Movies Similar to Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

Birth of a Nation(1997)

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.

Hotel Diaries(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.

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June(2024)

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

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Clear years(2015)

I wasn’t told. I wasn’t told it would be so difficult to live together. To keep a family together. To maintain love and happiness. I wasn’t told, and if someone had told me I wouldn’t have listened. I chose to live with my camera in my hand, filming the trajectory of feelings, from the golden age to the lost paradise, from being born to being reborn.

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

7.6

Fale Comigo Verão: O diário de um cineasta amador(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

Lost, Lost, Lost(1976)

Jonas Mekas adjusts to a life in exile in New York in his autobiographical film, shot between 1949 and 1963.

7.0

La deuxième femme(2008)

Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.

6.0

He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life(1986)

A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.

8.2

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Chromo sud(1968)

One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,' depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. - Experimental Film Club

5.8

In the Bathtub of the World(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.

5.5

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Homeo(1967)

Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.

5.2

Eautopsie(2024)

An enigmatic glimpse of life through precarious vignettes, propelling a narrative through a nebulous and opaque structure that sutures the filmmaker's home movie footage to archival material—from Hollywood narrative films to political selfie videos. A handmade impression of a time suspended between past and present and the ghosts and places occupying it, contemplating the nature and meaning of vision, memory and image making.

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My Son's Wedding to My Sister-in-Law(2009)

A short documentary by Jim McBride.

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Return to Khodorciur—Armenian Diary(1986)

Raphael, Yervant Gianikian's father, survived the Armenian genocide in 1915 in Eastern Turkey. In April 1988, while living in Venice, he sat for his son's camera and read an excerpt from his memoirs, translated from Armenian into Italian.

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Mathilde(1985)

An old man comes across a fascinating archive, then meets a woman who introduces him to the life of a banker, patron and philanthropist. A moving essay that is part documentary, part film diary.

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Vukica Djilas – Home Movies(2006)

It compiles more than twenty years of passionately recorded “pictures from life” captured on super 8, that Vukica Djilas shot from 1970 to late 1990s.

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Video Album 5: The Thursday People(1987)

The comings and goings of the late underground filmmaker, Curt McDowell—and the people and activities that came and went along with him—are the themes that run through this existential diary of daily life. McDowell was dying from AIDS-related illnesses during the production of the diary. “An elegy for McDowell, the videowork captures Kuchar’s mournful remembrances of his long-lasting friendship with the young filmmaker. But it also has the inquisitive charm, perverse humor, and quirky candor that places Kuchar’s visual expressions in a gritty niche all their own.”

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Tourist;Drifter(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.

9.0

Notes before the Wind(2020)

A loose collection of scenes in Hong Kong shot over a five-year period, this film begins with the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and ends right before the summer of 2019, when large-scale social unrest and violent resistance erupted. The everyday scenes capture the ambience and the landscape of change in the city, standing as a quiet prelude to the ensuing conflicts.

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