OVID's Collections
We try and make some sense for you of OVID's bountiful selection of films. And we keep thinking of new themes or subjects or combinations that go together, so check back!
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Defying Gravity
11 items
Whether on top of a mountain, deep in Antarctica or just a New York City street, these are documentaries that take the viewer to the edge of the world. Not for the faint of heart, they all show what human beings are able to accomplish and what difficulties can be overcome in life.
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Arab American Heritage Month
5 items
We invited the Arab Film and Media Institute (AFMI), a nonprofit organization founded by the team behind the largest and oldest Arab Film Festival in North America, to curate a collection of new and existing films with a focus on the lives, joys, daily struggles, and resilience of Arab women in d...
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Spectacle Theater's Top Films
15 items
In partnership with Spectacle Theater, we present a new playlist curated by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer celebrating our collaborations with the Brooklyn microcinema. The selections include Japanese maverick Shohei Imamura’s portrait of remote island communities THE PIRATES OF BUBUAN, the Afrofuturist ...
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African Film Festival 2023
12 items
The African Film Festival (AFF) has curated this collection of films that showcases the creativity, community, courage, good humor and resilience that Africans display in the face of great adversity.
The festival is dedicated to advancing an enhanced understanding of African culture through film...
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Nobuhiko Obayashi's Anti-War Trilogy
3 items
In the last decade of his long and prolific career, Nobuhiko Obayashi (1938-2020) —best-known in the U.S. as the filmmaker behind the cult hit House (1977)—wrote and directed a trio of deeply personal and formally audacious films that confronted Japan’s wartime past.
Made in the wake of the Grea...
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Free Cinema (eleven films)
11 items
Free Cinema not only reinvented British documentary making, but this highly influential period in the country’s cinema history was the precursor for the better known British New Wave of social realist films in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The term Free Cinema was coined by critic and filmmake...
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Spooky Season
32 items
OVID's eclectic Halloween collection has something for everyone, whether werewolves (Good Manners), serial killers (Next Time I'll Aim for the Heart), high school bullies and sinister doppelgangers (Alena), demons (Demons), cannibal sorcery (Dachra), or supernatural ghost stories (Bedevil) are yo...
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Marguerite Duras
5 items
Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) - best-known as the author of The Lover and for the screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour (the classic 1960 New Wave film directed by Alain Resnais) - was one of the most prolific, controversial, and renowned cultural figures in post-war France. Between 1943 (when she p...
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History of the Queer Liberation Movement
11 items
OVID stands in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community. This collection features films exploring the early fight for LGBTQ+ rights in America, from Stonewall to the AIDS crisis, and the brave people who fought for queer liberation.
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Downtown Community Television (DCTV)
6 items
The Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV) was founded in 1972 with the goal of using filmmaking as a tool to catalyze, inform, and empower communities. From humble beginnings (DCTV's first educational projects operated from the back of a dilapidated mail truck), fifty years later DCTV has g...
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Jezebel Productions
6 items
Jezebel Productions was founded by Andrea Weiss and Greta Schiller in 1985, when only a handful of women were directing documentary features.
Jezebel grew out of their collaboration on the groundbreaking documentary, Before Stonewall (1984), which was directed by Schiller. The film premiered at ...
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Fashion on Film
13 items
From charismatic portraits of iconic designers to exposés on the darker realities of the industry, these documentaries take unconventional approaches to the many-sided world of high fashion. Punk rock and high fashion collide in Westwood, a portrait of trend-setting designer and activist Vivienne...
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Pacific Street Films
5 items
FRIENDS SINCE THE AGE OF NINE, Sucher and Fischler grew up in a rough-and-tumble Brooklyn neighborhood and early on they took the rebellious road: declaring themselves “anarchists” while still enrolled in Brooklyn Technical High School. In 1970, two of their NYU student films, I AM CURIOUS HAROLD...
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Moments in Time
30 items
"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." —Robert Capa
The photographers featured in these films have all mastered the art of what makes for a good picture. From a portrait of Robert Frank, who produced the important book, The Americans, to Gerda Taro, whose wartime work wi...
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Remembering Allende
2 items
Salvador Allende, the Chilean president who was overthrown by a coup on September 11, 1973, is the focus of both Patricio Guzmán's SALVADOR ALLENDE and Marcia Tambutti Allende's BEYOND MY GRANDFATHER ALLENDE. The death of Allende and the years of military dictatorship that followed have left deep...