Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989)

Made as a relief worker's master's thesis, this documentary chronicles the difficulties of rebuilding a community in post-Pol Pot Cambodia

Short directed by Mansour Sora Wade.

An ailing elderly woman is paid a perfunctory visit by her family while she sits despondently in a nursing home. Nobody can get through to her except for her young grandson, who talks to her about the happy times they shared between the two of them when she was well.

This Oscar-nominated documentary short tracks the shift in the relationship of an individual to his work between the 19th century and today. Focusing on how nails are made, we first see a blacksmith laboring at his forge, shaping nails from single strands of steel rods. The scene then shifts from this peaceful setting to the roar of a 20th century nail mill, where banks of machines draw, cut, and pound the steel rods faster than the eye can follow.

Less and Less, Luc Moullet’s 40th film, concerns development and expansion, from 1968 to 2010, of the devices based on computers, automats, interactive terminals and others that can be found everywhere.

A documentary showing the struggle to bring electricity to rural areas of the United States.

Sergey Dvortsevoy makes his international debut with this astonishingly intimate portrait of a nomadic family on the Kazakh plains. Several scenes in this slow, elegant film betray a certain dry humor -- a child devouring the last of a bowl of yogurt and then crying; a cow getting its head stuck in a pail; and a woman singing to herself, accompanied by her snoring husband. Other scenes capture the nomads' hardscrabble lives -- drunken herdsmen in the grips of existential despair, growling dogs, and a camel enduring a rather grim septum piercing. By the end of the film, the family pulls up stakes and herds its sundry four-legged beasts -- camels, cattle, goats, dogs, and horses -- to a more fertile plain. This film was screened at the 1999 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.

GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM is constructed from fourteen dreams taken from eight years' worth of my journals. The text is scratched directly on to the film so that you hear your own voice as you read. The accompanying images of women, water, animals and saints were chosen for their indirect but potent correspondence to the text.

Souvenirs, memories, nostalgia, alienation, the ephermal quality of life ...these are the subjects of this animated diary. The film is not made in the usual way (screenplay, storyboard) and was born at the moment when the author sat at his desk and began animating.

Portraits of contemporary African women from four West African nations: Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal and Benin.

Pollet provides an insight into life on the leper colony of Spinalonga, an island off Crete, through the eyes of Raimondakis, who tells the story of his life to the camera after having been excluded from his community to spend years of his life on the island with his fellow sufferers. Themes addressed include love, community, companionship and death and the importance of these values to all people whatever their state of health.

Insects are tortured in various ways amidst the sounds of screaming.

A surrealistic montage set in motion by a tidal wave and incorporating a samurai battle.

Cabascabo, a veteran of the French colonial army in Indochina, returns to his home town in Niger, acclaimed by friends and relatives. In fragmented flash-backs, he tells the story of his adventure and the battles in that distant land.

The boisterous and cheerful lives of the residents of Cameroon are barely dented by incursions of supernatural power in this humor-filled rendition of traditional folk tales in modern guise. In the story, a cheerfully naughty girl crosses paths with a witch who has the power to satisfy her curiosity about men by changing her into a young man. She then becomes one of the boy suitors for the amorous attentions of a policeman's daughter. Some of the men have unusual names and even odder magical gifts: one of them has the ability to make a man's genitals disappear when he shakes hands with him.

This is Les Blank’s earliest music film, focusing on the renown trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, who along with Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rollins and others sparked the change from traditional Jazz to “Bebop” in mid-1940s America. The film includes rare images of Gillespie playing on his famous bent horn and talking about his beginnings, as well as his theories about music.

Familiar objects are transformed into a candy-coated vision of war in this seminal stop-motion short by PES.

A film documenting the landscapes of northern Iceland, as well as a recent work about the Hudson River.

A fascinating pictorial history of a New York City bar whose customers, from the hard-drinking working class Irish to the coiffed African American gay male, continually transform its focus during its 10-year reign.