The Automat

Restaurateurs, musicians, politicians-everyone loves hummus. A story of faith, community, and growth is told through the lens of a dietary staple and superfood, hummus! This documentary shows how food can bring people together.

Clarissa Dickson Wright tracks down Britain's oldest known cookbook, The Forme of Cury. This 700-year-old scroll was written during the reign of King Richard II from recipes created by the king's master chefs. How did this ancient manuscript influence the way people eat today? On her culinary journey through medieval history she reawakens recipes that have lain dormant for centuries and discovers dishes that are still prepared now.

To many African Americans, soul food is sacrament, ritual, and a key expression of cultural identity. But does this traditional cuisine do more harm to health than it soothes the soul?

Pestilent City covers Manhattan from South to North, from Times Square to Harlem, finding along the way ever more poverty, violence, rage and tragic drunkenness.

Shot entirely from an apartment window during the first month of New York City’s “Shelter in Place” directive, this film is a winding conversation about the fears, anxieties, and hopes of the residents of Claremont Avenue, in Manhattan.

Chronicles the rise and fall of 1970s New York City nightclub Plato's Retreat.

The Mona Lisa Curse is a Grierson award-winning polemic documentary by art critic Robert Hughes that examines how the world's most famous painting came to influence the art world. With his trademark style, Hughes explores how museums, the production of art and the way we experience it have radically changed in the last 50 years, telling the story of the rise of contemporary art and looking back over a life spent talking and writing about the art he loves, and loathes. In these postmodern days it has been said that there is no more passé a vocation than that of the professional art critic. Perceived as the gate keeper for opinions regarding art and culture, the art critic has supposedly been rendered obsolete by an ever expanding pluralism in the art world, where all practices and disciplines are purported to be equal and valid. Robert Hughes, however, is one art critic who has delivered a message that must not be ignored.

A feature-length documentary portrait of Québécoise painter Johanne Corno, who has lived and worked in New York City for more than 20 years. Ignored by the art intelligentsia in Québec, she settled abroad to escape that creative constraint, and built an enviable international career. Today, she casts a lucid eye on her work and describes the resources she draws on to survive in the jungle of the contemporary art world.

Portrait of the Sunshine Hotel, a flop house on the Bowery in New York's skid row. We meet Vic, the desk clerk, who paints watercolours and pastels; Jonesy, a janitor who talks about bedbugs; Bruce, a voluble alcoholic who makes runs for residents, picking up beer or sandwiches for them and sharing his philosophy with us; Vinnie, on methadone, caring for caged birds; Cashmere, a prostitute, the only woman at the hotel; Earl, who works downstairs in the Bowery's last factory, and Mike, the general manager, who talks about the changing face of the Bowery. The film concludes with tourists outside the Sunshine, hearing from Seth Kamil of Big Onion Walking Tours.

Stonewall veterans (including prominent trans activist Sylvia Rivera) and HIV-positive New Yorkers take up residency on the Hudson River piers as cranes raze vacant buildings for a new skyline.

The story of the New York accent, as told by New Yorkers.