Hallelujah the Hills

Windflowers

Arthouse portraiture of a disestablishmentarian during his six-year draft dodge.

Skyscraper

An Adolfas Mekas directed short parodying Italian art films of the time. It was created for use in a scene of the Broadway musical, "Skyscraper," starring Julie Harris and Peter Marshall, with a book by Peter Stone, music by Jimmy Van Heusen and lyrics by Sammy Cahn.

Compañeras and Compañeros

A feature documentary about Cuba’s youth: the student, the worker, the peasant, the teacher, the soldier. These young compañeras and compañeros illustrate what the Cuban Revolution is really all about as they discuss their thoughts on the revolution, theories on guerrilla warfare, commitment to building Che’s “New Man”, and camaraderie with those fighting for change across the globe.

The Double-Barrelled Detective Story

Interesting and sometimes funny adaptation of a Mark Twain short story. Hatfield is a carpetbagger who marries the daughter of a prominent plantation owner in order to humiliate him. He mistreats his wife, but she stoically refuses to complain to her father.

Certain Women

Caldwell's pulp storytelling, proto-feminist stance and unabashed social dramatization of his characters are a distinct vision of the condition of women -- specifically working class women. His broadly drawn themes of small town hypocrisy and restrictive moral values contextualize the titular characters' struggle for sexual expression, stability and independence. Certain Women is a disconcerting parable that pays tribute to but also defies the 50s period style of Caldwell, opting for contemporary small town situations and cinematic style. This cautionary tale of four heroic yet ordinary women is fashioned out of the past but relies on observations of the present historical moment and its political reality.

Guns of the Trees

Barbara, a young woman consumed by despair, contemplates suicide, while a man she meets in a church and a married couple struggle to persuade her that life is still worth living. Mekas’s film weaves this intimate drama into a larger reflection on alienation, politics, and the turbulence of early 1960s America.

The Genius

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

The Brig

Jonas Mekas’s film captures The Living Theatre’s stage production of The Brig, an unflinching portrait of life inside a U.S. Marine Corps jail in Japan in 1957. Over the course of a single day, prisoners endure relentless drills, abuse, and dehumanization, exposing the brutality of military discipline with stark immediacy.

A Weekend with Strangers

An attractive youth counselor must resort to murder in order to be free from her sordid past.

Going Home

A home movie by Adolfas Mekas and wife Pola Chapelle on their travels to Lithuania and Europe. It was filmed concurrently with the more highly regarded “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania” by Jonas Mekas, brother to Adolfas.

Goldstein

A fable about an old man with an odd effect on those he encounters.

Time & Fortune Vietnam Newsreel

Jonas Mekas zoomed in from a completely different angle for his Time & Fortune Vietnam Newsreel. This fake interview with ‘Lapland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs’ brings an outsider’s perspective to bear on the US war, and discusses with ironic perplexity if it might not be possible to kill off the Viet Cong more cheaply. For, whilst white students in the US primarily took issue with the war in South-eastern Asia, African-Americans remained predominantly concerned with their own situation. For them, daily discrimination at home and the Vietnam War were simply two faces of the same racist coin

The Orchid

An experimental film directed by author Samuel R. Delany

A Matter of Baobab

International Cast of Actors: Jonas Mekas, from Lithuania, poet and film-maker; Louis Brigante, from Madagascar, poet and publisher; Storm De Hirsch, from Holland, poetess, seer and film-maker; Pola Chapelle, from Tierra del Fuego, singer and motel operator; Adolfas Mekas, from Lapland, basket weaver and film director; Contessa Angela Maria Andrecci di Castiglione, from Italy, opera singer.

An Interview with the Ambassador from Lapland

Adolfas starred in, directed, and edited this Vietnam comedy, produced by Pola Chapelle and shot by Jonas Mekas.

Chef's Special

Maxi thinks his life is perfect. He is a famous cook who owns a successful restaurant in Chueca and is living his life as a gay man without much complex. But when his son Edu and his daughter Alba appear, and a new attractive neighbor comes along, it will have a strong effect on his life resulting in his values being challenged for ever.

Just Add Water

An offbeat romantic comedy about a decent guy, Ray Tuckby, with a dead-end life in the dead-end town of Trona, CA. After encouragement from a stranger whom he happens upon, Ray begins to dream again. He sheds the parasites in his life, musters the nerve to pursue his childhood love, and finally takes back his community by toppling the local teenage Meth-baron.

Boy Culture

A successful gay male escort describes in a series of confessions his tangled romantic relationships with his two roommates and an older, enigmatic male client.

French Twist

After learning of her husband's infidelities, a housewife invites an itinerant lesbian to move in with them. None of their lives will ever be the same again.

The Forty-Year-Old Version

Desperate for a breakthrough as she nears the big 4-0, struggling New York City playwright Radha finds inspiration by reinventing herself as a rapper.

Scorched

Three mischievous employees of a bank in a small deserted town all make plans to rob it at the same time, however none of them knows about the others.

Edge of Seventeen

1984, Sandusky, Ohio. A naive 17-year-old navigates heartbreak and self-expression as he explores his sexuality.

The World, the Flesh and the Devil

Ralph Burton is a miner who is trapped for several days as a result of a cave-in. When he finally manages to dig himself out, he realizes that all of mankind seems to have been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. He travels to New York City only to find it deserted. Making a life for himself there, he is flabbergasted to eventually find Sarah Crandall, who also managed to survive. Together, they form a close friendship until the arrival of Benson Thacker who has managed to pilot his small boat into the city's harbor. At this point, tensions rise between the three, particularly between Thacker, who is white, and Burton, who is black.

Keeping the Faith

Best friends since they were kids, Rabbi Jacob Schram and Father Brian Finn are dynamic and popular young men living and working on New York's Upper West Side. When Anna Reilly, once their childhood friend and now grown into a beautiful corporate executive, suddenly returns to the city, she reenters Jake and Brian's lives and hearts with a vengeance. Sparks fly and an unusual and complicated love triangle ensues.

The Band's Visit

A small Egyptian police band travels to Israel to play at the inaugural ceremony of an Arab arts center, only to find themselves stuck in the wrong town.

Doctor Zhivago

The life of a Russian physician and poet who, although married to another, falls in love with a political activist's wife and experiences hardship during World War I and then the October Revolution.

The Piano

When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband and a rugged frontiersman to whom she develops a forbidden attraction.