Hollywood Without Make-Up

Aznavour by Charles

2019 · ★ 6.9

In 1948, French singer Charles Aznavour (1924-2018) receives a Paillard Bolex, his first camera. Until 1982, he will shoot hours of footage, his filmed diary. Wherever he goes, he carries his camera with him. He films his life and lives as he films: places, moments, friends, loves, misfortunes.

Will Work for Views: The Lo-Fi Life of Weird Paul

2017

A film exploring the life of “Weird Paul.” After 30 years, 2000 videos, 800 songs, & 42 albums, he’s still not giving up on his dream.

The Happy Ones

2021

A love letter to Mar del Plata made of images, times and a road trip. "The Happy Ones" is an experimental short documentary composed of past and present family footage. It portrays a place in the summer, the city of Mar del Plata, with a span of 20 years between past and present images (January 2000 and 2020). Despite the time that passed by, it's beaches, essence and people remain, always willing to keep dancing.

The Spider and the Fly

1938 · ★ 8

Few amateur films with sound were produced in the 1930s and fewer remain extant. A charming artifact that demonstrates the expressive possibilities and technical limitations of amateur talkies, "The Spider and the Fly" includes a backyard Labor Day gathering, a trip to the Riverview Amusement Park, and a homemade Halloween parade of witches and ghouls.

The Dance of Memory

2014 · ★ 5.7

Memory mechanisms are mysterious: we only see the stories we choose in order to construct our own reality. Every mark is a message in time, the invocation of an absence. To travel in the memory is to walk in time, zigzagging, a long road permeated by a dark, indecipherable logic… if we could choose seven moments to sum up our entire life, which ones would they be? The Dance of the Memory is a documentary-essay that guides us in that autobiographical search, where image and memory intertwine. It mixes archive material with an aesthetic and subjective tone.

My Father's Camera

2000 · ★ 10

Home movies and their unique place in popular culture are the subject of My Father's Camera. Director Karen Shopsowitz weaves the history of home movies together with footage shot by her father--amateur filmmaker Israel Shopsowitz. Equipped with her dad's old Super 8 camera, Karen traces the history of home movies from the 1920s through to the amateur explosion of the '30s and '40s and beyond. She interviews a lively line-up of scholars and collectors, such as early members of the Toronto Film Club, a Japanese-American archivist who sees home movies as an expression of cultural diversity and a collector who hosts popular Webcasts that highlight new acquisitions.

Val

2021 · ★ 7.2

For over 40 years Val Kilmer, one of Hollywood’s most mercurial and/or misunderstood actors has been documenting his own life and craft through film and video. He has amassed thousands of hours of footage, from 16mm home movies made with his brothers, to time spent in iconic roles for blockbuster movies like Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone, and Batman Forever. This raw, wildly original and unflinching documentary reveals a life lived to extremes and a heart-filled, sometimes hilarious look at what it means to be an artist and a complex man.

Home Movie

1974 · ★ 5.5

Filmmaker Jan Oxenberg narrates her own home videos, commenting on how her views towards lesbianism and femininity have evolved over time.

Visit to Germany

David Lloyd George tours Germany, escorted by Nazi government officials, while his chauffeurs lark about with an SS Officer. Lloyd George was pro-German from the mid-1920s, and met Adolf Hitler in 1936. However, by 1938 he had become a leading opponent of appeasement with Germany. This film is believed to have been shot by George Ryder, Lloyd George's chauffeur.

Filmed Memory of Eternal Longing

2012 · ★ 10

This documentary is a record of moments with family, friends, travels, outings, and a passion that Carla inherited from her father. The need to encapsulate time led her to film her daily life with Bahian friends in Barcelona, a city where she lived the best of her youth for eight years. When she decided to return to Brazil, everything took on new significance. It was then that she began the project of making a documentary to immortalize that period. The casual recordings turned into an obsession, and her friends were interviewed, totaling more than 50 hours of filmed memories and a year of editing in Brazil. This process was a painful stagnation in the past, an effort to make sense of material that fed a difficult feeling to overcome: longing. The result is a delicate film that reflects on exile, memory, time, family, change, and life.

My Uncle's Friend

2021 · ★ 6

The story of a LGBTQIA+ child told through old images from VHS tapes. The videos were recorded by Vicente's father between 1987 and 1993.

Home Movies

2017 · ★ 5.9

In this home movie collection of gay men, memory serves as an act of hope, power, and above all, resilience.