Jem Cohen Movies

This surreal art-movie/live-performance hybrid is comprised of New York filmmaker Jem Cohen's original 16mm and DV movie footage combined with...

A collaboration between Jem Cohen with writer Luc Sante made in Tangier, Morocco, a city where neither of us had ever been. En route from the airport...

Moving towards an unknown destination, a group of anonymous passengers float through an unidentified landscape

In "Birth of a Nation", Jem Cohen takes his camera to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration and to the next day’s protests.

A short portrait of Patti Smith in the city where she lives. Patti recites the very first poem-song she ever wrote. We take a walk in her changing...

An observational portrait of London’s Essex Street, and the inhabitants who work the shops and throng the pavement there (Julie Murray).

A personal, poetic approach to narrative, originally shot on 8mm film and mastered to ¾” video. Created in collaboration with Gabriel...

The memory of a person, or the memory of a place (Rhys Graham).

A portrait of artist Anne Truitt made primarily in and around her studio at the Yaddo artists' community.

A meditation on history, memory, and change in Central and Eastern Europe, Buried in Light is a non-narrative journey, a cinematic collage....

Chance observations of New York's Chinatown, commissioned by the Museum of Chinese in the Americas. “A sleepwalker’s circumnavigation of...

A film by Jem Cohen

A history of New York City from Prehistoric times through the Space Age, composed entirely from documentary street footage.

Jem Cohen's memory-tribute to Jonas Mekas displaces its first-person narration from voice-over to on-screen text. Diaristic New York street imagery...

A portrait of Peter Hutton.

In his New York City landscape, Cohen finds inspiration in disturbance. Looking to life for rhythm and to architecture for state of mind, he locates...

"Like a floating, drifting piece of ticker tape, the film makes its way across boroughs and time to explore New York City's many moods, from loud and...

A portrait of an unnamed city in Italy. Sidestepping the tourist attractions that make the city famous, the film/video posits an almost-imaginary...

"I shot this film with a 16mm wind-up Bolex, and the 25th Anniversary tour of Dutch band The Ex, when they embarked on a 'convey tour' with about 25...