Film

Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety made only two feature films in his life. His 1973 film Touki Bouki follows two lovers trying to escape Dakar for Paris. It was almost lost until Martin Scorses...

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami made Close-Up in 1990 about a man arrested for impersonating a famous filmmaker. He cast the real impersonator and the real victims, then filmed the actual trial. The...

Tarkovsky's film Stalker was shot three times. The first time, the film stock was defective and all footage was lost. The second time, an earthquake destroyed the set. The third time, Tarkovsky shot i...

Andrei Tarkovsky's father was one of Russia's greatest poets. The son put his father's poems into the film Mirror, read by the father himself. The father hadn't spoken to the family in years. It is on...

Alice Guy-Blache directed her first film in 1896, making her one of the first filmmakers in history. By 1910, she ran her own studio in New Jersey and had directed over 1,000 films. Film histories for...

Akira Kurosawa was rejected from art school and nearly died by suicide before becoming a filmmaker. His first successful film came at 33. By the end of his career, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppol...

Dziga Vertov's 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera contains no actors, no sets, and no script. It was filmed across four Soviet cities in a single year. It uses split screens, slow motion, freeze frames...

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul shot Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives with local villagers who had never acted before. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2010. The Thai government r...

The first movie audience, watching the Lumiere brothers' film of a train arriving at a station in 1896, reportedly ran screaming from their seats. They thought the train would come through the screen....

Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine made 47 films over 58 years. His 1958 film Cairo Station, where he also starred as a mentally unstable newspaper vendor, was booed at its premiere. It is now conside...

Satyajit Ray made Pather Panchali with no budget, borrowed equipment, and actors who had never been in a film before. Shooting took three years because he kept running out of money. It premiered at Ca...

Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin was banned in multiple countries for decades because governments feared it would incite revolution. The Odessa Steps sequence, six minutes of montage, changed h...

In 1960, Ousmane Sembene, a dock worker from Senegal with no film training, traveled to Moscow to study cinema. He returned to make Black Girl in 1966, the first feature film by a sub-Saharan African...

During the filming of Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen had a heart attack, Marlon Brando showed up overweight and refused to learn his lines, and a typhoon destroyed the set. Francis Ford Coppola told his...

Buster Keaton performed every stunt in his films himself, including one where the facade of a two-story house fell on him. He survived because he stood exactly where an open window passed over his bod...

Chantal Akerman filmed Jeanne Dielman in real time. The camera watches a woman peel potatoes, wash dishes, and make beds for three hours. On the third day, something changes. Roger Ebert called it the...

Agnes Varda made her first film in 1955 with no film school training and almost no knowledge of cinema. She said she had seen fewer than ten films in her life at that point. Her debut, La Pointe Court...

The Egyptian film Cairo Station, directed by and starring Youssef Chahine in 1958, was booed at its premiere. Critics called it vulgar and disturbing. It took decades for audiences to recognize it as...

Wong Kar-wai shot In the Mood for Love over 15 months with no finished script. He threw away entire storylines and reshot scenes dozens of times. The film's two leads never share a kiss. That restrain...

Lotte Reiniger made the first feature-length animated film in 1926, two years before Disney's Steamboat Willie. The Adventures of Prince Achmed used hand-cut silhouettes and took three years to comple...

During the Japanese occupation, Korean cinema was forced to produce only propaganda films in Japanese. Director Choi In-gyu secretly embedded Korean folk songs and imagery in his 1943 film Homeless An...

Polish animator Zbigniew Rybczynski won the 1983 Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. When he went outside to celebrate, security wouldn't let him back into the ceremony because they didn't recognize h...

During the shooting of Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog hauled a 320-ton steamship over a mountain in the Peruvian jungle without special effects. Engineers told him someone would die. He did it anyway. Th...

Yasujiro Ozu placed his camera at the height of a person sitting on a tatami mat for nearly every shot of his career. He never used a fade, a dissolve, or a tracking shot. His films about ordinary fam...

Djibril Diop Mambety made Touki Bouki in Senegal in 1973 with almost no budget. He strapped a camera to the back of a motorcycle and filmed Dakar at full speed. Martin Scorsese later helped restore th...

In 1967, Brazilian director Glauber Rocha declared: An aesthetics of hunger is the only thing that matters. His Cinema Novo movement used handheld cameras and non-actors to make films about poverty th...