Milestone Films: For individual, home use only.

Nancy Savoca’s star-studded indie gem is a chronicle of a spirited Italian-American New York family that perfectly balances humor, tragedy, and pathos. Executive produced by Jonathan Demme and featuring memorable performances from Vincent D’Onofrio, Tracey Ullman, Lili Taylor, and Michael Imperio...

Documented by pioneering filmmakers Rob Epstein (The Times of Harvey Milk, 1984), Frances Reid (In the Best Interests of the Children, 1977), Greta Schiller (Before Stonewall, 1984) and Lucy Winer (Rate It X, 1986), the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights was a historic ...

In making this mixture of documentary and drama, director Lionel Rogosin’s aimed to reveal the harsh injustice of apartheid in Sophiatown, a South African ghetto where Black citizens formed their own vibrant community and culture. Rogosin spent a year meeting with locals in order to capture thi...

For more than two decades the Emmy and Oscar®-winning animator John Canemaker has created films that charm, enlighten and touch audiences. His amazing work features a distinctive personal style emphasizing emotion, personality and dynamic visual expression. His "toons" (which have been featured i...

In the early 20th century, when few stars were known by name, no woman had greater worldwide fame than ballet dancer and choreographer Anna Pavlova. Unlike movie actresses, whose celebrity spread with the international distribution of their films, Pavlova’s renown had to be earned theater by thea...

An Academy Award® and Golden Globe nominee for Best Documentary, People of the Wind's astonishing widescreen photography and brilliantly recorded soundtrack take the viewer out onto the dangerous precipices of the Zardeh Kuh mountain and into the icy waters of the Cholbar river. The film is an am...

In November 1951, Venezuelan Margot Benacerraf interrupted her film studies in Paris to create her first work, Reverón, a poetic study of the legendary and eccentric Venezuelan artist. The 30-minute short gained international acclaim when it premiered at the 1953 Berlin Film Festival.

In the su...

Forty years ago, in 1978, Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives startled audiences across the country when it appeared in movie theaters and on television. The first feature-length documentary about lesbian and gay identity made by gay filmmakers, the film had a huge impact when it was releas...

Black Roots, Lionel Rogosin’s fourth film is aimed at revealing the black experience in 1970s America. It is a unique oral history that uses song and bittersweet stories to illustrate the difficulties of black people living in a white America. Bitter Sweet Stories Talking about Black Roots is a d...

Lionel Rogosin (On the Bowery, Come Back Africa) took the fight for equality to his homeland with his astonishing fourth feature Black Roots. The extraordinary cast, including Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, attorney and feminist activist Florynce "Flo" Kennedy, musicians Jim Collier, We...

At the time of her death from cancer in 1988, Kathleen Collins was just 46 years old, but she was already an internationally renowned playwright, a popular professor (at New York’s City College) and a successful independent filmmaker.
Her second film, Losing Ground tells the story of a marriage ...

Before they dreamed up that oversized ape, King Kong's creators filmed this magical story of a Thai family's struggle to survive the forces of nature.

CHANG is a revelation - not only is it the obvious prototype for Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's later masterpiece, King Kong but it ...

E.A. (Varieté) Dupont's Piccadilly, the 1929 silent masterpiece brilliantly restored by the British Film Institute, stars the sultry Anna May Wong in her greatest role.

After many years of supporting roles in Hollywood, Wong left for Europe in search of better work. And did she find it! Her elec...

When The Adventures of Prince Achmed premiered in Germany on September 23, 1926, it was hailed as the first full-length animated film. More than seventy-five years later, this enchanting film still stands as one of the great classics of animation — beautiful, mesmerizing and utterly seductive.

T...

Eva Meyer is poor shop girl working at a five-and-dime. She is the sole wage earner for three younger sisters, a mother who struggles to hold everything together, and a father who prefers beer and penny dreadfuls to work. Each week, Eva returns to her cold-water flat and dutifully hands over her ...

