Recapturing Cuba: An Artist's Journey

In this fascinating Oscar-nominated documentary, American guitarist Ry Cooder brings together a group of legendary Cuban folk musicians (some in their 90s) to record a Grammy-winning CD in their native city of Havana. The result is a spectacular compilation of concert footage from the group's gigs in Amsterdam and New York City's famed Carnegie Hall, with director Wim Wenders capturing not only the music -- but also the musicians' life stories.

The Making-of James Cameron's Avatar. It shows interesting parts of the work on the set.

Photographer Estevan Oriol and artist Mister Cartoon turned their Chicano roots into gritty art, impacting street culture, hip hop and beyond.

This revealing portrait of Cuba follows the lives of Fidel Castro and three Cuban families affected by his policies over the last four decades.

Home movies, photographs, and recited poetry illustrate the life of Tupac Shakur, one of the most beloved, revolutionary, and volatile hip-hop MCs of all time.

The film follows adventurer Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia.

Oliver Stone spends three days filming with Fidel Castro in Cuba, discussing an array of subjects with the president such as his rise to power, fellow revolutionary Che Guevara, the Cuban Missile crisis, and the present state of the country.

Artists in LA discover the work of forgotten Polish sculptor Stanislav Szukalski, a mad genius whose true story unfolds chapter by astounding chapter.

After years in the limelight, Selena Gomez achieves unimaginable stardom. But just as she reaches a new peak, an unexpected turn pulls her into darkness. This uniquely raw and intimate documentary spans her six-year journey into a new light.

Global superstar Jennifer Lopez reflects on her multifaceted career and the pressure of life in the spotlight in this intimate documentary.

A look behind the lens of Christopher Nolan's space epic.

Through deeply personal interviews with her siblings and an examination of the photographs, letters, and belongings left behind, Mariska assembles a new portrait of her mother Jayne Mansfield, an extraordinary and complex woman.

Al Pacino's deeply-felt rumination on Shakespeare's significance and relevance to the modern world through interviews and an in-depth analysis of "Richard III."

A group of British children aged 7 from widely ranging backgrounds are interviewed about a range of subjects. The filmmakers plan to re-interview them at 7 year intervals to track how their lives and attitudes change as they age.

A backstage and on-stage look at Justin Bieber during his rise to super stardom.

In 1997, Louis Theroux made a documentary about the world of male porn performers in Los Angeles. 15 years later, he returns to find a business struggling with the deluge of free porn on the internet. Louis revisits some of the original programme's contributors as well as meeting the latest crop of porn performers dreaming of porn stardom.

Examines the life and career of singer Whitney Houston. Features never-before-seen archival footage, exclusive recordings, rare performances and interviews with the people who knew her best.

Explore the evolution of Buzz Lightyear from toy to human in the making of Pixar’s Lightyear. Dive into the origin and cultural impact of everyone’s favorite Space Ranger, the art of designing a new “human Buzz,” and the challenges faced by the Lightyear crew along the way.

Part documentary, part concert film, part fever dream, this film captures the troubled spirit of America in 1975 and the joyous music that Dylan performed during the fall of that year.

Explore how writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss created the hit television sensation. Take a personal voyage through the versions of Holmes that have served as inspirations for the new series - the original stories, their factual origins, hundreds of film adaptations - to arrive at their thoroughly modern Sherlock. Moffat and Gatiss explain the challenges they encountered adapting the original adventures of the iconic super-sleuth. Go behind the scenes on the set of the hit television series, including interviews with actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman and Lara Pulver, who talk about the reinvention of their fictional characters.

Tell Them We Were Here is an inspirational feature-length documentary about eight artists who show us why art is vital to a healthy society and reminds us that we are stronger together.

This fascinating exploration of the creative process follows one of Australia's leading contemporary artists Ben Quilty, as he completes one of his most challenging art works.

A documentary by Olivier Gonard, shot partly in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, that examines Olivier Assayas' film Summer Hours, and its approach to art.

94-year old Esther, a pensioner with bad sight, is in search of her artist daugther’s public decoration. Endless phone conversations takes her through municipal bureaucracy and lost culture secretaries. Will she ever get an answer to the eternal question: Where does the art really go?

African Underground: Democracy in Dakar is a groundbreaking documentary film about hip-hop youth and politics in Dakar Senegal. The film follows rappers, DJs, journalists, professors and people on the street at the time before, during and after the controversial 2007 presidential election in Senegal and examines hip-hop’s role on the political process. Originally shot as a seven part documentary mini-series released via the internet – the documentary bridges the gap between hip-hop activism, video journalism and documentary film and explores the role of youth and musical activism on the political process.

Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.

