Essay Film Movies

A filmmaker canoes up North Carolina’s Black River to the Three Sisters Swamp, chasing light through ancient bald cypress groves. What begins...

What do you see when you see a black screen?

A film essay that approaches cinema as a water current, revisiting a body of previous essay films through the recurring image of water—rivers,...

The times are fueled by anxiety, and our tweets will not say the opposite. A feeling of the end of the world hangs over our economic model. The...

A dog's funeral becomes part of a chain of absurd events including a tomato ketchup battle, a reconstruction of the battle of Austerlitz and a...

First, I wanted to make a kind of reflexively impoverished Busby Berkeley extravaganza. Second, I was interested in juxtaposing two cultural...

90's era home videos of a Mexican father starting a new life in the United States

The director spent her childhood living apart from her family and knew very little about its history. This changed when she graduated from college...

A videographic fantasia on the films of Alfred Hitchcock that quickly veers into controlled insanity. Through fervor and mania, this unconventional...

In this video I share my experience as the first Resident of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin during the winter of 2016-2017. Produced for the...

Filmmaker John Torres describes his childhood and discusses his father's infidelities.

A peculiar portrait of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) drawn by the extravagant and original look of the Spanish writer Fernando...

Through the footage from his family's Handycam, the director creates a portrait of his family that is falling apart.

Standing before a decaying state hospital in the Aegean coastal town of Foça, "The Department of Ownerless Places" investigates the...

Photography trip to Bolivia filmed with a rostrum camera and edited with original sounds from the country.

A documentary film contrasting present-day Lithuania with extracts from a peasant's diary from 1984/85.

A collage-style video essay that explores the idea of love through touch. Guided by fragments of films, paintings, photographs, and other visual...

An experimental documentary about dead turtles, crab swarms, decaying tennis courts, and microscopic histories. The filmmakers shot their...

In a world bedazzled by intractable images, do we need the essay film now more than ever? Kevin B. Lee weighs up this distinctively self-aware,...