The Connection is one of the most vital, fascinating films of the American independent world. Created by a woman director, Shirley Clarke, at a time when they were in very short supply, the film shattered stereotypes in just about every conceivable way. And yet, the film remained unseen for many ...

"Exhilarating, touching, [and] thoroughly absorbing!” — The New York Times

“Their story is poignant, their dexterity poetic, their legacy immense!” — Time Magazine

The golden age of tap dancing spanned the first half of the twentieth century and featured extraordinary artists, including Bill “B...

George Nierenberg's brilliant and blissful followup to No Maps on my Taps is introduced by Gregory Hines, who shares his childhood memories of watching and imitating the tap dance greats at the Apollo Theater. ABOUT TAP features stylistic performances and recollections by three of America’s leadi...

Director Philip Haas (Angels and Insects and Up at the Villa), and artist David Hockney invite you to join them on a magical journey through China via a marvelous 72-foot long 17th-century Chinese scroll entitled The Kangxi Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour (1691-1698), scroll seven. As Hockney ...

In filmmaker Luchino Visconti's bold and bruising masterpiece, five Southern Italian brothers looking for opportunity move with their mother to Milan. Simone and Rocco find fame in the boxing ring and love, with the same woman—Nadia. Jealousy mounts, blood is shed, and a striving family faces sel...

Like a matador confronting a bull, the artist approaches his easel, his eyes blazing. As he wields his brush, we see through the canvas as the artwork unfolds, erupts, dances into being before our eyes. Pablo Picasso, the most influential artist of the twentieth century, is making a painting, and...

John Canemaker’s Academy Award® and Emmy Award-winning animated documentary explores the terrain of father/son relationships, as seen through Canemaker's own turbulent relationship with his father.

Featuring the voices of noted actors Eli Wallach and John Tuturro, THE MOON AND THE SON: AN IMAGIN...

Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache are taut, absorbing dramas of wartime espionage and murder, made in 1944 to aid the war effort.

Filmmaker Michael Rogosin's fascinating exploration of the production history behind his father Lionel's groundbreaking documentary, On the Bowery

ON THE BOWERY chronicles three days in the drinking life of Ray Salyer, a part-time railroad worker adrift on New York’s skid row, the Bowery. When the film first opened it 1956, it exploded on the screen, burning away years of Hollywood artifice, jump-starting the post-war American independent s...

In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his embattled collaboration with silent era genius Buster Keaton on the production of a short, titleless avant-garde film. Beckett was nearing the peak of his fame, which would culminate in his receivin...

On the night of December 2, 1966, Clarke and a tiny crew convened in her apartment at the Hotel Chelsea to make a film. There, for twelve straight hours they filmed the one-and-only Jason Holliday as he spun tales, sang, donned costumes and reminisced about good times and bad behavior as a gay hu...

Ornette: Made In America captures Ornette’s evolution over three decades. Returning home to Fort Worth, Texas in 1983 as a famed performer and composer, documentary footage, dramatic scenes, and some of the first music video-style segments ever made, chronicle his boyhood in segregated Texas and ...

A cult film from the 1970s, lost for years and now restored, Chac: The Rain God can now be seen as a gorgeous cinematic journey into myth. Based on a combination of ritual and legends from the Popul Vuh, as well as Tzeltal and Mayan stories, this gorgeous film was shot in the Chiapas region of Me...

The Big Animal (Duze Zwierze) was scripted by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski, directed by star Jerzy Stuhr, and shot in shimmering black-and-white by cinematographer Pawel Edelman (Academy Award®-nominee for Roman Polanski's The Pianist). It is a lovely, passionate film that exposes greed and pett...

Something New is a thrilling and hilarious Western where the hero comes to the rescue of the kidnapped girl in a 1920 Maxwell sedan! Chased by bandits on horseback across rocky terrain, Shipman, boyfriend/co-star Van Tuyle and "Laddie" (her pet collie) survive some of the most amazing (and real) ...

