Essay Film Movies

Inspired by a tumultuous period in the director's relationship with her mother, the film draws a poignant analogy between the phases of their...

Valtos is a story told from thirty years hence, in the last moments of its narrator, who awoke one day in 1987 'with the knowledge that I had been...

Through voiceover and static San Francisco landscapes this experimental narrative short tells the melancholy story of a butch dyke pining over a one...

EMPATHY (a digital love letter) is a short essay documentary, a heartbreaking comedy about a break-up, an attempt to concretize emotion and evoke...

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

Swimming, Dancing examines audiovisual representations of the Yangtze (1934–present), from silent film to video art to the contemporary vlog....

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

Originally produced anonymously and distributed by RTMark, Untitled #29.95 tells the story of the commercial art establishment's attempt to turn...

"The prevailing stigmatization of the 'villero' universe is fed back by the images. In order to dismantle this stigmatization, other images must be...

"No Refunds" is a visceral, tangled descent into the transactional dynamics of intimate encounters, told through the language of bodies, sheets, and...

Musing on the nature of memory, Don Hertzfeldt recounts stories about a kiss from The King, a floating child in a backyard and a giant foot.

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,...

Film critic James Quandt looks at Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad in 26 different ways, each corresponding to a letter in the alphabet

In an age of chaos, destruction, and decay, the resurrection of nature was the last ray of vitality and a testament to survival. The film ventures...

A collective experimental short / essay film—a fragment of a surreal inner landscape. Two performers torment themselves with immense sorrow in...

A drawing of an ancient bathhouse in a French travel book to the Middle East sparks a visual poem, inspired by the Arab poetry tradition of "standing...

An enigmatic glimpse of life through precarious vignettes, propelling a narrative through a nebulous and opaque structure that sutures the...

History, work, sex, cinema, death and my older brother. An essay on what swimming pools mean in culture and the collective memories we have about...

Framed within the genre of "essay film", and with the landscape of Mar de Cobo as its central core, the film explores the limits between documentary...