WORLD BETWEEN US

Marie Tomanova left her small Czech village to move to New York City and pursue her dream of being an artist. Life was tough as an immigrant in the US. She wrestled with a crisis of identity, toiling in low paid jobs, cleaning and babysitting, trying to establish herself in this new life far away from home. Once she discovered photography and met her partner Thomas Beachdel, an art historian, her star began to ascend. Now an award-winning photographer, Tomanova has had solo shows New York City, Prague, Tokyo, and Paris, and published books with forewards by Kim Gordan and Ryan Ryan McGinley. The World Between Us is a feature length documentary by director Marie Dvorakova, following Tomanova and Beachdel over this crucial five-year period, tracing their personal and professional lives as they establish themselves in NYC’s thrilling but formidable creative scene.

World Between Us will premiere on HBO Max in May 2025. Follow Marie Tomanova here for futher details.

ASCO: WITHOUT PERMISSION

Established by a group of Mexican-American teenagers living in East Los Angeles in 1972, ASCO was a reaction to police violence and the Chicano Movement; the collective even borrowed its moniker from the Spanish for ‘disgust’. “They come to our so-called party, and we bombard them with our art,” shares Patssi Valdez on screen, relaying their early tactics for engaging people in the work. A nod to their physical proximity to (but ultimate rejection from) Hollywood inspired No Movies, which saw the group embrace performance art. “Spray Paint LACMA”, perhaps the most recognised action, involved members Harry Gamboa Jr., Glugio ‘Gronk’ Nicandro and Willie Herrón tagging themselves on the building’s exterior in response to finding no Chicano art in the museum. Oscillating between archive footage, interviews, re-enactments and collaborations with contemporary artists, the film itself, notes director Travis Gutiérrez Senger, is “an experiment, a series of questions”.

Follow the film’s Instagram for updates of screenings.

ERNEST COLE: LOST AND FOUND

The late South African photographer Ernest Cole, whose work enjoyed two concurrent exhibitions in London in 2024 (Autograph highlighted his New York pictures, while the display at The Photographers’ Gallery focused on his acclaimed House of Bondage series), is further awarded his flowers in Raoul Peck’s new portrait, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. A previous Oscar nominee for his film about James Baldwin, Peck brings in former AnOther cover star LaKeith Stanfield to voice Cole, exploring his life and subsequent exile from South Africa, and the frustrations that accompanied his efforts to find work in the US. “I photographed light American stuff, and heavy American stuff,” he reflects, as images of these two scenarios pass across the screen. Later chapters focus on the curious discovery of his archive in a Swedish bank in 2017, as well as the cruel timing of his final days in 1990, cut with testimony from the South African Reconsolidation Commission of 1996.

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is in UK and Irish cinemas from 7 March 2025.

I AM MARTIN PARR

Never meet your heroes, unless the opportunity presents itself to spend a summer with them, touring the UK, eating ice cream at the seaside and chatting to their wife about their collection of Saddam Hussein watches. If said summer happens to coincide with the King’s coronation and the photogrrapher in question is Martin Parr, a photographer renowned for his vibrant portrayal of British society, well you couldn’t dream much better. Such was the case for filmmaker Lee Shulman. First meeting at a photography festival in 2019, the pair collaborated on a book and exhibition two years pater (2021’s Déjà View), before arriving at I Am Martin Parr, a road trip-cum-documentary that leans into Parr’s observations of leisure and consumerism, featuring talking heads from Grayson Perry, Bruce Gilden and Kavi Pujara.

I Am Martin Parr is released in the UK and Ireland by Dogwoof. See here for up-to-date release information, screenings, and events.

BOTY: I AM THE SIXTIES

“She, and her work, had so many of the best characteristics of the 1960s,” says comedy writer Jason Hazeley, encapsulating the mood of this documentary on the late great Pop artist, Pauline Boty. “Fun, political, colourful, original, thoughtful. And unfortunately, short-lived as well.” Beginning with the unveiling of a blue plaque in 2023, Lee Cogswell’s film explores the misogyny that greeted Boty when she arrived at the Wimbledon College of Art in the late 50s, through to her primary role in the British Pop art movement of the following decade.

BOTY: I Am the Sixties is available to watch on iPlayer here now.

ART FOR EVERYBODY

“I’m 16 and I want to be an artist,” confides a voiceover at the beginning of Miranda Yousef’s documentary Art For Everybody. “However, I’ve been also realising that a person has to eat. I don’t want to end up like Van Gogh.” The words belong to Thomas Kinkade, perhaps the foremost instigator of mass-produced art, whose work, while less known in the UK, at one point in the 1990s appeared in one out of 20 homes in the US by way of print, plate, cushion or clock (there were, additionally, over 200 galleries in his name around the country). Typically depicting cottage-focused, English garden scenes, Kinkade was largely dismissed by critics (during a rare show beyond his own galleries, students attending wore black armbands as they saw him and his work as ‘invading the art world’. “I’ve achieved a nirvana that Andy Warhol dreamed of achieving,” protested Kinkade). While Yousef primarily displays the facts, we’re driven to reconsider what and who determines what art can be.

Visit the film’s website here for details of screenings near you.

E.1027 – EILEEN GRAY AND THE HOUSE BY THE SEA

Filmed on location on the French Riviera, as well as in Basel, Vézelay, and Paris, E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea tells the dramatic tale of influential and visionary modernist, Eileen Gray. Her stunning 1920s villa, named E.1027, caught the eye of fellow architect Le Corbusier, and became the focal point of a simmering power struggle and love triangle in the 1930s Parisian art scene.

Part-documentary, part-drama, this stylish film explores the power of women’s artistic expression and autonomy and the ways in which men have attempted to subjugate it. Highly conceptual, the project marries dramatised scenes with existing archival materials to trace the strange relationship between Gray, her collaborator Jean Badovici and Le Corbusier, who was ‘intruiged’ and ‘possessed’ by the beauty of this magical villa by the sea.

E.1027 – Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea is released by Modern Film and will open in UK and Irish cinemas on 16 May 2025.

WAR PAINT: WOMEN AT WAR

The latest instalment in British filmmaker Margy Kinmonth’s three-part series about artists confronting conflict, this new feature considers, in moments of life or death, what does a woman see that a man misses? Informed by the way women have for so long been side-lined (in particular, with reference to her mother, a WW2 codebreaker), the film explores the life and work of Lee Miller – recently given the biopic treatment via Kate Winslet (last year’s Lee) – alongside artists including Maggi Hambling, Rachel Whiteread, Shirin Neshat and Zhanna Kadyrova. Between them, the fuller line up of artists conjure varying interpretations of the way war plays out, both on the frontline and more keenly, perhaps, by those privy to the longer term repercussions.

War Paint: Women At War is in cinemas from 28 March 2025. Find out more info and book tickets here.