Mary McGuire (Mae Murray) is a working-class young girl who lives in a New York tenement and supports her mother and her shiftless father and uncle.

Two items in the March 27, 1919 edition of The New York Star catch her attention. The first is a news item about the famous dancer Gloria du Moine ...

Beyond the Rocks, the silent romance starring film legends Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino was long considered one of the great "lost" films from the Hollywood golden age, only a one-minute fragment was known to exist in the Nederlands Filmmuseum.

Lost for over eighty years, film cataloguer...

Back to God's Country stars early independent producer, writer, conservationist, and star Nell Shipman shot on location in the frozen wilds of Canada. Shipman, a fearless free spirit on and off-screen, was ably supported by brilliant cameraman Joseph B. Walker, who went on to shoot many of Frank ...

The restoration of Margot Benacerraf's brilliant film Araya is a landmark in cinema history. The film was hailed as a masterpiece of poetic cinema and a forerunner of feminist Latina cinema on it's re-release by Milestone.

The peninsula of Araya in northeastern Venezuela, is one of the most ari...

On New Year’s Day, a man tries to help a woman pay her rent and learns a lesson in connecting with others in a community. A short film by Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, To Sleep with Anger) that remains a masterpiece of storytelling

The Exiles chronicles a night in the life of a group of 20-something Native Americans who left reservation life in the 1950s to live in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. The film is is a narrative feature with a script that was pieced together from interviews with the documentary subjects....

One of the most acclaimed music documentaries of all time, Say Amen, Somebody is George Nierenberg’s masterpiece — a joyous, funny, deeply emotional celebration of African American culture, featuring the father of Gospel, Thomas A. Dorsey ("Precious Lord, Take My Hand"); its matron, Mother Willie...

A classic adventure by the makers of King Kong. In 1924, neophyte filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack hooked up with journalist and sometime spy Marguerite Harrison and set off to film an adventure. They found excitement, danger and unparalleled drama in the migration of the Bakh...

“Exceptional! … The Beggar Maid" is beautifully done … Miss Mary Astor, gives the beggar girl all of the grace and charm she is supposed to have.” — New York Times

In 1920, Triart Pictures was formed to create movies of everlasting value about art and artists. They had famous artists including D...

In February 1971, one month after the revelations of the My Lai massacre, an astonishing public inquiry into war crimes committed by American forces in Vietnam was held at a Howard Johnson motel in Detroit. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War organized this event called the Winter Soldier Invest...

A key masterpiece of the L.A Rebellion, Bless Their Little Hearts distills the social concerns and aesthetics of that trailblazing movement in African American cinema. Billy Woodberry’s film showcases his attentive eye, sensitivity to the nuances of community and family, and the power of the blues...

I've spent my life searching for a man to look up to without lying down." - Frances Marion

And what a life it was! From 1915-1939, Frances Marion was one of the most powerful talents in the movie industry. In one of the most liberating eras for women in film, she wrote more than 200 movies and w...

In the heyday of silent films, a winsome ingénue named Olive Thomas — affectionately dubbed "Ollie" by her friends and fans — possessed a seemingly charmed life. Born in the coal mining town of Charleroi, Pennsylvania in 1894, her astonishing beauty and spirit carried her to New York City where s...

Richard Brody's review of I'm Going Home from The New Yorker:

With I'm Going Home, the legendary Manoel de Oliveira, at the age of 93, created his masterpiece. The critics have already acclaimed it as one of the finest films of the decade. Warm, funny, humane and ultimately heartrending, the fil...

Remembered mostly for his magnificent performance as the Japanese officer in The Bridge over the River Kwai, few filmgoers realize that Sessue Hayakawa was one of the great stars of the silent cinema. In many films he played a dashing, romantic lead — a rarity for Asian actors in Hollywood, even ...

Written and directed by Gilbert & George. New 2K restoration in collaboration with, and approved by, the artists!

