A bare-boned independent drama with brief but meaningful touches of gentle comedy, Actual People is a poignant triumph, a simple but effective voyage into the mind of a young woman trying to find herself in a world that has somehow become hostile to those who refuse to find a place within its preconceived standards. As a debut, and a film in general, Zauhar’s work here represents an auspicious start to a very promising career for someone who is likely to become an essential voice in contemporary cinema, if this film is anything to go by.

Hollywood 90028 shows the dark side of the L.A. dream in the bleak and downbeat story of an aspiring movie cameraman turned serial murderer. Written and directed by esteemed experimental filmmaker Christina Hornisher, and beautifully captured through the lens of camera operator Jean-Pierre Geuens, Hollywood 90028 offers a vivid time capsule of Los Angeles in the early 1970s.

Tessa and Ben are staying in Philly for the weekend to attend Ben's high school reunion. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the couple has to rent a room in a stranger's apartment. That stranger is Adam, whose loneliness is immediately obvious to his new guests. Adam quickly becomes an unwilling voyeur to the most private parts of the couple's life. While Ben seeks validation from old classmates, Tessa is left to find her own affection within the confines of the apartment. When Tessa betrays Adam's trust, Adam goes to great lengths to assert his dominance over his home.

Pushing at the limits of non-fiction cinema, A Man Imagined is a bracingly intimate and hallucinatory portrait of a man with schizophrenia surviving amidst urban detritus and decay. Made in close collaboration with 67-year-old Lloyd, this immersive documentary fable follows the jagged path of a decades-long street survivor, across harsh winters and blistering summers, as he sells discarded items to motorists, sleeps in junkyards and lapses into near-psychedelic reveries.

Celebratory, shocking and raw, this film is as close to the story of the anarcho-punk band as you're going to get... Crass were an art collective and punk band that formed in Essex in 1977, and disbanded in 1984. They promoted anarchism and a movement of resistance that awakened and appealed to many. Director Brandon Spivey tells the tale of Crass's "Reality Asylum," the story and the inspiration behind the band's subversively defiant single through interviews with Crass co-founders Steve Ignorant and Penny Rimbaud, and Small Wonder record label owner Pete Stennett. 

Set in the underbelly of 1980s Modesto, California, Warm Blood uses the real-life diary of a teenage runaway named Red (newcomer Haley Isaacson) returning home to find her father. In his narrative feature debut, director Rick Charnoski’s history as a skate video director informs the frenetic storytelling style, as he combines Red’s nihilist musings with a collage of documentary and B-movie meta-narratives that paint a seedy picture of life on the outskirts of town. Talk-radio bits and punk music underscore the auditory cacophony of doom, while frequent Kelly Reichardt collaborator Christopher Blauvelt (First Cow, The Bling Ring) lends his immersive, naturalist lens shooting on gritty 16mm film.

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE: Filmmaker and visual artist Marie Losier invites us into the mysterious and unclassifiable world of the Residents, the emblematic figures of the American musical avant-garde for over 50 years and the band perhaps most symbiotic with Night Flight. This playful, intimate portrait celebrates the extraordinary freedom of a band that never followed the rules, with extensive new interview footage with Homer Flynn, president of The Cryptic Corporation, alongside rare archival materials.

At once blistering and poetic, the ravages of colonialism cast a dark shadow over the South American landscape in Embrace of the Serpent, the third feature by Ciro Guerra and a 2016 Academy Award-nominee. Filmed in stunning black-and-white, Embrace of the Serpent centers on Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and the last survivor of his people, and the two scientists who, over the course of 40 years, build a friendship with him. The film was inspired by the real-life journals kept by Theodor Koch-Grunberg (portrayed by Jan Bijvoet) and Richard Evans Schultes (Brionne Davis), who traveled through the Colombian Amazon in search of the sacred and difficult-to-find psychedelic Yakruna plant.

