Dear Director

In the form of a filmed epistolary conversation, two young, experienced filmmakers discuss film, present and past family, heritage and maternity. The personal and profound reflections—which are embodied in the graceful images taken day-to-day—are suddenly echoed by the political emergency of a country.

The prophetic jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, who today is seen as one of the most important innovators in jazz, was obsessed with his radical music and by the thought that people one day would understand it. In 1962 he recorded his first album in Sweden. Eight years later he was found dead in New York's East River, aged 34. (TCM)

JEWS excavates a lost world of manners and ritual in home movies shot by several Chicago families from the 1920s through the 1940s. Much as in similar found footage soliloquies by Péter Forgács, Jay Rosenblatt and Ken Jacobs, director Roger Deutsch wrings unexpected pathos from mundane traces of the past. Children mug for the camera with dances of the day, upright mothers march their strollers up the avenue, men smoke, the family gathers around the table to light the candles. The bare title cannot help but raise the specter of contemporaneous events in Europe, lending an extra degree of urgency to the film's meditation on disappearance. - Max Goldberg

A film in three parts after Oskar Schlemmer's Triadische Ballett (Triadic Ballet).

Millennials in the US discover their lack of legal nationality, sparking a search for recognition and belonging that unites them and offers hope for the future.

Click for full movie details & trailers.

Dance Theater of Harlem's Lindsey Donnell reflects on the obstacles she and other ballet dancers face in ballet and society.

Documentary about the Szymon Wiesenthal Center and the obstacles, often set by governments not interested in providing any help for the Center's project, it encounters.

A short documentary about Brussels' roller derby team, Les Brussels Derby Pixies.

A B'nai B'rith delegation visits the town of Oberammergau to meet with its mayor and the monk who is responsible for the passion play which is presented every ten years. The group discusses their efforts to eliminate the antisemitic tone of the play.

Click for full movie details & trailers.

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.

'Coffea arábiga' was sponsored as a propaganda documentary to show how to sow coffee around Havana. In fact, Guillén Landrián made a film critical of Castro, exhibited but banned as soon as the coffee plan collapsed.

This underwater ballet is an ecological story depicting our paradoxical relationship with plastic. Bakelite launched the #SickOfPlastic campaign from On Est Prêt, along with the Surfrider Foundation, Break Free from Plastic and the Resilient Foundation. Photography was directed by Jacques Ballard, a specialist in underwater cinematography.

Demonstration of the rapid poisoning of a cat hung up in a cloth, strychnine as a trigger of the tonic form of convulsions.

The movie shows the consequences of total and partial removal of the epithelial bodies in a cat

Two cats housed in a glass box, one of which had received a small amount of atropine in the preliminary experiment, are exposed to ether vapors with the result that only the animal which had not been pretreated began to salivate (profusely).

Parasympathetic irritation is generated in the test animal by subcutaneous injection of muscarine. Salivary secretion, miosis, convulsive evacuation of thin feces and severe shortness of breath as signs of intoxication with a parasympathomimetic. The symptoms of intoxication are reversed by subcutaneous injection of atropine.

Compulsory locomotion and continuous circular movement to the operated side without orientation in case of a onesided removal of the cerebrum and corpus striatum. In case of a doublesided removal there are no spontaneous movements with a normal posture and movement coordination. The dogs' reaction towards external stimuli only.

This short celebrates the 20th anniversary of MGM. Segments are shown from several early hits, then from a number of 1944 releases.