“We are unhealthy, middle-aged, dirty-minded, depressed, cynical, empty, tired-brained, seedy, rotten, dreaming, badly behaved, ill-mannered, arrogant, intellectual, self-pitying, ho...

The Wide Blue Road (La Grande Strada Azzurra), is the remarkable debut feature directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, famed for The Battle of Algiers (1966) and BURN! (1969), in a beautiful, newly restored version thanks to the efforts of Jonathan Demme, Dustin Hoffman and Milestone Film.

Set in a fishin...

The first Korean feature to ever have theatrical distribution in the United States, Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? has been acclaimed by critics and audiences around the world as a film of remarkable power and beauty. In a remote mountain monastery above a bustling city, an old Zen maste...

On March 9, 1931, the SS Viking left the port of St. John's, Newfoundland, and sailed into motion picture history. On board were New York filmmaker Varick Frissell and an unusual crew of seamen and Hollywood movie people. Their mission: to shoot the final scenes for an epic feature film on the li...

Seni Camara lives with her husband and family in the village of Bigona, in the Casamance region in southern Senegal. Working outside the local tradition of making pots and “useful” objects out of clay, Seni claims that through a “gift of God” she has been able to create thousands of bizarre, magn...

This is the rediscovered film made in 1924 by the legendary Soviet silent film director, Yevgeny Antinov. "Despised by the modernists for his love of narrative, hated by the traditionalists for his modern techniques, disapproved of by the government for his self-indulgence and individualism, and ...

Philip Haas’s eye-popping film on Australian Aboriginal art, takes us through the steps of preparing three ground paintings made by a group of desert tribesman. The film shows the collective effort and cooperation required to make the art. The beauty of the finished pieces — so ancient and so mod...

When Sir Ernest Shackleton set sail on the Endurance on August 8, 1914, he was already an internationally renowned Antarctic explorer and a national hero.

He planned a brave attempt to cross the continent of Antarctica via the Pole. Raising money for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic (ITA) expedition...

Richard Long is a British land artist whose “walks” have included such far-flung places as the Australian brush and the glaciers of Iceland. The records of his journey, be they photographs, word pieces or objects he has collected along the way constitute his world-famous artwork. But before Phili...

At the Bull Pup Café, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle is chef of all trades and Keaton waits tables in his own inimitable fashion. When a rambunctious customer annoys the pretty cashier, Buster Keaton comes to her defense and all-out mayhem ensues. Arbuckle and Keaton’s dance à la Salome and Cleopatra is...

At the time of her death from cancer in 1988, Kathleen Collins was just 46 years old, but she was already an internationally renowned playwright, a popular professor (at New York’s City College) and a successful independent filmmaker. Her first film, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy is an adapta...

Admiral Richard E. Byrd was one of the most popular heroes in the age of exploration of the twenties. While he is nearly forgotten today, Byrd nearly beat Lindbergh to Paris (he flew a month later). In 1925, he was the first to fly over the North Pole making international heroes of himself and hi...

From the moment it was first released at a tiny Left Bank theater in Paris, this epic account of France under the occupation of the Nazi regime during World War II has been acclaimed as one of the most moving and influential films of all time. Originally refused by French TV, the film garnered in...

A surreal foray into the fictive universe of Boyd Webb. Although Webb is usually classified as a sculptor, he does not exhibit objects — his art works are extremely large photographs of elaborate sculptural sets in which humans or animals are posed. For this movie, he has designed eight new works...

Herbert G. Ponting's spellbinding chronicle of Captain Robert Scott's heroic and ultimately tragic race for the South Pole (not only did Amundsen reach the goal first but Scott and his entire team died on the return trip) was originally released in 1913. Ponting, who had been a renowned still pho...

AND NOW, MIGUEL is known today as the beloved novel by Joseph Krumgold that won the Newberry Medal for excellence in American children's literature in 1954. But few know that the story actually originated as a motion picture for the US Department of State directed by the Academy Award®-winning Kr...

