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What was kept, and the power in deciding.

17: in film
13:00: average
221 min: in total
32: across the network

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13:00

And Everything Is Going Fine

Steven Soderbergh · 2010

Steven Soderbergh’s 2010 documentary And Everything Is Going Fine assembles archival monologues, interviews and home movies of Spalding Gray into a portrait built entirely from his own words and presence. Edited by Susan Littenberg and scored by Gray’s son Forrest, it avoids biography-by-explanation in favour of temporal layering and verbal recurrence. The film premiered at Slamdance in January 2010 and was released on Criterion Collection Blu-ray and DVD in 2012.

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Burroughs: The Movie

Howard Brookner · 1983

Howard Brookner’s 1983 documentary Burroughs: The Movie is the only film made with William S. Burroughs’ full participation during his lifetime. Shot over five years with Tom DiCillo and sound by Jim Jarmusch, it traces Burroughs’ life through interviews, location footage, and quiet observation—no narration, no re-enactments, no interpretive framing. The film premiered at the 1983 New York Film Festival and aired as part of BBC Arena. Restored in 2012, it remains a rare, unvarnished portrait of a writer whose life and work resist easy summary.

13:00

Caught by the Tides

Jia Zhangke · 2024

Caught by the Tides is a 2024 Chinese drama directed by Jia Zhangke, constructed from footage shot between 1999 and 2024 — including material from Unknown Pleasures, Still Life, and Ash Is Purest White — and centred on Zhao Tao’s character Qiao Qiao across two decades of social and personal change. It premiered in competition for the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

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For All Mankind

Al Reinert · 1989

Al Reinert’s 1989 documentary For All Mankind assembles six million feet of NASA film into a single, continuous lunar mission, using astronauts’ interview voices and Brian Eno’s ambient score to evoke the physical and psychological experience of spaceflight — prioritising sensation over explanation, silence over speech, and scale over story.

13:00

Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words

Stig Björkman · 2015

Stig Björkman’s 2015 documentary assembles Ingrid Bergman’s letters, diaries, and home movies into a first-person portrait, voiced by Alicia Vikander and Melinda Kinnaman. Interviews with her children and peers provide grounded counterpoint. Structured chronologically and sparingly scored, it privileges Bergman’s voice over analysis—succeeding where her writing is rich, thinning where it ends.

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Innocence Unprotected

Dušan Makavejev · 1968

Dušan Makavejev’s Innocence Unprotected (1968) is a Yugoslav documentary essay built around fragments of Dragoljub Aleksić’s unreleased 1942 film of the same name. Makavejev expands the material with wartime newsreels, interviews with surviving cast, and subtle visual interventions — tinting, selective colouring — to explore how amateur art endures under political pressure. Neither satire nor homage, it treats innocence as a cultural condition worth preserving, not excusing. The film won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at Berlin in 1968 and is now recognised as cultural heritage in Serbia.

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Les glaneurs et la glaneuse... deux ans après

Agnès Varda · 2002

Two years after her acclaimed documentary about gleaning, Agnès Varda revisits its subjects and settings, filming herself as much as others. With handheld camerawork, unvarnished sound, and a gently recursive structure, the film measures time’s passage not in events but in textures — wrinkled skin, sprouting potatoes, reused objects, remembered conversations. It is a modest, self-aware extension of her earlier work, rooted in attention rather than argument.

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Moonage Daydream

Brett Morgen · 2022

Moonage Daydream is a 140-minute documentary about David Bowie, directed and edited by Brett Morgen from five million items in Bowie’s personal archive. It uses montage, remixed music, and unreleased footage to construct a non-linear, sensory portrait — avoiding biography in favour of immersion. Premiered at Cannes in 2022, it won a Grierson Award and was shortlisted for an Oscar. It is structured as a series of associative chapters, emphasising Bowie’s intellectual and aesthetic preoccupations over career milestones.

13:00

Night and Fog

Alain Resnais · 1956

Alain Resnais’s 1956 documentary Night and Fog uses stark juxtaposition — new colour footage of abandoned camps alongside archival black-and-white material — to dissect the concentration camp as a functional extension of fascism. Written by survivor Jean Cayrol and Chris Marker, and scored by Hanns Eisler, it avoids sentimentality in favour of structural analysis: architecture, logistics, bureaucracy, and the diffusion of responsibility. Commissioned for the tenth anniversary of camp liberation, it remains a foundational essay film, rigorous, unsettling, and deliberately unresolved.

