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...

Directed by Chea Prince • Documentary • 2003 • 56 minutes

In the autumn of 1965, sharecroppers Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter enrolled the youngest eight of their thirteen children in the public schools of Drew, Mississippi. Their decision to send the children to the formerly all white schools wa...

Directed by Cynthia Beatt • Documentary • With Tilda Swinton • 2010 • 60 minutes

In 1988 director Cynthia Beatt and the Tilda Swinton embarked on a filmic journey along the Berlin Wall to create the short film CYCLING THE FRAME (28', color, 1988). Riding her bicycle from the Brandenburg Gate to ...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1998 • 116 minutes

Based on the life and work of the Russian film director Alexander Medvedkin (1900-1989), THE LAST BOLSHEVIK is a tribute from one filmmaker to another. An archeological expedition into film history that reveals new cinematic treasures, ...

Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1965 • 77 minutes

Shot on the border between Niger and Mali over a period of seven years, THE LION HUNTERS is Jean Rouch's documentation of the lion hunt performed by the gow hunters of the Songhay people.

Rouch has said that he made the film 'to try to gi...

Directed by Tinatin Gurchiani • Documentary • 2013 • 101 minutes

A filmmaker puts out a casting call for young adults, aged 15- to 23. The director wants to make a film about growing up in her home country, Georgia, and find commonalities across social and ethnic lines. She travels through citie...

Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1955 • 28 minutes

The film opens on the bustling streets of Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana), a major colonial port city that serves as a stage for the collision of the traditional and the modern. Among the diverse groups who populate...

Directed by Paul Duane • Documentary • With Peter Lennon, Raoul Coutard • 2005 • 27 minutes

This documentary reunites director Peter Lennon and cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who recount the making of their then controversial but now classic documentary on Ireland in the Sixties. Rocky Road to D...

Directed by John Akomfrah • Documentary • 2010 • 94 minutes

Structured as an allegorical fable set between 1949 and 1970, THE NINE MUSES is comprised of nine overlapping musical chapters that mix archival material with original scenes. Together, they form a stylized, idiosyncratic retelling of t...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

Western history is said to begin with the Greeks—more specifically, with Herodotus, credited as the first historian. But the ancient Greek conception of history, based on the idea of self-examination, is very different from current conce...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

“Harmony can only be divine and it is Man... who makes it go berserk.” -- Iannis Xenakis

This episode is classic Chris Marker, tying together an abandoned Athenian power plant turned cultural center, ancient Greek statuary, a department...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

“Modern and ancient democracy have no genetic relationship” -- Mihalis Sakellariou

An in-depth—but not overly dense—exploration of how Athenian democracy worked, and the key ways it differs from modern states using the word. Ancient Gre...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

“The adventures of language may be the most meaningful thing in world history.” -- Nikos Svoronos

The word “logos” stands at the start of Greek philosophy. A word that defies simple translation, it lies at the root of terms including lo...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

“Historians say Utopia doesn’t exist. It does! It’s the geometric space where everything is proven.” --Michel Serres

There is a narrative about ancient Greece and math: That the Greeks invented mathematics as we know it, that men such a...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

“Greek love, Greek eroticism, is a paradigm for us. But it’s something about which we are very hypocritical.” --John Winkler

Classicist Giulia Sissa takes center stage in this episode, which explores desire in ancient Greece (primarily ...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

“The word was music before all else” -- Angelique Ionatos

What defines music? Soldiers marching in tandem create rhythms; Orthodox priests don’t simply speak when performing the liturgy, they chant and sometimes sing; the hammer banging...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

“Myths fuel history.” --Mario Ploratis

A small number of Greek myths—Oedipus, Antigone, the Gorgon who turns people who gaze on her to stone—have fed our understandings of ourselves and each other through literature, religion, philosoph...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

“It’s the most Greek word I know. In a sense, it defines Greece.” --Vassilis Vassilikos

Nostalgia is there right at the start of the Greek literary tradition. Odysseus, after a decade of fighting the Trojan War, must wander another deca...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

“Every European era has formed its own image of Greece made up from its own imagination. There is so much self-projection and misinterpretation.” -- Cornelius Castoriades

We begin with the personal. In interviews, classicists Manuela Sm...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

“The owl? What about it?” --Theo Angelopoulos

After a dozen episodes that begin and end with the image of an owl, PHILOSOPHY begins with the owl and its symbolism, and shows us how many of the participants in the series react to the bir...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

“The wake of our dreams is Greek” --George Steiner

This episode sets the tone for the rest of the series, introducing the fundamental idea Marker and his participants explore: For centuries, we’ve used Greek civilization as a touchstone...

Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes

“The institution of tragedy plays a fundamental role in a democracy.” --Cornelius Castoriadis

Greek tragedies were originally like TV shows before the age of streaming. They were performed once, and only once says scholar Oswyn Murray. ...

Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2001 • 109 minutes

Augusto Pinochet, the general who overthrew President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973, was the first dictator in Latin America—or the world—to be humbled by the international justice system since the Nuremberg trials.

THE PINOCHE...

Directed by Shohei Imamura • Documentary • 2012 • 46 minutes

Imamura reveals remote and impoverished islands in the Philippines to be the home of rival factions of pirates in this absorbing investigation into a little-known way of life.

"Masterful... Imamura whisks an entire world out of nothin...