The Costume Designer

This short focuses on the job of the costume designer in the production of motion pictures. The costume designer must design clothing that is correct for the film historically and geographically, and must be appropriate for the mood of the individual scene. We see famed costume designer Edith Head at work on a production. The Costume Designer was part of The Industry Film Project, a twelve-part series produced by the film studios and the Academy. Each series episode was produced to inform the public on a specific facet of the motion picture industry. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

The Days Before Christmas

This short documentary depicts Christmastime in Montreal. The milling crowds, department store Santas, Brink's messengers, kindergarten angels and boisterous nightclubs all combine to make a vivid portrait of the holidays.

The Dream Machine

A 16mm anthology of experimental super 8 films by Derek Jarman, Michael Kostiff, Cerith Wyn Evans and John Maybury, with framing footage by Tim Burke of Brion Gysin using a dream machine. Jarman's contribution is a version of his 1977 Art and the Pose (aka Arty the Pose), refilmed at 3fps, with a musical soundtrack. Jarman planned The Dream Machine as a commemoration of William Burroughs and Gysin's 1982 visit to the UK, and received initial funding from the Arts Council in 1983, then rethought the project as a portmanteau film featuring Gysin alone. The production remained in limbo until 1986, when James Mackay obtained completion funding from the British Film Institute. (Since this film was released on VHS accompanied by Jarman's Broken English: Three Songs by Marianne Faithfull, T.G.: Psychic Rally in Heaven and Pirate Tape under the umbrella title The Dream Machine, synopses of this film have often muddled up its details with those of the earlier films. )

Tenebrae factae sunt

A documentary about the Parisian night club “Bus Palladium”. This film was theatrically released as a complement for Godard's Masculin, féminin.

Stop for Bud

Stop for Bud is Jørgen Leth's first film and the first in his long collaboration with Ole John. […] they wanted to "blow up cinematic conventions and invent cinematic language from scratch". The jazz pianist Bud Powell moves around Copenhagen -- through King's Garden, along the quay at Kalkbrænderihavnen, across a waste dump. […] Bud is alone, accompanied only by his music. […] Image and sound are two different things -- that's Leth's and John's principle. Dexter Gordon, the narrator, tells stories about Powell's famous left hand. In an obituary for Powell, dated 3 August 1966, Leth wrote: "He quite willingly, or better still, unresistingly, mechanically, let himself be directed. The film attempts to depict his strange duality about his surroundings. His touch on the keys was like he was burning his fingers -- that's what it looked like, and that's how it sounded. But outside his playing, and often right in the middle of it, too, he was simply gone, not there."

The Rink

This short, silent film captures a Sunday afternoon at a community skating rink. Iconic Quebec director Gilles Carle has the camera follow toddlers learning to skate, young girls flashing their skates and boys decked out in the colours of their favourite hockey teams. A picture perfect moment on a bright winter's day.

China Strikes Back

Raw footage received from photographer Harry Dunham revealed never before seen images of Mao Tse-Tung and the Eighth Route Army, inspiring Frontier to collectively shape a new film from desperate images, and to refine its dialectic editing.

Erholungslandschaft spanische Mittelmeerküste

A look at the small village of Benidorm on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. Within 20 years, the fishing village has become a magnet for tourists from all over the world, with unfavorable consequences for the locals.

Fields of Sacrifice

This 1964 documentary returns to the battlefields where over 100,000 Canadian soldiers lost their lives in the First and Second World Wars. The film also visits cemeteries where servicemen are buried. Filmed from Hong Kong to Sicily, this documentary is designed to show Canadians places they have reason to know but may not be able to visit. Produced for the Canadian Department of Veteran Affairs by the renowned documentary filmmaker Donald Brittain. (NFB)

The Emblazoned Apparitions

An alchemically treated lullaby to the end of cinema, featuring Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

Natalie Portman: Starting Young

Natalie Portman reflects on how she was cast in the film Léon: The Professional (1994) at such a young age.

Bums and Dogs

A hotel in the centre of town is a war-time home and refuge for many of Sarajevo's homeless people. Every morning they leave the hotel and wander around the destroyed city gathering again at the defunct hotel in the afternoon. This film follows their separate fates through the bitter comparing of images of the bums with those of dogs abandoned by their owners and now left et the mercy of the war ravaged streets of Sarajevo.

Showfolk

A Vaudeville comedian still working at 100, a stunning siren who dated Reagan when he was a Democrat, a kid out of college who sold The Ten Commandments around the world, a Disney legend who met Walt when she was a little girl and spent her life with Mickey Mouse: these showbiz vets share wisdom and inspiration garnered over seven lifetimes in the business. Residing together at the Motion Picture & Television Fund home, these entertainment lifers are "bonded by the show". These, ladies and gentlemen, are Showfolk.

Exploring the Reef

Jean-Michael Cousteau's documentary about the Great Barrier Reef keeps getting interrupted by characters from Disney's Finding Nemo.

10 Year Retrospective: Cast and Crew Look Back

The cast and crew reflect back on the making of the film Léon - The Professional (1994). A series of interviews with people in different places, all of them involved in the film.

