Essay Film Movies

An essay film about Jean-Paul Sartre and the French Existentialists, featuring Roland Barthes' last interview.

Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes...

This film essay about mushrooms and their connections to other living things tries to use the structure of mushrooms to explain nature, science, and...

A scientific expedition travels to an alternative Earth in hope of finding a new home for humanity, which has destroyed its own planet. But is it...

This documentary aims to register this unknown side of James Joyce: His Greek Notebooks. Trieste. Bloomsday, 2013. Dance in slow motion, accompanied...

A visual essay on contemporary Kiwi architecture.

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

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

the film centers on a group of young people from different social backgrounds, united by their addictions.

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

The images from the landing of the first expedition of the spaceship Columbia are juxtaposed to a reflection on the function of the visual medium,...

Through the story of one woman’s year in a room with a view, the film catches its audience up in the collective memories of all those who have...

In this new video essay, filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe delves into the dread-inducing mood and tone of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s modern horror...

Since the 1980s, the video shop has been a desperately necessary space for film culture. In Videoheaven, Alex Ross Perry tells the story of the...

In the fourth and final instalment of Karel Vachek’s not-so-little Little Capitalist Tetralogy, preparations for an opera performance in the...

A meditation on early Swedish anime fandom and coming of age at the turn of the millennium. Memories from a first love in bleeding video colors, the...

A very personal interpretation, to say the least, of the passion of the Christ According to St. John.

A film essay investigating the question of what “the West” means beyond the cardinal direction: a model of society inscribed itself in...