Movies: John Gianvito

A visual essay about the progressive tradition of the United States as seen through grave markers and monuments....

A cri de coeur against Iraq War I from writer-director John Gianvito (Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind)....

Taking inspiration from the collaborative 1967 militant anthology film Far from Vietnam, five of the boldest and most prominent American militant filmmakers unite to create this searing (and seething) omnibus work, employing a variety of approaches t...

On September 11th, 2001, the security bubble, within which so many Americans live, was violently perforated and, at least for a moment, the air, the heart, the eye was pierced by the rageful acts of the discontented, soon supplanted by the vengeful a...

A man hikes through late-winter woods. Russia invades Ukraine. It’s difficult to reconcile the scales of action described by those sentences, but this difficulty is what John Gianvito dwells on in his new video. It may simply be that this is a diary,...

An investigation into the ecological disaster caused by a US military base on the Philippines – and its victims, their world. A humble act of solidarity, a defiant work of remembrance, a rallying cry to rise and resist, a cinematic prose poem....

A semi-autobiographical film about an adolescent relationship, about emotional illiterates of a particular age and milieu. Structured as a series of fragments – so called “shards of memory” – the film follows the progressive dissolution of the affair...

First begun in 2006, WAKE (SUBIC) completes the documentary diptych, FOR EXAMPLE, THE PHILIPPINES, the first part of which, VAPOR TRAIL (CLARK) was released in 2010. Collectively this nine-hour essay explores circumstances of toxic contamination aroun...

The memory of a particular moment in early 20th century history when, in 1913, Helen Keller (1880-1968), a deaf-blind writer, lecturer and political activist, spoke, for the first time and in public, about socialism and progressive causes....

Five «cinematographic letters» by five filmmakers addressed to individuals with whom it was impossible to correspond in real life. Filmed in a combination of Super-8, video and 16mm in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Montreal, the five episodes ...

Rotterdam regular John Gianvito (Vapor Trail (Clark), IFFR 2010) checks in with a sensitive, homebound film diary recorded in the pandemic years 2020-2022. The watchful, wary stance of deer outside his house triggers a series of fragments associated ...

While Afghanistan burns, America fiddles…John Gianvito’s film is a mosaical journey through a dark night of the soul. As fog descends upon the landscape, a man attempts to lull himself to sleep. Across the nation, Americans embrace their pleasures. ...

Three figures - man, woman, child - roam the grounds of a State Mental Hospital, a kind of hell on earth, looking for each other or for a supreme witness to their loneliness. A visual poem with voices off....

a short meditation on the student residency of Boston’s historic Mission Hill neighborhood....