Filmmaker Philip Haas traveled to the southernmost tip of Madagascar to meet Efiaimbelo, a man in his mid-sixties who works as a funerary sculptor. The film follows Efiaimbelo as he travels to an isolated area in the countryside to cut down a special tree for sculpting. He makes it into a pole of...

One of the most breathtaking 35mm tinted and toned nitrate prints from the silent era, the Library of Congress has graciously provided Milestone with an exceptional video master of this silent cult classic. BIG STAKES is an entertaining, exciting, hilarious – and yes, strange – addition to cinema...

Blonde, beautiful and talented, Marion Davies was the first and funniest screwball comedienne. As star of two of the best comedies ever made, Show People and The Patsy, she combined zany slapstick and exuberant mimicry. Glamorous, witty and kind, both on screen and off, Davies was also famous for...

The fascinating and tumultuous lives of Mikhail, Boris and Denis Kaufman (better known as Dziga Vertov) are the focus of this powerful documentary. Using rare archival footage from Russian state film archives and private collections, the brothers' lives and art are traced from Bialystok to Moscow...

A Milestone favorite, Eleanor Antin is an acclaimed artist/filmmaker working for many years in installation, performance and video, She has built an impressive international reputation based in part on her historical impersonations including Eleanor Nightingale (a Crimean War nurse), the Black Ki...

Banned for years and then shown with a very poor quality soundtrack, John Huston's LET THERE BE LIGHT was always highly regarded but a bit difficult to watch. Now with fully restored sound (by Chace Audio) and visual (by Colorlab), this is the best version of the legendary film.

Huston's film ab...

A critical and popular hit at the New York Film Festival, Michael Powell's The Edge of the World received a thrilling theatrical release that established it as one of the great discoveries of the year!

Two families living on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, the Mansons and the Grays, a...

Hollywood discovered Peggy-Jean Montgomery when she was 19 months old and made her a star by the age of two. By the time she was six, she had made more than 150 popular shorts and a star of feature films. In fact, she was one of the most popular stars in Hollywood with a line of Baby Peggy produc...

In 1983, after many long months of shooting, Charles Burnett sent his rough-cut of My Brother's Wedding to his producers. Ignoring his request to finish the editing of the film, the producers rushed it to a New York festival screening, where it received a mixed review from the New York Times. Wit...

THE MAN WITHOUT A WORLD is one of the most unusual, artistic and fantastic films of the American Indie history. There is nothing else like it!

THE MAN WITHOUT A WORLD is credited to the legendary (and imaginary) 1920s Soviet director, Yevgeny Antinov. But the film is anything but old. In fact, A...

With the freedom of inspiration and the rigor of writing that are his trademarks, Manoel de Oliveira returns to Oporto, the city of his birth.

The Oporto of this childhood is a city laden with history, a city of artists and thinkers. And, as in a spiral movement, the film moves from the ruins of...

In the earliest years of the twentieth century, enterprising traveling showmen in the north of England hired pioneer filmmakers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon to shoot footage of local people going about their everyday activities. These films would be shown later at nearby fairgrounds, town hall...

Legong: Dance of the Virgins was filmed entirely on location in Bali in 1935 by the Marquis Henry de la Falaise, World War I her, the ex-husband of movie star Gloria Swanson and the current spouse of screen siren Constance Bennett. The film is a tragic tale of love denied — Poutou, a respected Le...

Louis J. Dorflinger, son of the founder of Dorflinger Glass Works, wrote in his diary on Monday, September 25, 1916 that three gentlemen from the Paramount Picture Company came to White Mills, Pennsylvania to “take pictures” of the glass house and shops and left the next day. This film, Sand Bubb...

Millay at Steepletop (Color, 25 minutes) is a loving tribute to the great American poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, filmed entirely at her 700-acre upstate New York farm by Sloane Shelton and Kevin Brownlow. By combining images of the natural beauty of the poet's home with readings from her most fa...