13:00

Overlord

Stuart Cooper · 1975

Overlord (1975) is a British black-and-white film written and directed by Stuart Cooper, blending newly shot drama with archival footage from the Imperial War Museum and German sources. It traces the brief life of Thomas Beddows, a conscripted soldier, from call-up to death on D-Day at Sword Beach. Shot on period lenses and edited to match the grain and rhythm of wartime film, it avoids heroism and exposition in favour of quiet accumulation — of gesture, texture, silence. Awarded the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at Berlin in 1975, it was later championed by Roger Ebert and added to the Criterion Collection.

13:00

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese · 2019

Rolling Thunder Revue is a hybrid concert film and constructed documentary, built from restored 1975 tour footage shot by Dylan for Renaldo and Clara, intercut with contemporary interviews — some real, some fictionalised. Directed by Martin Scorsese and produced by Jeff Rosen, it deliberately obscures the line between fact and invention, inviting the viewer to question memory, myth, and the ethics of archival storytelling. Released by Netflix in 2019, it foregrounds performance over biography and texture over testimony.

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Sentimental Value

Joachim Trier · 2025

Joachim Trier’s 2025 drama Sentimental Value follows sisters Nora and Agnes as their estranged father Gustav returns to Oslo to film a project rooted in their grandmother’s wartime trauma. With Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, it traces how grief, ambition and memory circulate through performance, architecture and silence—without offering catharsis or easy resolution.

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The Beales of Grey Gardens

Albert Maysles, David Maysles · 2006

Assembled from footage shot for the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens but left unused for over thirty years, The Beales of Grey Gardens (2006) offers a slower, denser immersion in the East Hampton home of ‘Big’ and ‘Little’ Edie Beale. Directed by Albert and David Maysles and edited by Ian Markiewicz, it deepens rather than reinterprets the original — showing more of the mother-daughter dynamic, their caretaker Jerry, friend Lois Wright, and the ever-present cats, including the origin of the famous hallway fire. With no narration or context, it trusts observation over exposition.

13:00

The Velvet Underground

Todd Haynes · 2021

Todd Haynes’s 2021 documentary examines the Velvet Underground not as a rock band but as a convergence of avant-garde film, minimalist composition, and 1960s New York counterculture. Built from newly shot interviews and rigorously curated archival material — much of it silent, scratched, or degraded — the film privileges texture, timing, and material constraint over narrative or biography. It foregrounds the roles of Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and the Factory milieu while leaving gaps around later line-up changes and musical evolution. Edward Lachman’s cinematography and Affonso Gonçalves’s editing sustain a deliberate, almost tactile pace.

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The Watermelon Woman

Cheryl Dunye · 1996

Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 debut is a mockumentary about a Black lesbian filmmaker researching a fictional 1930s Black actress — ‘The Watermelon Woman’ — erased from film history. Blending interviews, staged archive photos by Zoe Leonard, and autobiographical elements, it exposes how race, sexuality and institutional power shape what gets preserved — and what must be invented to survive.

13:00

Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser

Charlotte Zwerin · 1988

Charlotte Zwerin’s 1988 documentary assembles rediscovered 1967 footage of Thelonious Monk in performance, rehearsal, and daily life, supplemented by interviews with collaborators and family. Produced by Clint Eastwood’s Malpaso Productions, it avoids narration and chronology in favour of sustained, intimate observation — capturing Monk’s physicality, discipline, and reserve with unprecedented fidelity. Selected for the National Film Registry in 2017, it remains the definitive visual record of the pianist at work.

13:00

Time

Garrett Bradley · 2020

Garrett Bradley’s 2020 documentary follows Sibil Fox Richardson’s two-decade campaign to free her husband Rob from a 60-year Louisiana prison sentence. Built from 100 hours of her home videos and new black-and-white footage, it treats time as both subject and material — showing how love, labour and resistance persist across decades of separation. It won the Sundance U.S. Directing Award and was nominated for an Academy Award.