Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell
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WILD COMBINATION is director Matt Wolf’s visually absorbing portrait of the seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist, and disco producer Arthur Russell. Before his untimely death from AIDS in 1992, Arthur prolifically created music that spanned both pop and the transcendent possibilities of abstract art. Now, over fifteen years since his passing, Arthur's work is finally finding its audience. Wolf incorporates rare archival footage and commentary from Arthur's family, friends, and closest collaborators—including Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg—to tell this poignant and important story.
Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak
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From Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze comes a deeply moving tribute to Maurice Sendak, a seminal talent whose conflicts with success and lifelong obsession with death have subtly influenced his work. Sendak was best known for WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, which he wrote twelve years into his career as a writer and illustrator. The WILD THINGS book would go on to become one of the most beloved and critically lauded children's books of all time and, much to Sendak's chagrin, would come to define his career.
All I Can Say
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Shannon Hoon, lead singer of the rock band Blind Melon, filmed himself religiously from 1990-1995 with a video camera, recording up until a few hours before his sudden death at the age of twenty-eight. His camera was a diary and his closest confidant. In the hundreds of hours of footage, Hoon meticulously documented his life—his family, his creative process, his television, his band’s rise to fame, and his struggle with addiction. He filmed his daughter’s birth, and archived the politics and culture of the 90s, an era right before the internet changed the world. Created solely with his own footage, voice, and music, this rare autobiography is a prescient exploration of experience and memory in the age of video. It is also Hoon’s last work, completed twenty-three years after his death.
Black White + Gray
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A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe. Yale-educated and born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Sam Wagstaff transformed himself from innovative museum curator to Robert Mapplethorpe's lover and patron. During the heady years of the 1970s and 1980s, the New York City art scene was abuzz with a new spirit, and Mapplethorpe would be at the center of it. Wagstaff pulled him from his suburban Queens existence, gave him a camera and brought him into this art world that seemed to be waiting for him, creating the man whose infamous images instilled emotions ranging from awe to anger. In turn, Mapplethorpe brought the formerly starched-shirt preppie to the world of drugs and gay S-and-M sex, well-documented in his still-startling photographs. Twenty five years separated the lovers, but their relationship was symbiotic to its core, and the two remained together forever. The film also explores the relationship both men had with musician/poet Patti Smith, whose 1975 debut album "Horses" catapulted her to fame.
We Are Little Zombies
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When four young orphans—Hikari, Ikuko, Ishi, and Takemura—first meet, their parents’ bodies are being turned into dust, like fine Parmesan atop a plate of spaghetti Bolognese, and yet none of them can shed a tear. They are like zombies; devoid of all emotion. With no family, no future, no dreams, and no way to move forward, the young teens decide that the first level of this new existence involves salvaging a gaming console, an old electric bass, and a charred wok from their former homes—just enough to start a band-and then conquer the world. Tragedy, comedy, music, social criticism, and teenage angst are all subsumed in this eccentric cinematic tsunami.
Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets
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As much a testament to the band as it is to the city and inhabitants of Sheffield, PULP weaves exclusive concert footage with man-on-the-street interviews and dreamy staged sequences to paint a picture much larger, funnier, moving, and life-affirming than any music film of recent memory. Though culminating with the farewell concert the band played to thousands of adoring fans in their hometown of Sheffield, England, PULP is by no means a traditional concert film or rock doc.
Relaxer
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Doom and gloom are on the way. The Y2K apocalypse can't be stopped. Abbie's older brother issues him the ultimate challenge before it goes down: beat the infamous level 256 in Pac-Man and no getting up from the couch until he does so. Abbie’s survival story begins here; inside a rotting living room with no food or water, and a revolving door of numb-nut friends and acquaintances. It’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL by way of SLACKER.
Teenage
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A hypnotic rumination on the genesis of youth culture from the end of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th, Matt Wolf's Teenage is a living collage of rare archival material, filmed portraits, and diary entries read by Jena Malone, Ben Whishaw, and others. Inspired by Jon Savage's book and set to a shimmering contemporary score by Bradford Cox (Deerhunter), Teenage is a mesmerizing trip into the past and a riveting look at the very idea of "coming-of-age." Teenagers didn't always exist. They had to be invented.
Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
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Scott Walker: 30th Century Man shows a rare glimpse into the creative world of the most enigmatic figure in rock history. Tracing the undeniable impact Scott Walker has had on popular music through casual interviews with some of his biggest, highest profile fans, we explore his fascinating trajectory. From jobbing bass player on LA's Sunset Strip, to his domination of the British pop scene that began in the swinging summer of 1965, to his transformation into a composer of true genius, here is an uncompromising and serious musician working at the peak of his powers.
