
Art of the Real 2018
Celebrating its fifth year, the Art of the Real festival offers a survey of the most vital and innovative voices in nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking.
The fifth edition of Art of the Real is an essential showcase for the most vital and innovative voices in nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking.
Julien Faraut
2018|
France|
95 minutes
Faraut’s sophisticated and witty found-footage ode to tennis legend John McEnroe is an essayistic investigation into the poetics of athletics, taking as its point of departure Jean-Luc Godard’s maxim, “Cinema lies, sports doesn’t.”
Adam Khalil & Bayley Sweitzer
2018|
USA|
83 minutes
This first feature by Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer is a forceful and hallucinogenic film about personal politics in extraordinary times.
Martin DiCicco
2017|
USA / Qatar|
70 minutes|
Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian with English subtitles
A glimpse at the lives of the laborers who built the Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway, Martin DiCicco’s serene documentary doubles as a stunning document of Central Asia’s unique geography.
Juliana Antunes
2017|
Brazil|
70 minutes|
Portuguese with English subtitles
With its almost exclusively female crew and nonprofessional cast, Baronesa is structurally simple yet multilayered in its resonance, recalling the films of Pedro Costa as it establishes Antunes as a formidable new voice in Brazilian cinema.
Clément Cogitore
2017|
France|
49 minutes|
Russian patois with English subtitles
The director of Neither Heaven Nor Earth (ND/NF 2016) looks at the conflict between two families of “Old Believers” living in an extremely remote region of the Siberian taiga. Uninterested in anyone’s rules but their own, the families are not only threatened by each other and wild animals but also by environmental change. Screening with Alex Tyson’s Divieto 2.
Luise Donschen
2018|
Germany|
67 minutes|
English and German with English subtitles
Donschen’s feature debut is a funny, eclectic, and seductive film about seduction, veering radically from fiction to observational documentary to single-subject interview (including John Malkovich) to landscape and back again.
Karim Aïnouz
2018|
Germany / France / Brazil|
97 minutes|
Arabic, English, and German with English subtitles
Berlin-based Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz returns with this impeccably photographed documentary chronicling a year in the lives of asylum seekers in Berlin’s historic Tempelhof, a former airport built by the Nazi government as a symbol for Hitler’s Germania.
Antoine Bourges
2017|
Canada|
70 minutes
Bourges’s droll, touching debut, about a support caseworker in training assigned to the case of a withdrawn shoplifter, studiously renders the mechanics and kinks of the Canadian legal system and social services.
Gustavo Vinagre
2017|
Brazil|
82 minutes|
Portuguese with English subtitles
Filmed in a single all-night session, Brazilian director Gustavo Vinagre’s latest is an extended interview with his friend and collaborator Julia Katharine, a Japanese-Brazilian trans actress-filmmaker whose insomnia keeps her awake long enough for her to candidly spill stories from her life.
Donal Foreman
2018|
Ireland / France / USA / UK|
73 minutes|
English and French with English subtitles
Donal Foreman tries to understand the father he hardly knew, the Irish-American political filmmaker Arthur MacCaig, who passed away in 2008, in his singular essay film.
Corneliu Porumboiu
2018|
Romania|
70 minutes|
Romanian with English subtitles
The latest from Romanian New Wave master Porumboiu is a hilarious and politically incisive portrait of a bureaucrat who dreams of radically revising the rules of the world’s most popular sport.
Kazuhiro Soda
2017|
Japan / USA|
122 minutes|
Japanese with English subtitles
Mrs. Koso, an elderly fishmonger, and Mr. Murata, an 86-year-old fisherman who still takes his boat out daily, are captured in this vérité-inflected black and white documentary.
Jake Meginsky
2018|
USA|
91 minutes
An experimental jazz icon who has played with Albert Ayler, Giuseppi Logan, and Sonny Sharrock, Milford Graves is now the subject of a documentary as radical as his music.
