This first-person essay film, composed of excerpts from over 400 films and accompanied by a soundtrack featuring the intimate recollections of director Frank Beauvais, reframes otherwise incidental images into an indelible and immensely moving reflection on life, love, and loss.

In this 16mm travelogue, Tamer Hassan and Armand Yervant Tufenkian trace a collection of letters, originally written to accompany seed packets sent between friends and families, across the U.S.

This wry reinvention of the nature documentary spies upon the local fauna of Lithuania’s Curonian Spit, observing from the same remove the cormorants who nest there and the human tourists who come to puzzle at their curious existence.

In Chinese filmmaker Lei Lei’s first feature, anonymous images and found materials skip and stutter through analog animation techniques, while on the soundtrack the director’s mother speaks of her youth in Maoist China and of violent dreams of animals fueled by late nights in front of the television.

Filming with a patient and unobtrusive hand, Nicole Vögele observes the goings-on at a late-night eatery in Taipei where Mr. Kuo and his wife, Mrs. Lin, cook for the city’s night owls. Through overheard conversations and the restaurant’s routine activities, a vivid portrait of a working-class community slowly takes shape.

Shot in stark monochrome, Julien Elie’s Dark Suns chronicles the hundreds of murders of women, journalists, and activists in Mexico since the early 1990s and the insidious culture of cartel violence and police corruption behind them.

Lebanese artist Ghassan Halwani’s debut feature is an evocative, procedural investigation of the thousands of people who were disappeared in Beirut throughout the Lebanese Civil War.

Comprising footage shot aboard the Costa Concordia during the production of Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme and civilian-shot footage of the ship as it ran aground two years later, this “anatomy of a disaster” reanimates the ship’s ghostly aura and offers precious insight into Godard’s process.

Deep in France’s Landes forest, a group of wood pigeon hunters navigate a complex system of pulleys and tunnels; as they patiently await their prey, conversations highlight the traditions still honored by the practice, even as the distant sound of falling trees signals its imminent demise.

Ian Soroka’s debut feature navigates caves, quarries, archaeological sites, and a fallout shelter transformed into a film archive to excavate the buried histories of the Partisan Liberation Front, who resisted the Fascist occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II.

This wild and hallucinatory film explores the mysterious forests of a remote territory on the Finnish-Russian border, an idyllic setting where folklore, magic, and traumatic histories intersect.

As Phnom Penh’s historic White Building, a thriving artist community, faces redevelopment, longtime residents somberly reflect on their old home and its imminent destruction, stirring up the dust and memories that have accumulated in its storied walls.

A result of director Sebastian Brameshuber’s friendship with his film’s real-life subject, a Nigerian mechanic toiling away at the base of a centuries-old Austrian ore mine, this myth-shrouded document of one man’s solitary existence doubles as a meditation on our globalist economy.

A cross-country journey from Los Angeles to New York—captured in images of transit zones and passenger-train interiors—serves as the backdrop to this highly personal reflection on the experience of undocumented people in ICE-age America.

Anand Patwardhan’s epic chronicle of India’s ongoing persecution of its own people provides both a detailed history of the murders of many public figures and a present-day exploration of the terrorist acts that have resulted from the country’s fall from democracy.

In The Stone Speakers, myth and memory share space as director Igor Drljača explores Bosnia and Herzegovina’s heritage and cultural identity through its attractions and landmarks, highlighting a self-styled ideology the country hopes to reinforce through the Balkan tourism boom.

Set around Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano, Sarah J. Christman’s debut feature depicts the allegorical quests of a pair of female beekeepers, a Hawaiian activist, and a group of scientists, drawing ambitious parallels between the earthbound and the cosmic, the intimate and the expansive.

This psychological portrait from first-time director Francisco Marise centers on a Cuban special forces veteran who, when not channeling his trauma through a rigorous training regimen, seeks to reconnect with old comrades.

This discreetly expanding fiction from partners Clarissa Campolina and Luiz Pretti traces through vivid montage and voiceover the relationship between two immigrants who meet while living in New York. Combining elements of the diary and travelogue film, While We Are Here captures the beauty and fragility of love and its memory.

Using only 360-degree sequence shots, director Daniel Zimmermann methodically charts a fir tree’s journey from the Austrian countryside to the Brazilian rainforest, highlighting the relative value and consequence of globalized trade and man’s place within the larger ecosystem.

To commemorate the passing of pioneering experimentalist Barbara Hammer, Art of the Real presents a free program featuring one of Hammer’s most indelible works—the 1978 portrait of sapphic intimacy Double Strength—alongside two 2018 homages.

Featuring Julio Iglesias’s House by Natalia Marín, Walked the Way Home by Eric Baudelaire, Those Who Desire by Elena López Riera, and On Guard by Jeamin Cha.

The epic, impressionistic trilogy of documentaries about Beirut by Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019) are at once landmark works of Lebanese cinema and masterpieces of the essay film form.

Featuring Vibration, Delay Exposure, Shift, Metastasis, Atman, and For the Damaged Right Eye.

Featuring The Weavers of Nishijin, The Song of Stone, and Ginrin.

Visceral and discordant in style and politics, Matsumoto’s monumental work of queer cinema loosely adapts Oedipus Rex to the radical subcultures of 1960s Tokyo, from its gay-bar demimonde to its revolutionary student movement, with a breathlessly inventive queer aesthetic.

Minimalist and inky black, Matsumoto’s horror-noir-samurai film unfolds a dark tale of a betrayed ronin who unleashes an infernal force of abject cruelty and grisly vengeance.

With works spanning the past decade—including selections from [SIC] (2009), The Makes (2010), Letters to Max (2014), and the work-in-progress A Dramatic Film, the result of a four-year collaboration with a group of Paris Banlieue middle-schoolers—this program engages with the artist’s process of “protocol” and its profound and original results.

This talk will consider how and why hybridity, fiction, and “blurring boundaries” have figured as recurring preoccupations in critical and curatorial efforts to conceptualize the vitality of experimental documentary practices.