This beautiful documentary portrait of German Jewish émigrée Irmi Selver (1906–2004), based on her memoirs (read by Hanna Schygulla), takes us on a unique journey through a life marked by love, unimaginable loss, and strength of spirit.

This beautiful examination of the tradition of Japanese folding screen and scroll painting explores the sensuous style and innovative methods of Edo period painting and reveals its influence on Western art.

The epic adventure of seven Western women travelers on the Trans-Siberian Express who are ambushed by a band of Mongol horsewomen. “A rare and remarkable film. . . . Sumptuously stylized yet ardently observational” (New Yorker).

Ottinger’s glorious adaptation of a 1920s Ukrainian Soviet satire is both a picaresque post-revolutionary tale of avarice and a fascinating document of Ukraine circa 2004.

Ottinger traces the paths of past explorers in a multipart exploration of the peoples, landscapes, and legends of the Bering Sea. This extraordinarily beautiful work is perhaps Ottinger’s magnum opus.

The second chapter in Ottinger’s Arctic exploration takes her to Chukotka in the Russian Far East.

Ottinger travels from Chukotka to the remote outpost of Wrangel Island as her journey continues.

Ottinger’s Bering Sea voyage concludes with the peninsula of Kamchatka and Bering Island.

This personal portrait of the idiosyncratic German artist, filmmaker, and feminist traces her artistic development and offers insights into her singular body of work.

Ottinger’s latest film describes her experiences as a young artist living in Paris in the 1960s, evoking a place and time of intellectual, artistic, and political ferment.

Cowritten and edited by Oscar winner Walter Murch, this documentary is a fascinating investigation into the 1953 Anglo-American coup d’état in Iran that displaced democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossaddegh and installed the despotic Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah. “Passionate and fearless” (Hollywood Reporter).

In a film that is part documentary, part myth, Ottinger transports us to the Echigo region of northwestern Japan, where heavy snow blankets the landscape for more than half the year and distinctive ways of life have evolved.

Ottinger’s award-winning documentary on the Prater amusement park in Vienna draws a parallel between the illusionary business of carnival freak shows and the bygone era of a cinema of attractions.

A dive into Berlin’s seedy underside, courtesy of two women drinking themselves into oblivion. With appearances by Magdalena Montezuma, Nina Hagen, Eddie Constantine, and other cult stars.

“Virginia Woolf meets the German camp underground in this extravaganza of performance art and oddity” (Jonathan Rosenbaum). Ottinger’s gender-bending, boundary-breaking fantasy of world history features Magdalena Montezuma, Delphine Seyrig, and Eddie Constantine.

Delphine Seyrig plays Dr. Mabuse, the unscrupulous president of a multinational press conglomerate scheming up a new plan for world domination, in Ottinger’s Langian exploration of media manipulation.

A comic fable about a middle-aged man in Dakar whose life changes when he receives a money order from Paris. African master Ousmane Sembène’s approach is “spare, laconic, slightly ironic, and never patronizing” (NEW YORK TIMES).

Juxtaposing fragments of childhood memory with the collective memories and nightmares of the twentieth century, Andrei Tarkovsky invented “a new language, true to the nature of film . . . life as a dream” (Ingmar Bergman).

In Monicelli’s beloved comedy, struggling actress Anna Magnani just wants to have a nice time on New Year’s Eve but is unwittingly dragged into a night of attempted thievery by her broke friend Totò and handsome pickpocket Ben Gazzara.

Seven young scholars share their love for Yiddish, and for the avant-garde Yiddish poetry written between the world wars. “Pulsates with the sounds of forgotten rhythms” (Genica Baczynski, L’HUMANITÉ).

Jill Li’s formidable documentary is a comprehensive account of the 2011 grassroots uprising and its aftermath in Wukan, a fishing village in Guangdong Province in southern China. “Engrossing, revealing and bittersweet” (Deborah Young, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER).

A medieval knight challenges Death to a game of chess in Bergman’s iconic work of cinematic philosophy. “A magically powerful film” (Pauline Kael).

A woman (Liv Ullmann) tells of her life on a remote island with her artist husband (Max von Sydow) in a film that intertwines supernatural mysteries with the no less mysterious torments of creativity.

Bergman’s color film is one of his sparest and most straightforward, involving four people who escape to a remote Swedish island, yet remain unable to escape the injustice of the modern world. “One of Bergman’s most beautiful films” (NEW YORK TIMES).

The epic tale of one Swedish family’s pursuit of the American dream during the great Swedish migration to the American midwest during the 1850s. “Infinitely absorbing and moving” (Roger Ebert).

Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, PELLE THE CONQUEROR stands the test of time. Max von Sydow delivers “an immensely moving, tender depiction of a man cowed by age and servitude” (TIME OUT).

French artist and filmmaker Éric Baudelaire’s UN FILM DRAMATIQUE is made collaboratively with twenty middle schoolers as they explore the details and politics of their daily lives. “A work of refreshing spontaneity and continuous revelation” (Jordan M. Smith, NONFICS).

Watch a live illustrated presentation on the book SERENE FOR THE MOMENT: SARA KATHRYN ARLEDGE by its editor, Irene Georgia Tsatsos, Director of Exhibition Programs/Chief Curator at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. Filmmaker Kerry Laitala will read from Arledge’s memoir “Madness in Memory,” and Tsatsos and Los Angeles Filmforum Executive Director Adam Hyman will read from a conversation with Terry Cannon; both are included in SERENE FOR THE MOMENT, and part of the Arledge paper collection housed at BAMPFA's Film Library and Study Center.

A found suitcase of early 1960s reel-to-reel audiotapes containing recorded letters between a married man and his lover provides the origin story behind Jane Gillooly’s reconstruction of their affair, using minimal, evocative images.

Acclaimed documentarian Maya Da-Rin’s first narrative film is an atmospheric exploration of the divide between urbanity and the Amazonian wilderness that "gives us an elusive but powerful sense of the limits of our own vision" (NEW YORK TIMES).

Three of China’s greatest living authors share their stories and memories in Jia Zhangke’s tribute to storytelling, and to the connection between intellectual thought and working-class labor. “A spiritual depiction of China. Illuminating” (SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST).

Maggie Cheung stars in Stanley Kwan’s modernist biopic on the life and tragic early death of Chinese film star Ruan Lingyu. “A masterpiece . . . the greatest Hong Kong film I've seen” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).

Honoring connections to nature and the cycles of life, Sky Hopinka’s poetic experimental documentary follows two Native Americans from the Pacific Northwest as they share their personal rituals and relationships to life, identity, language, and homeland.

Tali Yankelevich’s portrait of the Veran supermarket in São Paulo records the dreams and philosophies of the workers who populate the meticulously stocked aisles. “An existentialist delight” (LOS ANGELES TIMES).

A Parisian philosophy teacher, Jeanne, becomes entangled in her new friend Natacha’s plot to oust Natacha’s father’s young girlfriend in “one of Rohmer’s most formally restrained and emotionally unhinged films” (NEW YORKER).

Vacillating between two suitors and shuttling between gray Paris and chilly Nevers, Félicie dreams of reuniting with her ideal mate, with whom she had a summer fling—and a child. The film’s climax is a “subtly enacted miracle” (VILLAGE VOICE).

Set in Dinard, a holiday resort on the Brittany coast, this summer’s tale of romantic dreams is presented with the controlled grace of a master, dissecting every uncertain glance, every failed connection, and every hopeful touch.

A widowed vintner in southern France insists she has no time for romance; nonetheless, her friends set out to find her a companion. “Rohmer elegantly seduces us with people who have all of the alarming unpredictability of life” (Roger Ebert).

Shot on location in various regions of France in the 1990s, when Éric Rohmer was at the height of his powers, this four-film cycle probes the psychological and philosophical mysteries of love—elusive, imagined, or manifest.

For Dutta, the principality of Guler, with its long history of artistic expression, “became a laboratory that I went back to again and again, engaging with various aspects each time.” Plus two shorts that further explore the cultural history of the Western Himalayas.

Dutta painstakingly recreates the eighteenth-century artist Nainsukh’s brilliant miniature paintings through sumptuous compositions set amid palace ruins.

At ninety-three, Krishna Baldev Vaid (1927–2020), a pioneer of Hindi experimental writing living in New York, feels at a loss for words. Yet he is eager to access the “dance of language,” to which he has devoted his life. With shorts THE SCENT OF EARTH and TEN QUESTIONS FROM A CRITICT.

Featuring Sadie Barnette, Amy Franceschini, Jim Goldberg, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Alicia McCarthy, Tucker Nichols, Nigel Poor, and Michael Swaine, this documentary reflects on a Bay Area art scene less concerned with money and power than with imagination, innovation, community, and care.

In an exuberant, inventive, and poignant film about an American soldier’s sojourn in Paris, Melvin Van Peebles brilliantly balances French New Wave style with profound social critique and psychological substance.