Anonymous Club
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Shot on vivid 16mm film over a three-year period, Anonymous Club chronicles notoriously shy, Melbourne-based musician Courtney Barnett’s ups and downs on the world tour for her album Tell Me How You Really Feel. Featuring Barnett’s unguarded narration from her audio diary, recorded on a dictaphone provided by filmmaker Danny Cohen, the film delivers frank and unprecedented insight into Barnett’s creative process, the sacrifices and inner conflicts set in motion by fame, and the sometimes dark backdrop to her whimsical, relatabley poetic compositions.
Dark Days
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For years, a homeless community took root in a train tunnel beneath New York City, braving dangerous conditions and perpetual night. Dark Days explores this surprisingly domestic subterranean world, unearthing a way of life unimaginable to those above. Through stories simultaneously heartbreaking, hilarious, intimate, and off the cuff, tunnel dwellers reveal their reasons for taking refuge and their struggle to survive underground.
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.
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.
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.
Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour
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Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour follows iconic feminist electronic band Le Tigre on their 2004-2005 international tour. Le Tigre confronts sexism and homophobia in the music industry while tearing up the stage with their no-holds-barred lyrics, punk rock ethos, and whip-smart wit.
Shepard & Dark
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A documentary portrait of the unlikely decades-long friendship between actor and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard and reclusive oddball Johnny Dark, through a correspondence of handwritten letters dating back to the 1960s.
The Love Witch
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Elaine, a beautiful young witch, is determined to find a man to love her. In her gothic Victorian apartment she makes spells and potions, and then picks up men and seduces them. However, her spells work too well, leaving her with a string of hapless victims. When she finally meets the man of her dreams, her desperation to be loved will drive her to the brink of insanity and murder.
With a visual style that pays tribute to Technicolor thrillers of the ‘60s, THE LOVE WITCH explores female fantasy and the repercussions of pathological narcissism.
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.
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.
Cane River
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Written, produced, and directed by Emmy Award-winning documentarian, Horace B. Jenkins, and crafted by an entirely African American cast and crew, CANE RIVER is a racially-charged love story in Natchitoches Parish, a “free community of color” in Louisiana. A budding, forbidden romance lays bare the tensions between two black communities, both descended from slaves but of disparate opportunity—the light-skinned, property-owning Creoles and the darker-skinned, more disenfranchised families of the area. This lyrical, visionary film disappeared for decades after Jenkins died suddenly following the film’s completion, robbing generations of a talented, vibrant new voice in American cinema. Available now for the first time in nearly forty years as a brand-new, state-of-the-art restoration.
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.
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.
Body
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A darkly funny and twisted journey taking place entirely on one unforgettable Christmas Eve, Body revolves around a trio of college co-eds whose dalliance with breaking-and-entering goes horribly awry. Following a freak accident, the girls find themselves entangled in a Hitchcockian nightmare steeped in tension and deceit, where no one is to be trusted and a new twist lies around every corner.
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.
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.
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.
NFTV 3
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