Short Films

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  • Animated Shorts (collection)

    47 items

  • All Water Has a Perfect Memory

    Documentary • 2001 • 19 minutes

    ALL WATER HAS A PERFECT MEMORY is a poignant experimental documentary that explores the effects of tragedy and remembrance on a bi-cultural family. At seven months old, filmmaker Natalia Almada lost her two-year-old sister, Ana Lynn, in a drowning accident at her ...

  • The Film of Her

    Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 1996 • 12 minutes

    "Morrison's THE FILM OF HER is based on the story of a Library of Congress clerk who saved a vaultful of paper reels, documenting the earliest days of cinema, from the incinerator. A gorgeous tribute to the art form's origins, this 12-m...

  • Night Cries

    Directed by Tracey Moffat • Drama • With Marcia Langton, Agnes Hardwick, Jimmy Little • 1991 • 19 minutes

    On an isolated, surreal Australian homestead, a middle-aged Aboriginal woman nurses her dying white mother. The adopted daughter’s attentive gestures mask an almost palpable hostility. Their...

  • Dick Cheney in a Cold, Dark Cell

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2009 • 3 minutes

    River ice sets the scene for Judy Garland's international cri de coeur. It's hard to understate the amount of anxiety created by a vice president who usurped authority for eight years to start wars and wreck the economy and then sidled off to...

  • Roy Smeck: Wizard of the Strings

    Directed by Peter Friedman • Documentary • With Roy Smeck, Gene Autry, Arthur Tracy, Mel Bay • 1984 • 27 minutes

    In 1926, Warner Brothers premiered the first sync-sound film ever made. It featured a largely unknown vaudeville performer named Roy Smeck. The film showcased Roy’s virtuosity on the ...

  • Bill Morrison's Short Films

    12 items

    Morrison's work is characterized by his sensitive approach to found, often decaying film footage, and his close collaboration with contemporary conmposers, including Vijay Iyer, Johann Johannsson and Bill Frisell.

    "The only major directors with a comparably original ear are probably Jean-Luc God...

  • Chris Marker's Bestiary

    5 items

    French filmmaker Chris Marker is best known for politically engaged documentaries (A Grin without a Cat, Le Joli Mai and Cuba Si!), for his personalized "cine-essay" films (Sans Soleil, Remembrance of Things to Come and The Case of the Grinning Cat) and the science-fiction classic La Jetée. No ma...

  • Jane Campion Shorts

    3 items

    The internationally acclaimed director of THE POWER OF THE DOG, TOP OF THE LAKE and THE PIANO first displayed her visual flair and dark humor in these award-winning shorts. The compilation includes:

    A GIRL'S OWN STORY is about Beatlemania and growing up in the sixties – where family is strange,...

  • How to Build an Igloo

    Directed by Douglas Wilkinson • Documentary • 1949 • 10 minutes

    A demonstration of igloo-building in Canada's Far North, showing how the site is selected and how blocks of snow are used to make a snug shelter in only an hour and a half. As the camera follows each stage, the commentary explains t...

  • Flamenco at 5:15

    Directed by Cynthia Scott • Documentary • 1983 • 5 minutes

    This Oscar-winning film is a visual and emotional thriller. It is an impressionistic record of a flamenco dance class given to senior students of the National Ballet School of Canada by two great teachers from Spain, Susana and Antonio R...

  • Christmas with Chávez

    Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2013 • 2 minutes

    Weeks before the 2006 midterm elections, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez came to the United Nations and delivered his "smells of sulfur" speech about Bush. After that speech, Bush was officially a lame duck—the Republicans lost the House and...

  • Pony Boys

    Directed by Eric Stange • Documentary • 2022 • 22 minutes

    Summer, 1967. Two Massachusetts boys – 9 and 11 — are desperate to visit Expo ’67 in Montreal — the largest World’s Fair ever. But their parents can’t take them. Then Mom comes up with the solution: hitch their pet Shetland pony King to a...

  • Sierra Leone Greets the Queen

    Directed by T. Cummins • Documentary • 1961 • 22 minutes

    Record of the royal visit by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip to Sierra Leone between 25th November and 1st December 1961. The Royal yacht Britannia arrives in Freetown. Formal greeting from dignitaries including the Prime Minister Sir...

  • Life of a Queen

    Directed by Not credited • Documentary • With Queen Elizabeth II • 1960 • 16 minutes

    Compilation newsreel portraying Queen Elizabeth II from her childhood to the early days of her reign, sponsored by the Central Office of Information. This film starts with early footage of the Queen as a girl an...

  • Good White People

    Directed by Jarrod Cann & Erick Stoll • Documentary • 2016 • 16 minutes

    In the Spring of 2001, the African-American community of Over-the-Rhine in downtown Cincinnati arose in protest after unarmed 19-year-old, Timothy Thomas, was killed by a white officer named Steven Roach. In the years follow...

  • Now He's Out in Public and Everyone Can See

    Directed by Natalie Bookchin • Documentary • 2017 • 24 minutes

    A riveting polyphonic documentary, NOW HE'S OUT IN PUBLIC AND EVERYONE CAN SEE presents a fractured narrative about an unnamed man whose racial identity is continually redrawn and contested by clusters of impassioned narrators. This ...

  • Meantime

    Directed by Michael T Workman  • Documentary • 2022 • 19 minutes

    After Tim’s work-related stroke leads to troubling health complications, his son Michael returns home to Montana. As they spend the most time together since Michael’s childhood, they reckon with the past that haunts Tim.

    Meanti...

  • 24 Hours in the Life of a Clown (Jean-Pierre Melville)

    Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville • Documentary • 1946 • 19 minutes

    In Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1946 film debut, we follow aging circus clown Beby, from one night’s performance to the next. After the show, Beby eats the same spaghetti dinner his wife has been preparing for decades, lingers over fon...

  • 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...

  • Tell Them Anything You Want (with Maurice Sendak)

    Directed by Lance Bangs, Spike Jonze • Documentary • With Maurice Sendak • 2009 • 39 minutes

    From Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze, acclaimed director of WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, comes A PORTRAIT OF MAURICE SENDAK, a loving look at one of the most cherished and controversial figures in children's l...

  • Trouble Sleep

    Directed by Alain Kassanda • Documentary • 2020 • 41 minutes

    Kassanda’s freewheeling urban portrait follows two young men, Fred and Akin, as they navigate the crowded roadways of Ibadan, Nigeria’s third largest city. Engineering graduate Fred is beginning a new job as a taxi driver, while Akin p...

  • A Call to Action: The Freedom Budget of 1966

    Directed by Jenny Alexander • Documentary • With Martin Luther King • 2023 • 7 minutes

    “A Call to Action: The Freedom Budget of 1966” tells the story of a little-known grassroots push for guaranteed income during the civil rights movement. 

  • Nixon’s Reversal

    Directed by Jenny Alexander and James Rutenbeck • Documentary • 2023 • 9 minutes

    Richard Nixon was on the verge of providing guaranteed basic income for all Americans. Then a story from 1795 changed his mind and the course of history.