15 Art Films to Watch at the TriBeca Film Festival

Image via Complex Original

Director: Nancy Kates
Runtime: 100 minutes
Released: 2014

This documentary investigates the life of one of the most provocative thinkers and literary critics of the 20th century. The film tracks Sontag's life through the use of archival materials, personal accounts from people who knew Sontag, and Sontag's own words. It includes her impact on the discourse of photography, which many in the visual art community recognize her for.

Director: Alexandra Liveris
Runtime: 8 minutes
Released: 2013

Nocturnity is a short work directed by an MFA candidate at Stanford University's Documentary Film Program. The film is about a sleepwalker's flipped sense of identity upon tracking her nighttime journey through the use of surveillance cameras.

Director: David Wachtenheim, Robert Marianetti, Elizabeth Swados
Runtime: 28 minutes
Released: 2014

My Depression is an animated adaptation of Elizabeth Swado's award-winning book of the same title.

Director: Michael Moshe Dahan
Runtime: 13 minutes
Released: 2014

This is another short film about the disappearance of the analogue film medium. It captures film as it disintegrates in a chemical solution.

Director: Jimmy Goldblum, Adam Weber
Runtime: 82 minutes
Released: 2014

This documentary is based on Delhi's last remaining Kathputli colony and its rich community of artists and performers. These people are forced to either relocate or fight for their home, which is soon to be bulldozed and gentrified into a place for luxury high-rises. This documentary not only commemorates and documents the mystical Indian folk arts, it also preserves a community that is still here today (but which may be gone tomorrow).

Director: Eva von Schweinitz
Runtime: 16 minutes
Released: 2013

This nostalgic work will help you rediscover the special qualities of film as a work of art and a process of artistic production. Now that CGI and digital projection dominate our movie screens, Eva von Schweinitz wishes to draw our attention to the beauty of film for film's sake.

Director: Jonathan Minard, James George
Runtime: N/A
Released: 2014

Assembled from code, Clouds is a non-linear documentary that experiments with and exemplifies new possibilities in art, narrative, and technology. It contains three-dimensional conversations that constitute a web of ideas. Form and content merge here in an exciting, novel, and interactive piece.

Director: Stan Douglas and NFB Digital Studio
Runtime: N/A
Released: 2014

Internationally renowned artist Stan Douglas works with NFB Interactive to recreate vanished areas from Vancouver's history in meticulous 3D detail. The recreated, three-dimensional sites excavate lost time. They will take you back into Vancouver's past so that you can navigate the long-gone environments and encounter characters who once inhabited now-extinct spaces.

Director: Anita Thacher
Runtime: 7 minutes
Released: 2014

This short film appropriates Hollywood film clips from the '30s and '40s and reconfigures their images and sounds through graphic and sequential interventions. A large number of these clips are in black and white with artificial disruptions inserted into the compilation. The overall message is to refocus and sharpen our attention on the nebulous aspects of the films, to which we have become defamiliarized.

Director: Nick Fenton, Peter Strickland
Runtime: 97 minutes
Released: 2014

This experimental documentary chronicles the multidimensional avant-garde show that focuses on Björk's eighth studio album. It includes the unique voices of Nick Fenton and Peter Strickland, both of whom film Björk live in performance. With evocative animation and footage of science and nature interspersed with Björk's music, the film presents itself as an original piece of work pushing the possibilities of music.

Director: Daniel Junge, Kief Davidson
Runtime: 95 minutes
Released: 2014

LEGO has been around for generations, capturing the hearts and minds of adults and children alike, who use these colorful blocks to build the designs of their imaginations. LEGO is used for building simple, unidentifiable structures, or to create large, architectural models. The extraordinary impact that the brick has made is remarkable, and this documentary aims to demonstrate the vast ways in which LEGO has captured our minds and inspired all sorts of creation across the world.

Director: Bill Morrison
Runtime: 10 minutes
Released: 2014

All Vows uses ancient archival films to depict an unknowable, alien future that is reflected through a dissolving historic document. In the style of Bill Morrison, the film uses archival material and contains contemporary music. This piece features original music from composer Michael Gordon.

Director: Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman, co-directed by Mark Becker
Runtime: 89 minutes
Released: 2014

Art and Craft is about a schizophrenic outsider figure who is also one of the most, if not the most, prolific art forger in the US. His imitations of Matisse and Picasso are precise and almost indistinguishable from the real. His motivations are not monetary or rooted in any quest for fame. He does, however, share another universal human desire: to be a part of a community.

Director: Russell Sheaffer
Runtime: 4 minutes
Released: 2013

Acetate Diary is, quite literally, a diary. Filmmaker Russell Sheaffer experiments with a roll of 16mm film to create a short, multi-media work of sound, color, moving images, and text.

Director: Louie Psihoyos
Runtime: 90 minutes
Released: 2014

Together with a team of activists, 6 aims to draw your attention to issues of mass extinction and animals whose lives are endangered by showing never-before-seen images and footage of animals that are not commonly featured in documentaries. Directed by the same person who brought us The Cove, this documentary will change the way you view the world.