Cartoneras is a documentary that grapples with Latin America’s urban realities, and the cardboard publishing movement that has emerged from these in the 21st century. Reflecting on the different contexts that propelled this form of community publishing, like Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis, the independent art scene, and the movements which formed around waste-pickers, the film’s narrative is developed through conversations with important actors from the cartonera world.

We are in the midst of production on a one-hour film on seminal art historian John Richardson, and his work on the fourth and final volume of his biography on Picasso. Richardson shares his insights and observations on Picasso, whom he first met in the 1950s, with Shelley Wanger, his editor at Alfred A. Knopf (a division of Random House, Inc.).

"Gold of Cuba" is a documentary by Argentine filmmaker Alejandro Saderman that shows the development of Cuba through the promotion of its main industry: sugar. From the discovery of America to the figure of Reinaldo Castro, National Hero of Labor as a sugarcane cutter, the film discusses the introduction of mechanical harvesters, including the African slave labor that would later be replaced, with the abolition of slavery, by Chinese sugarcane cutters.

This movie chronicles the life and times of R. Crumb. Robert Crumb is the cartoonist/artist who drew Keep On Truckin', Fritz the Cat, and played a major pioneering role in the genesis of underground comix. Through interviews with his mother, two brothers, wife, ex-wife and ex-girlfriends, as well as selections from his vast quantity of graphic art, we are treated to a darkly comic ride through one man's subconscious mind.

Tells the history of skateboard art and its evolution through the decades, as iconic and rebellious skateboarders and artists give firsthand experiences and stories about their art that challenged the establishment.

This film tells Jean-Michel's story through exclusive interviews with his two sisters Lisane and Jeanine, who have never before agreed to be interviewed for a TV documentary. With striking candour, Basquiat's art dealers - including Larry Gagosian, Mary Boone and Bruno Bischofberger - as well as his most intimate friends, lovers and fellow artists, expose the cash, the drugs and the pernicious racism which Basquiat confronted on a daily basis. As historical tableaux, visual diaries of defiance or surfaces covered with hidden meanings, Basquiat's art remains the beating heart of this story.

About the artist Ian Hellström (1925-2012) with his own museum. A tour of Ian's house is an adventure in art, antiques, skulls and dolls, all in perfect balance. Ian created various jewelry sculptures, a kind of collage with glass beads, brooches, simple jewelry and various toys, which were sometimes pasted into boxes with small compartments. His colorful art and cross-border life is captivating but not always easy to understand.

In Pablo Picasso's career, a blue and pink period gets the attention they deserve. It is between 1901 and 1907 that the seeds of all his future work lie, for it is then that Picasso turned his back on his father's teachings and broke free from academic constraints and himself at the beginning with everything that crossed his path. This documentary takes a look at Picasso's various metamorphoses, shaped by a struggle between zest for life and dark thoughts. A world shared by his friend Jaime Sabartés, who wrote it in a collection of memoirs. Art documentary (2018) by Gaëlle Royer.

The Ordinary Grand Film is the result of love at first sight with The Ordinary Grand Circus. With film and equipment borrowed from left and right, with the free complicity of all those who appear in the credits, they went on weekends to film a few moments of their tour.

Shifting his lens from Cantonese opera to Japanese Noh drama, documentary filmmaker Cheuk Cheung continues his exploration of complex gender issues ingrained in traditional theatres. For seven centuries, only the male body has been granted the privilege to inhabit this highly stylised art form that embraces spirituality in subtle movements. The film traces the journey of third-generation Noh performer Uzawa Hikaru, a young woman who makes her presence in the male-dominated space; yet behind the mask lies a daughter yearning to seek a resolution beyond her mother’s path – a quest to fuse body and soul in pursuit of the profoundly mysterious aesthetic.

The Whitney Museum of American Art presented the landmark exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective from June 27 to October 19, 2014. It was the largest, most comprehensive survey of Koons’s art ever assembled, spanning four decades of his career and displaying 145 works from every series, including 13 new pieces exhibited publicly for the first time. The film follows Koons and Whitney Chief Curator, Scott Rothkopf, who conceived and organized the show, through every gallery of the exhibition. In addition, insightful interviews with Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s Director, Robert Storr, Dean Emeritus of the Yale School of Art, and Michelle Kuo, Editor of Artforum, help to deepen the investigation into Koon’s art and process.

Mark Rothko, a master of abstract expressionism, created 835 paintings during his five-decade career.

In the summer of 1994, a team of public television reporters filmed and interviewed seven Cubans a few days before their risky venture of setting out to sea in homemade rafts to reach the coast of the United States. Six made it far enough to be picked up at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard. When these balseros (rafters) were finally allowed to go to the United States, the film crew went with them to a string of several cities. Seven years later, the film crew visits them again, to discover that their destiny has been in the United States. Theirs is a true story about some of the authentic survivors of our times, the human adventure of people who are shipwrecked between two worlds.