A portrait of Arthur “Peg Leg Sam” Jackson –black harmonica player, singer, and comedian who made his living “busking” on the street and performing in patent-medicine shows touring southern towns. Footage includes excerpts from one of his last medicine shows, videotaped at a county fair in 1972, and material filmed near his home in South Carolina in 1975.
Category: Short
This provocative short documentary film is a private testimonial on the body of the director’s mother, who, in the presence seen and felt, reveals, the physiognomy of old age. The camera intimately undresses and examines the obese and exhausted body. But the film bears above all a sentimental tone. The widow recalls her housband, would be happiest if she could turn back time, and sobs.
Davey, a talented young chess player, and Wil Bevan, his history teacher, are in Bournemouth for the British Chess Championships. When Davey meets up with Helen, a punk girl from London, Wil is faced with the problem of steering his charge through the championship and the trauma of first love.
In an open field, a butterfly flies from flower to flower. The charming image is interrupted by cut-out photos of apartment blocks and flats that jump into view to the rhythm of a pile driver. The butterfly is increasingly hemmed in by the buildings, until there’s no more space left, and it is finally mounted and framed on a wall. The last of its kind died in 1975.
Sientje is a little girl whose mother won’t let her watch TV. She’s angry. Extremely angry: what does a little girl do when she’s so angry? Sientje takes out her aggression on everything, even her most precious stuffed animal.
Documentary portrait of writer and performer Spalding Gray, tracing his journey from his Rhode Island childhood to his rise as a celebrated monologist. Through interviews, performance excerpts, and reflections, it explores how he transformed personal experience into art. The film highlights his distinctive storytelling style—wry, confessional, and deeply human—revealing the creative process behind his acclaimed stage works.
Nuit noire, Calcutta, a film commissioned by the pharmaceutical industry and hijacked by Marin Karmitz, unfolds as an intense, nocturnal meandering, with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. Marin Karmitz rapidly abandons the informative intent of the project, adopting a much freer narrative. Although the film’s purpose is to promote a drug claiming to cure alcoholism, it transforms into a black-and-white mirage, starring Maurice Garrel as a drunken writer, a vice-consul in Calcutta, who is rendered creatively impotent.
Maldoror’s short debut film Monangambééé encapsulates the director’s artistic and political vision: this is not militant grandstanding, but a deeply human and lyrical portrayal of colonial inequality and injustice. Based on the short story “O fato completo de Lucas Matesso” (1962) by José Luandino Vieira, it shows how an Angolan activist arrested by the Portuguese occupiers becomes the victim of an absurd linguistic mix-up.