Film

At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government is determined to fight Communism with culture. The Venice Biennale, the world’s most influential art exhibition, becomes a proving ground in 1964. Alice Denney, Washington insider and friend of the Kennedys, recommends Alan Solomon, an ambitious curator making waves with trailblazing art, to organize the U.S. entry. Together with Leo Castelli, a powerful New York art dealer, they embark on a daring plan to make Robert Rauschenberg the winner of the Grand Prize. The artist is yet to be taken seriously with his combinations of junk off the street and images from pop culture, but he has the potential to dazzle. Deftly pulling off maneuvers that could have come from a Hollywood thriller, the American team leaves the international press crying foul and Rauschenberg questioning the politics of nationalism that sent him there.

Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide was made over 11 years and features interviews and rare archival footage with Kenny Scharf, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper, Yoko Ono, Kaws, Marilyn Minter, and Jeffrey Deitch. The documentary shows Scharf’s New York City arrival in the early 1980s where he quickly befriended Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. This trio, amongst the fervent creative bustle of a depressed downtown scene, would soon take the art world by storm. While Basquiat and Haring both died tragically young, Scharf lived through cataclysmic shifts in New York City and the art world. Despite set backs along the way, Scharf continues to follow his particular high-tone, technicolor artistic vision while growing public and critical appreciation for his earlier work has cemented his place as a pop art icon.

In Balanchine’s Classroom takes us back to the glory years of Balanchine’s New York City Ballet through the remembrances of his former dancers and their quest to fulfill the vision of a genius. Opening the door to his studio, Balanchine’s private laboratory, they reveal new facets of the groundbreaking choreographer: taskmaster, mad scientist, and spiritual teacher. Today, as his former dancers teach a new generation, questions arise: what was the secret of his teaching? Can it be replicated?

Filled with never before seen archival footage of Balanchine at work during rehearsals, classes, and in preparation for his most seminal works, along with interviews with many of his adored and adoring dancers and those who try to carry on his legacy today, this is Balanchine as you have never seen him, and a film for anyone who loves ballet and the creative process.

Gerhard Richter Painting offers unprecedented insight into the life and work of one of the greatest artists of our time, and is a “gorgeously rendered work of art” (Variety) in its own right.

Legendary German painter Gerhard Richter granted filmmaker Corinna Belz access to his studio in the spring and summer of 2009, where he was working on a series of large abstract paintings. In quiet, highly concentrated images, the documentary provides a fly-on-the-wall perspective of the very personal, tension-filled process of artistic creation. Richter is his own worst critic, destroying multiple canvases before his remarkable creative spirit takes hold, and the astonishing final compositions emerge.

“Painting is another form of thinking,” Richter once said, and GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING takes that premise seriously, exposing for the first time how he translates his thoughts onto a blank canvas. Beautifully shot and endlessly revealing, it “artfully and convincingly immerses us into the world of one of the greatest [painters], painting.” (Village Voice)

Cecil Beaton was a dazzling chronicler of his time. A photographer, writer, painter, and Oscar®-winning set and costume designer who captured both the front lines of war and the Queen’s official portrait, Beaton embodied the cultural and political changes of the twentieth century. In Love, Cecil, director Lisa Immordino Vreeland (Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict) blends archival footage and photographs with voice-over of Beaton’s famed diaries to capture his legacy as a complex and unique creative force. Dynamic and lyrical, Love, Cecil is an examination of Beaton’s singular sense of the visual, which dictated a style that set standards of creativity that continue to resonate and inspire today. Narrated by Rupert Everett.

This documentary explores the minds behind the heist of Willem de Kooning’s “Woman-Ochre.” An unlikely couple traveled the world and stole some of the world’s most priceless articles. This wild true story is told through the eyes of their closest family and friends.

An acclaimed photographer with the eye of a filmmaker, Gregory Crewdson has created some of the most gorgeously haunting pictures in the history of the medium. His meticulously composed, large-scale images are stunning narratives of small-town American life—moviescapes crystallized into a single frame. While the photographs are staged with crews that rival many feature film productions, Crewdson takes inspiration as much from his own dreams and fantasies as the worlds of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Edward Hopper and Diane Arbus. Crewdson’s imagery has also infiltrated the pop culture landscape—including his inimitable Six Feet Under ads and Yo La Tengo album art. Shot over a decade with unprecedented access, Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters beautifully bares the artist’s process—and it’s as mesmerizing and riveting as the images themselves.

