Nanni Moretti recalls in his diary three slice of life stories characterized by a sharply ironic look: in the first one he wanders through a deserted Rome, in the second he visits a reclusive friend on an island, and in the last he has to grapple with an unknown illness.
A young girl turns into an A-List celebrity over night when her private journal is accidently published and becomes a best-seller.
Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.
An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.
A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.
'Eigi Sylhet' is a journey of my self-discovery. With no narrative, this two-minute diary film paints a portrait of my resilience and artistic awakening, weaving together my self-portraits and cityscapes captured in 2018, a year I spent in oblivion, solitude and contemplation. It's a letter I wrote to my future self.
Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.
For years, together with his partners from the production company O Quadro, he has been betting on cinema as a tool to explore the typical issues of youth. In this film, Evandro Scorsin turns the cameras on himself as he deals with the dilemmas of the passing of time and the imposition of adulthood. In an exercise in autofiction where cinema and life merge, the film is also a cinematic love letter to the beloved masters (especially Nicholas Ray). Coming and going between two countries and times, it records the vertigo of displacement and the reinventions inherent to an immigrant experience.
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,' depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. - Experimental Film Club
Soare is a musician with too little inspiration and too many neurons baked from smoking weed. One day, he decides that his life has become too chaotic, so he begins writing a guide for surviving the moments when his reality stops making sense. Passing various surreal episodes, Soare hopes to regain his inspiration.
One fine morning it stopped working and I realized my little compact camera was dying. So I started taking as many photos as possible with it before it dies. These photos were taken in 2018 and 2019. A time I spent in oblivion. It was dark. It was blurry. This silent film is my tribute to my beloved camera.
A letter of love to my past self who discovered himself.
Two teen boys living in an isolated house in the mountains contemplate their existence while maintaining a video diary of their daily lives.
Raphael, Yervant Gianikian's father, survived the Armenian genocide in 1915 in Eastern Turkey. In April 1988, while living in Venice, he sat for his son's camera and read an excerpt from his memoirs, translated from Armenian into Italian.
A person narrates themself making a salad
IN THE LAND OF GIANT PYGMIES, a diary of Aurelio Rossi's 1925 trek into the immense Belgian Congo, preserves a long-gone-Colonial-era wonder at natural resources, "primitive" tribes, customs and costumes in Europe's cast African possessions, and implies that the "dark continent" could benefit from the "civilizing" influences of home.
A short documentary by Jim McBride.
Jonas Mekas adjusts to a life in exile in New York in his autobiographical film, shot between 1949 and 1963.