Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

Mar 1, 1968

3h 0m

★ 7.2

Overview

Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

Genres

Documentary

Diaries, Notes, and Sketches Trailers

Cast

Self

Timothy Leary

Self

Ed Emshwiller

Self

Franz Fuenstler

Self

Jack Smith

Self

Mario Montez

Self

Nico

Self

Edie Sedgwick

Self

Andy Warhol

Self

Judith Malina

Self

Storm De Hirsch

Self

Norman Mailer

Self (archive footage)

Allen Ginsberg

In 2022, when the economic crisis in her native country was at its peak, she decided to visit her family there. She turned her short trip into a collage-like diary in which she reflects on her relationship with her homeland, which is in a state of protracted decay. The film is composed of spontaneous snapshots capturing the author's stay, interspersed with inserted captions serving as personal, often poetically formulated comments and observations. As a result, the film does not hide its strongly subjective perspective, but at the same time builds on it to make an important statement that shows the transformation of Lebanese society in everyday details such as the appearance of the city itself or in the intimate sphere of the author's family life.

0.0

VEREDA

Jan 22, 2025

The day with the sky neither too blue nor too grey. With a hint of red. The train crowded and the backpacks between the feet. The loves on every corner, the ones we pretend not to see.

0.0

American Teenagers

Nov 13, 2022

A short documentary project that attempts to encapsulate what it looks and feels like to be an American Teenager in 2022.

0.0

Tiny Little Things

Feb 1, 2019

A Turkish woman in Brighton shares her visual diary. Witness her ups and downs, her intimacy and vulnerability. After revealing hers, the film invites you to confront your ‘tiny little things’. It presents a slice-of-life experience with an abstract flow and deals with one’s existence in this world. There is no escape from family and the things in your mind, even if you are thousands of miles away. The meaning changes constantly, and the camera becomes the extension of her mind. And somebody put that voice in her brain.

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Hotel Diaries

Oct 20, 2007

Made over six years in the hotels of six different countries, Hotel Diaries charts the 'War on Terror' era of Bush and Blair through a seven-part series of video recordings that relate personal experiences to the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel/Palestine. In these works, which play upon chance and coincidence, hotel rooms are employed as 'found' film sets, where architecture, furnishing and decoration become the means by which the filmmaker’s small adventures are linked to major world events.

7.0

Birth of a Nation

Aug 6, 1997

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

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June

Dec 31, 2024

A letter of love to my past self who discovered himself.

No Image

0.0

My Son's Wedding to My Sister-in-Law

Apr 10, 2009

A short documentary by Jim McBride.

0.0

NO MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE

Mar 25, 2026

Blending candid interviews, experimental moments, and reflective narration, this 55-minute personal doc explores what it means to grow up when the people who love you also struggle to accept who you are. Through screen-recorded calls with friends, street interviews, and distant footage of everyday life, I examine my upbringing as a queer non-binary trans person—where love, expectation, and shame often coexisted—among a sea of other stories about adolescence. Anchored by a conversation with a close friend and fellow artist, the film sits in the tension between care and rejection, asking if anyone is even really special—or maybe all of us are.

7.7

As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

Nov 5, 2000

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

9.0

Tourist;Drifter

Jan 10, 2022

An experimental coming-of-age odyssey through someone's troubled mind, going from country to country, landscape to landscape, growing up in the process. A documentary, travelogue, vlog, dream and self-portrait. A reflection on life, death and history.

0.0

10/26

Jan 10, 2026

No overview available.

7.1

Lost, Lost, Lost

Sep 14, 1976

Drawn from footage shot between 1949 and 1963, Jonas Mekas’s autobiographical diary film chronicles his early years in exile, capturing the struggle to build a new life in New York and his gradual discovery of a vibrant artistic community.

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My Diagnosis

Mar 3, 2025

Filmmaker Jon Beaton has always felt like an outsider. When TikTok’s powerful algorithm starts sending him content from the app’s autistic community, he has an epiphany – could this explain everything? My Diagnosis explores the tension between self-diagnosis and institutional validation through an intimate blend of personal vlogs and fictionalised recreations.

7.0

Fale Comigo Verão: O diário de um cineasta amador

Jun 15, 2023

For years, together with his partners from the production company O Quadro, he has been betting on cinema as a tool to explore the typical issues of youth. In this film, Evandro Scorsin turns the cameras on himself as he deals with the dilemmas of the passing of time and the imposition of adulthood. In an exercise in autofiction where cinema and life merge, the film is also a cinematic love letter to the beloved masters (especially Nicholas Ray). Coming and going between two countries and times, it records the vertigo of displacement and the reinventions inherent to an immigrant experience.

7.0

In the Bathtub of the World

Apr 29, 2001

On January 1st, 1999, Caveh Zahedi started a one-year video diary. The idea was to shoot one minute each day. This is the result.

0.0

Vanishing Points

Oct 15, 2025

Spanning over 70 years, two women recount their experiences growing up in Colombia and immigrating to Canada. Intersecting with key moments in Colombian history, Vanishing Points is a polyphonic composition of mirrors, labyrinths, dreams, and nightmares that question the idea of perspective and the linearity of history and time.

0.0

…And I Saw Your Name on the Dust of the Houses.

Invalid Date

At seventy-two, my grandmother Rosi wanders among the properties she built in the past as she searches for her place in the world while dealing with the pain of loss and abandonment.