OR Books Selects
The team at OR Books are so impressed with OVID's unique and alternative curation that they accepted our request to share their staff picks for your viewing pleasure! Hidden in the cavernous back room of the Francis Kite Club in East Village, OR Books amplifies dissident, progressive voices. Some OR favorites from the collection include: D.W. Young’s THE BOOKSELLERS, about the obsessive and eccentric world of antiquarian rare book sellers; Thomas Heise’s immersive film essay HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME, a deep-dive into four generations of Heise’s family archives that trace the upheaval of Germany's last century; Dariush Mehrjui’s LEILA starring Leila Hatami, the story of an Iranian couple struggling with infertility; ELLAVUT CIMIRTUQ / OUR WORLD IS CHANGING (Jacqueline Cleveland, Mischa Hedges, Sonia Luokkala), about the communities of Southwest Alaska adapting to thawing permafrost; and Denys Arcand’s FIPRESCI Prize-winning hit THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE, about a group of academics spending an intimate weekend together at a country retreat.
OR’s latest releases include The Myth of Red Texas by David Griscom, Search Work edited by Rachel Meade Smith, The Complicit Lens by Robin Andersen with a foreword by Rashid Khalidi, and American Trickster by Ru Marshall.
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Heimat is a Space in Time
Directed by Thomas Heise • Documentary • 2019 • 218 minutes
In HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME, German filmmaker Thomas Heise shares the stories of three generations of his family, in their own words.
Heise sets the tone early, reading an anti-war essay written in 1912 by his grandfather Wilhelm, whe...
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Ellavut Cimirtuq (Our World Is Changing)
Directed by Jacqueline Cleveland, Mischa Hedges, Sonia Luokkala • Documentary • 2023 • 30 minutes
Many coastal villages in Alaska are under imminent threat from thawing permafrost, sea-level rise and erosion. The accelerated retreat of Arctic sea ice has left shorelines unfrozen and exposed. As ...
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Geographies of Solitude
Directed by Jacquelyn Mills • Documentary • 2022 • 103 minutes
An immersion into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, a remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic, the film follows Zoe Lucas, a naturalist and environmentalist who has lived there for over 40 years collecting, cleaning and doc...
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The Children of 209 Saint-Maur Street
Directed by Ruth Zylberman • Documentary • 2020 • 100 minutes
209 rue St. Maur is a classic Parisian apartment building in the 10th arrondissement: Stone, built around a courtyard, shops on the bottom floor. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was home to some 300 working class people, ...
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The Booksellers
Directed by D.W. Young • Documentary • With Fran Lebowitz, Parker Posey • 2020 • 98 minutes
Antiquarian booksellers are part scholar, part detective and part businessperson, and their personalities and knowledge are as broad as the material they handle. They also play an underappreciated yet ess...
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Bestiaire
Directed by Denis Côté • Documentary • 2012 • 72 minutes
Fascinating and beguiling, BESTIAIRE is Denis Côté's mesmerizing meditation on the relationship between man and beast. This strikingly beautiful film about looking-starts with a group of art students attempting to sketch an animal-that blu...
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The Seer and the Unseen
Directed by Sara Dosa • Documentary • With Ragnhildur Jonsdottir • 2019 • 89 minutes
THE SEER & THE UNSEEN is a magic realist fable about invisible elves, financial collapse and the surprising power of belief, told through the story of an Icelandic grandmother who speaks on behalf of nature unde...
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I Talk to Animals
Directed by Peter Friedman • Documentary • With Samantha Khury • 1990 • 54 minutes
Samantha is an "animal therapist and psychic" who has convinced skeptical pet owners, zoo keepers, and race horse trainers that she really can "talk" to their animals. Here we see her at work counselling race hors...
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Rabbit a la Berlin
Directed by Bartek Konopka & Piotr Roslowski • Documentary • 2009 • 39 minutes
RABBIT A LA BERLIN is the 2010 Academy Award-nominated story of thousands of wild rabbits which lived in the Death Zone of the Berlin Wall. This is the first film showing the story of the Wall and the reunification of...
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Dreams of Ice
Directed by Ignacio Agüero • Documentary • 1993 • 55 minutes
Like Moby Dick’s Ishmael, a sailor takes a ship and goes from Antarctica to Spain, in a trip that transports an iceberg to Seville for the World Fair of 1992. In this voyage, mysterious things will happen, making him a victim of the hi...
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The Decline of the American Empire (Denys Arcand)
Directed by Denys Arcand • Drama • With Dominique Michel, Dorothée Berryman, Louise Portal • 1986 • 101 minutes
When a Montreal professor (Rémy Girard) and his wife (Dorothée Berryman) gather six of their erudite friends for a holiday in the country, the conversation naturally turns to sex. The ...
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Leila (Dariush Mehrjui, w/ Leila Hatami)
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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The Destruction of Memory
Directed by Tim Slade • Documentary • 2016 • 85 minutes
The bombing of Sarajevo's National Library and the burning of its ancient books. The looting of the Iraqi National Museum and destruction of its priceless historical objects. The beheading of Kahled al-Asaad, long-time lead archaeologist fo...