Notes on a True Story

On the evening of March 11, 1950, Annabella Bracci, a 12-year-old girl, was brutally killed and thrown into a pit on the outskirts of Rome, near the village of Primavalle. A brief and poetic account of the events and their impact on an impoverished community. A handful of wild flowers and a painful catch in the voices.

The Funicular of Mount Faloria

Vertigine (Vertigo) is the original title of a fragment of around 4', signed by Michelangelo Antonioni, which is a part of the eight-minutes documentary La funivia del Faloria. The title was eventually modified in La funivia del Faloria because considered more effective to obtain the governmental prize (at the time the minimum length allowed was 8 minutes). Vertigine was shot in 1949 with the cinematographer Bellisario, who was director of photography in several documentaries in those years, but was edited only in 1950, after Antonioni had made his first feature film, Cronaca di un amore.

Que Esse Grito Não Seja em Vão!

Be-In

Captures the spirit and essence of the great San Francisco Human Be-In of January 14, 1967. Ten thousand people imbued with peace, love and euphoria. Set to hard rock such as only San Francisco blues can produce. BE-IN contains Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Timothy Leary, Michael McClure, Lenore Kandel and Buddha. Music by Blue Cheer.

TV-Ping-Pong

An early video work by Ivan Ladislav Galeta that underlines the perceptual presumptions of video-media.

Very Nice, Very Nice

Arthur Lipsett's first film is an avant-garde blend of photography and sound. It looks behind the business-as-usual face we put on life and shows anxieties we want to forget. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, "Very nice, very nice." The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.

One Soldier's Story: The Journey of American Sniper

Join director Clint Eastwood and his creative team, along with Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller, as they overcome enormous creative and logistic obstacles to make a film that brings the truth of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle's story to the screen.

Interstellar: Nolan's Odyssey

A look behind the lens of Christopher Nolan's space epic.

A Fan's Guide to Ms. Marvel

A documentary short that gives you an exclusive look behind the groundbreaking original series, "Ms. Marvel", from its comic book origins to its development and production as Marvel Studios’ next hit series on Disney+. It features interviews with its award winning filmmaking team and the show’s captivating star, newcomer Iman Vellani.

Extremis

A purely observational non-fiction film that takes viewers into the ethically murky world of end-of-life decision making in a public hospital.

Daybreak Express

Set to a classic Duke Ellington recording "Daybreak Express", this is a five-minute short of the soon-to-be-demolished Third Avenue elevated subway station in New York City.

John Was Trying to Contact Aliens

John Shepherd spent 30 years trying to contact extraterrestrials by broadcasting music millions of miles into space. After giving up the search, he makes a different connection here on earth.

End Game

Filmed and edited in intimate vérité style, this movie follows visionary medical practitioners who are working on the cutting edge of life and death and are dedicated to changing our thinking about both.

The Crash Reel

The Crash Reel tells the story of a sport and the risks that athletes face in reaching the pinnacle of their profession. This is Kevin Pearce’s story, a celebrated snowboarder who sustained a brain injury in a trick gone wrong and who now aims, against all the odds, to get back on the snow.

The Atomic Cafe

A disturbing collection of 1940s and 1950s United States government-issued propaganda films designed to reassure Americans that the atomic bomb was not a threat to their safety.

Tricked: The Documentary

This character-driven film considers the evolving sex trafficking landscape as seen by the main players: the exploited, the pimps, the johns that fuel the business, and the cops who fight to stop it.

Zion

A portrait of Zion Clark, a young wrestler who was born without legs and grew up in foster care.

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction

An impressionistic portrait of the iconic actor Harry Dean Stanton comprised of intimate moments, film clips from some of his 250 films and his renditions of American folk songs.

The Class of ‘92

A detailing of the rise to prominence and global sporting superstardom of six supremely talented young Manchester United football players (David Beckham, Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Phil and Gary Neville). The film covers the period 1992-1999, culminating in Manchester United's European Cup triumph.

Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience

A celebration of the universe, displaying the whole of time, from its start to its final collapse. This film examines all that occurred to prepare the world that stands before us now: science and spirit, birth and death, the grand cosmos and the minute life systems of our planet.

Ram Dass, Going Home

Ram Dass is one of the most important cultural figures from the 1960s and 70s. A pyschedelic pioneer, author of Be Here Now, beloved spiritual teacher, and outspoken advocate for death-and-dying awareness, Ram Dass is now himself approaching the end of life. Since suffering a life-changing stroke twenty years ago, he has been living at his home on Maui and deepening his spiritual practice — which is centered on love and his idea of merging with his surroundings and all living things. Shot in a nuanced cinematic style, the film is an intimate summary of his life learning and awareness, and is ultimately a poetic meditation on life, death, and the soul’s journey home.

Avatar Spirits

Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, co-creators of the hit television series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, reflect on the creation of the masterful series.

To Be Takei

Over seven decades, actor and activist George Takei journeyed from a World War II internment camp to the helm of the Starship Enterprise, and then to the daily news feeds of five million Facebook fans. Join George and his husband, Brad, on a wacky and profound trek for life, liberty, and love.

Heart of a Dog

Lyrical and powerfully personal essay film that reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother, her beloved dog, and such diverse subjects as family memories, surveillance, and Buddhist teachings.

A Plastic Ocean

A documentary focused on plastic pollution in the world's oceans.