directed by Daniel Karslake • Documentary • With Eugene Robinson, Imogene Robinson, Brenda Poteat, Tonia Poteat, Randi Reitan, Jake Reitan, Richard Gephardt, Chrissy Gephardt, Mary Lou Wallner • 2007 • 96 minutes
Does God really condemn loving homosexual relationships? Is the chasm separating Ch...
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Carmo Hit the Road
Directed by Murilo Pasta • Drama • With Seu Jorge • 2010 • 100 minutes
Carmo would do anything to escape the hellhole of a Brazilian border town where she lives. So when a lonesome, wheelchair-bound low-life named Marco arrives on the scene, she jumps at the chance to help him transport a shipme...
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My Fuhrer
Directed by Dani Levy • Drama • With Ulrich Mühe, Sylvester Groth • 2009 • 92 minutes
The bastard love child of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Mel Brooks’ The Producers, My Führer is a wildly provocative and laugh-out-loud satire about Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
December 1944: ...
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Dedalus
Directed by Jonah Greenstein • Drama • With Alexander Horner, Thomas Jay Ryan, Ashley Robicheaux • 2020 • 92 minutes
DEDALUS is a fiction triptych portraying community, love, and loss.
In rural Iowa, a grocery cashier watches helplessly as classmates conceal their act of sexual violence against...