Essay Film Movies

A long-hidden, personal doc about leaving a beloved house by the late, revered Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.

A film-maker travels through mountain villages and along the shores of Alpine lakes to investigate the disappearance of Valérie 20 years...

In this Criterion Collection video essay, Kogonada explores how doors recur throughout the films of Robert Bresson. The short considers doorways as...

The Drone is the Message. It's not the laptop nor phone that best typifies our relationship to the internet. It's the drone.

Quite a few years have passed since November 1989. Czechoslovakia has been divided up and, in the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus’s...

A street in downtown Warsaw transforms into a kaleidoscopic portrait of Polish society. Behind the viewfinder is an Indian immigrant, who seeks to...

From the behavior, discourse, and appearance of individual actors, Vachek composes, in the form of a mosaic, a broad and many-layered film-argument...

The Weight of Sight is a playful and very personal essay where director Truls Krane Meby, through a massive archive of his own material - anything...

Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a...

The surrealist painter René Magritte questions the objective reality and emphasizes the arbitrariness of the relationship between an object,...

On April 1st, 2022, my grandfather passed away and i felt lost. I think my path changed when, some days after he passed away, i was offered a small...

A labyrinthine portrait of Czech culture on the brink of a new millennium. Egon Bondy prophesies a capitalist inferno, Jim Čert admits to...

Feeling lost, a holidayer takes a vacation, only to discover a world that is as banal as it is hyper-real. A found-footage essay film. A home-movie....

Expertly merging old VHS home movies with new family interviews, filmmaker Eddie Sánchez traces his parents' journey from Mexico to the U.S....

The author's personal confession. This essay film about the relationship between father and son is filmed exclusively in 16mm film in Prague,...

This documentary essay introduces a peculiar trio of men united by their passion for hunting. Each of them conceives of hunting in his own way,...