Adirley Queirós
2017|
Brazil / Portugal|
99 minutes|
Portuguese with English subtitles
This witty and visually dazzling Afrofuturist docufiction takes on Brazil’s structural racism and the 2016 presidential coup.
Kristina Konrad
2018|
Germany / Uruguay|
237 minutes|
Spanish with English subtitles
Swiss documentarian Kristina Konrad’s epic document of Uruguay’s 1989 amnesty referendum is an engrossing, powerful and frequently funny look at democracy in action.
Amar Kanwar
2017|
India|
84 minutes
A well-off math professor gives everything up to live in a train car in this minimalist meditation on modern existence.
Sergei Loznitsa
2018|
Germany|
94 minutes|
Russian, German and English with English subtitles
Loznitsa’s incisive film documents the annual gathering at the Soviet Memorial at Berlin’s Treptower Park to commemorate the Red Army’s defeat of the Nazis, capturing the event in all its patriotic spectacle and ecstatic strangeness.
Jumana Manna
2018|
Germany / Lebanon / Norway|
66 minutes|
English, Arabic, Norwegian with English subtitles
Jumana Manna (A Magical Substance Flows Into Me, Art of the Real 2016) documents the complex pathway of seed distribution between Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley and the global seed vault deep inside Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.
Irene Lusztig
2017|
USA|
101 minutes
In the 1970s, Ms. received several thousand letters to the editor detailing all manner of injustices as well as criticisms of the magazine’s feminism. This film returns to the sites where some of the letters originated and records women of all ages reciting them to camera.
Various
2017/8|
73 minutes
An impressionistic exploration into the final moments of four Chinese workers who died at sea, an astute observation of indigenous weavers who use a pre-Spanish loom to create their work, and a multilayered portrait of the residents of Dawson City, Yukon Territory.
Mexico|
105 minutes
One of the best documentary filmmakers of his generation, Eugenio Polgovsky died suddenly last year. These two medium-length works—Tropic of Cancer and Mitote—reveal vastly different aspects of 21st-century Mexico.
40 minutes
In this interactive performance, Nicolas Pereda will explain his relationship to C.B., an amateur archaeologist, activist, artist, and the creator of the Mining Museum in La Union, as interview footage plays behind him.
Artist Spotlights
Presentations and career-spanning conversations with visual artists whose work resonates with nonfiction filmmaking.
Steffani Jemison
90 minutes
This program spotlights the urgent and sublime work of multimedia artist Steffani Jemison, whose videos, performances, scores, and installations seamlessly merge politics, poetics, and aesthetics.
Amar Kanwar
90 minutes
Artist and filmmaker Amar Kanwar chronicles India’s political shifts and the dramatic changes to its landscape, focusing on those most vulnerable to the effects. Here he presents two films from his multimedia installation work The Sovereign Forest (2012), followed by a discussion.
Hiwa K
75 minutes
Iraqi-born, Germany-based artist Hiwa K shares three works from the past decade, followed by a discussion.
90 minutes
A program-length survey of duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s recent video works, followed by a discussion.
Celebrating its fifth year, the Art of the Real festival offers a survey of the most vital and innovative voices in nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking. The 2018 lineup features a host of brilliant new works by internationally acclaimed filmmakers such as Corneliu Porumboiu, Sergei Loznitsa, Irene Lusztig, Karim Aïnouz, Kazuhiro Soda, and Jumana Manna, along with a vibrant slate of impressive, award-winning debuts from around the world. This year also includes a series of “Artist Spotlights,” four presentations and career-spanning conversations with visual artists whose work resonates with nonfiction filmmaking: Hiwa K, Amar Kanwar, Steffani Jemison, and Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Art of the Real is documentary redefined.
Organized by Dennis Lim and Rachael Rakes.
Presented with support from MUBI.
Acknowledgments:
UniFrance; German Films; Mara Polgovsky; Michel Lipkes; Marian Goodman Gallery; the New Museum; UnionDocs Documentary Arts Center; NYLO







