Cas, an academic assistant and amateur musician, moves into her aunt’s old home. In the bedroom closet, she finds a cache of mysteriously labeled microcassette tapes, containing cryptic recordings of sounds ranging from everyday objects to abstract soundscapes. Cas’s curiosity to discover the origin of these tapes leads her on a meditative journey through unknown verdant Californian landscapes, encountering experimental music performances, eccentric shop owners, and early music treasures along the way. As her adventure progresses, the mystery unravels in equally enigmatic and enlightening ways, reflecting Cas’s own evolving relation with time and sound.

This time capsule compilation from Night Flight creator Stuart Shapiro and Laurie Dolphin celebrates the work of 40 innovative media artists using Flash in the early 2000s. At the time, Flash animation was the heartbeat of a new generation of pop culture enthusiasts at the beginning of the Internet. Whether creating their own independent animated clips or working with some of the biggest names in the music world, such as Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Todd Rundgren, Dr Dre and Phish, these Flash artists used the medium's unique quality to make art that defined a pivotal internet era.

It’s 2007 in Pfresno, Texas. Raphael is in county jail following an arrest for graffiti. He’s a good kid. It’s just graffiti. So you can’t blame Raphael for the events that unfold after his arrest. He’s not responsible for the sting operation, Pflophaus’s new mixtape, Officer Williams and her delusional suspicions, the meth pipes, the FBI, the rich kids with nothing to lose, Mateo, Larry the pig, all the knives, the local aspiring TV newswoman, the plutonium deal gone wrong, or anyone who may or may not die due to that deal turning sour. None of it is Raphael’s fault, but it is his problem.

A lonely dog groomer in Hollywood searches for love, but his true passion is making weird video art that nobody understands. His menial routine spirals out of control when he meets the girl of his dreams, crossing boundaries between reality.

After a catastrophic event, eight girls find themselves stranded in a house without electricity. As they run out of food and water, their sanity begins to crumble, and soon they regress to their baser instincts.

Follows a land surveyor on an assignment to measure an ancient forest for a developer but soon loses his reason in a supernatural environment that has its own plans.

After suffering a traumatic incident, Molly (Cecilia Milocco) moves into a new apartment to begin her path to recovery, but it’s not long after her arrival that a series of persistent knocks and screams begin to wake her up at night. Molly’s new life begins to unravel as the screams intensify and no one else in the building believes or is willing to help her.

We Kill for Love goes in search of the forgotten world of the direct-to-video erotic thriller, an American film genre that once dominated late night cable television and the shelves of neighborhood video stores. Through interviews with the many directors, writers, and actors who fanned the flames of this sexy subgenre, to academics and film historians whose books have explored its mysteries, this documentary explores the erotic thriller from its origins in film noir to its heyday during the 1980s and 90s home video explosion. Told with humor and tact and accompanied by hundreds of illustrative clips from DTV erotic thrillers, We Kill for Love balances film art with film scholarship as it pulls back the curtain to reveal the heart and soul of a forgotten and often maligned film movement.

Warning: This film contains extended sequences of flashing lights that may impact people with photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised. New French Extremity auteur Gaspar Noé’s Lux Æterna (2019) is a hypnotic, nerve-frying descent into meta-filmmaking chaos. As Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg prepare for a shoot, they discuss filmmaking war stories, witches, and burnings at the stake. What begins as a behind-the-scenes interlude quickly unravels into full-blown psychosis in Noé’s acclaimed Cannes Film Festival premiere.

Birdie is a fragile and introverted teenager with a dark imagination. At an imposing, nearly-empty convent perched on the edge of a frozen lake, Birdie is unceremoniously placed into the care of the nuns where she develops unusual obsessions that will mark her as either a saint or a heretic.

In director Fabrice du Welz's Calvaire, a traveling entertainer is on his way home for Christmas when his van breaks down in the middle of a village, where he quickly falls victim to a dangerously unhinged innkeeper determined to keep him captive. This dark, unsettling film from the New French Extremity movement is available for the first in the US in high definition from a brand new restoration via Yellow Veil films. "A dark absurdist descent into hell," says Guillermo Del Toro.