This meditation on cinema’s past from Decasia director Bill Morrison pieces together the bizarre true history of a long-lost collection of 533 nitrate film prints from the early 1900s. Discovered buried under the permafrost in a former Canadian Gold Rush town, their story conjures the forgotten ties between the fledgling film industry and Manifest Destiny in North America.

Located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle, Dawson City was settled in 1896—the same year large-scale cinema projectors were invented—and became the center of the Klondike Gold Rush that brought 100,000 prospectors to the area. Soon after, the city became the final stop for a distribution chain that sent prints and newsreels to the Yukon. The films were seldom, if ever, returned. By the late 1920s, over 500,000 feet of film had accumulated in the basement of the local library. Much of it was eventually moved to the town’s hockey rink, where it was stacked and covered with boards and a layer of earth. The now-famous Dawson City Collection was uncovered in 1978 when a new recreation center was being built and a bulldozer working its way through a parking lot dug up a horde of film cans.

Morrison draws on these permafrost-protected, rare silent films and newsreels, pairing them with archival footage, interviews, historical photographs, and an enigmatic score by Sigur Rós collaborator and composer Alex Somers. Dawson City: Frozen Time depicts the unique history of this Canadian Gold Rush town by chronicling the life cycle of a singular film collection through its exile, burial, rediscovery, and salvation.

A transformative artist and one of the most insightful chroniclers of American life, legendary Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank continues to fascinate generations of casual observers and aspiring photographers alike. Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank is the definitive account of Frank’s life and the unique ways his biography and art intersect to produce powerful, richly textured images.
Shot in cinema-verité style between New York and Nova Scotia, where Frank now lives, the lm captures Frank reflecting on a lifetime of image making that most famously produced “The Americans,” probably the most influential photographic book of the last sixty years. From the Lower East Side to Coney Island, Frank revisits places where he lived and photographed, unsentimentally yet humorously noting the erosion of the New York he once knew. He recalls his collaborations with the Beat generation, including his lm Pull My Daisy, narrated by Jack Kerouac, as well as his infamous Cocksucker Blues with The Rolling Stones. Affectionate conversations with Frank’s second wife, the vibrant artist June Leaf, reveal decades of closeness, creative exchange and support through the intense tragedies of Frank’s life. In rare moments of vulnerability, Frank speaks movingly about these tragedies and his attempts to cope through his deeply personal photography and films. Unembellished and un inching, this portrait captures the life and art of one of the most significant and uncompromising artists of the 20th century.

Pritzker Prize winning Irish-American architect Kevin Roche is an enigma. He reached the top of his profession, but had little interest in celebrity and eschews the label “Starchitect”. Despite a lifetime of acclaimed work that includes 40 years designing new galleries for The Met in New York, he had no intention of ever retiring. He graduated from UCD in 1945, and after more than 60 years in the USA, his first Irish project, the Convention Centre Dublin, opened in 2010. Roche’s architectural philosophy focused on creating “a community for a modern society” and he has been credited with creating green buildings before they became part of the public consciousness. He has won awards for his designs of over 300 major buildings around the world, among them the Pritzker Prize in 1982 – the highest honor given to a living architect.<br><br>

Some of his best known work includes the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York which he has worked on for almost 50 years, the revolutionary Oakland Museum of California, the Ford Foundation and United Nations Plaza in Manhattan, A Centre For the Arts at the Wesleyan University, corporate campuses for Bouygues in Paris and Banco Santander in Madrid. Roche has also been the subject of special exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Architectural Association of Ireland in Dublin, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.<br><br>

Irish Director Mark Noonan’s debut feature film <em>You’re Ugly Too</em> featured Aidan Gillen (Game of Thrones) and Lauren Kinsella (Albert Nobbs) and premiered at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) where it was nominated for Best Debut Feature. Completed in Summer 2017, <em>Kevin Roche: The Quiet Architect </em>is his debut documentary feature, and was filmed at locations in New York City, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Indiana, Oakland California, Paris, Madrid and Dublin.
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Noonan says, “This is not a film about rarified architectural theory. On the contrary, Roche’s ability to pierce the skin of architectural theory allows him to draw deep insights into his life and singular architectural process. We’ve strived to photograph his buildings in a cinematic style that brings the spectacular nature of their size and beauty to the big screen and allows the audience immerse themselves in architecture they might never get a chance to visit.”
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<em>Kevin Roche: The Quiet Architect</em> was produced by John Flahive for Wavelength Pictures in association with Nicky Gogan and Karla Healion at Stills Films, with the participation of the Irish Film Board / Bord Scannáin na hÉireann, and Just Films, Ford Foundation.