Searching For Ingmar Bergman
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On the 100th anniversary of his birth, internationally renowned director Margarethe von Trotta examines Ingmar Bergman’s life and work with a circle of his closest collaborators as well as a new generation of filmmakers. This documentary presents key components of his legacy, as it retraces themes that recurred in his life and art and takes us to the places that were central to Bergman’s creative achievements. Featuring interviews with actress Liv Ullmann, directors Olivier Assayas, Ruben Östlund, and more.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
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In his short career, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a phenomenon. His dense, bebop-influenced neoexpressionist work emerged in the 1980s while minimalist art was the fad and as a successful black artist, he was constantly confronted by racism and misconceptions.  In this documentary portrait of the renowned artist, Basquiat's friend and filmmaker Tamra Davis shines the spotlight on New York City painter, built around a lost, personal interview with the artist, rare archival footage and more.
Martin Margiela: In His Own Words
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One of the most revolutionary and influential fashion designers of his time, Martin Margiela has remained an elusive figure the entirety of his decades-long career. From Jean Paul Gaultier’s assistant to creative director at Hermès to leading his own House, Margiela never showed his face publicly and avoided interviews, but reinvented fashion with his radical style through forty-one provocative collections. Now, for the first time, the “Banksy of fashion” reveals his drawings, notes, and personal items in this exclusive, intimate profile of his vision. The film features interviews with, among others, Margiela himself, Jean Paul Gaultier, Carine Roitfeld, Trend Forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort, Fashion Critic Cathy Horyn, and fashion historian Olivier Saillard. The score has been composed by the Belgian rock band dEUS.
Shortbus
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PLEASE NOTE: This film contains graphic nudity and explicit sexual acts. John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus explores the lives of several emotionally challenged characters as they navigate the comic and tragic intersections between love and sex in and around a modern-day underground salon. A sex therapist who has never had an orgasm, a dominatrix who is unable to connect, a gay couple who are deciding whether to open up their relationship, and the people who weave in and out of their lives, all converge on a weekly gathering called Shortbus: a mad nexus of art, music, politics, and polysexual carnality. Set in a post-9/11, Bush-exhausted New York City, SHORTBUS tells its story with sexual frankness, suggesting new ways to reconcile questions of the mind, pleasures of the flesh, and imperatives of the heart.
The Hours And Times
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Christopher Munch’s boldly original debut, THE HOURS AND TIMES (1992), is a fictional account of what might have happened in April 1963, when John Lennon and Beatles manager Brian Epstein traveled to Barcelona for an extended weekend getaway. In the four days they spend together, the suave Epstein (played by David Angus) and the provocative Lennon (Ian Hart in his first starring role) reflect on their lives, both private and professional, as they explore the unique bond they share. Munch’s sparse and intimate narrative, captured with exquisite black-and-white cinematography, is a thoughtful meditation on friendship and sexuality, crafted around a brief moment in the lives of two extremely well-known pop figures.
The Twentieth Century
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Toronto, 1899. Aspiring young politician Mackenzie King (Dan Beirne) dreams of becoming the Prime Minister of Canada. But his romantic vacillation between a British soldier and a French nurse, exacerbated by a fetishistic obsession, may well bring about his downfall. In his quest for power, King must gratify the expectations of his imperious Mother, the hawkish fantasies of a war-mongering Governor-General, and the utopian idealism of a Québécois mystic before facing one, final test of leadership. Culminating in an epic battle between good and evil, King learns that disappointment may be the defining characteristic of the twentieth century!
The Thorn in the Heart
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The Thorn in the Heart (L'Epine dans le Coeur) is a personal look at the life of the Gondry family matriarch, Michel's aunt Suzette Gondry, and her relationship with her son, Jean-Yves. Michel examines Suzette's years as a school teacher and her life in rural France. During the course of filming the documentary, Michel unearths new family stories and uses his camera to explore them in a subtle and sensitive way.
Brimstone & Glory
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The National Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepec, Mexico is a site of festivity unlike any other in the world. In celebration of San Juan de Dios, patron saint of firework makers, conflagrant revelry engulfs the town for ten days. Artisans show off their technical virtuosity, up­and-comers create their own rowdy, lo­fi combustibles, and dozens of teams build larger-than-life papier-mâché bulls to parade into the town square, adorned with fireworks that blow up in all directions. More than three quarters of Tultepec’s residents work in pyrotechnics, making the festival more than revelry for revelry’s sake. It is a celebration that anchors a way of life built around a generations-old, homegrown business of making fireworks by hand. For the people of Tultepec, the National Pyrotechnic Festival is explosive celebration, unrestrained delight and real peril. Plunging headlong into the fire, BRIMSTONE & GLORY honors the spirit of Tultepec’s community and celebrates celebration itself.

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