Ojai Playhouse

Paul Thomas Anderson captures Brooklyn musician Cameron Winter's minimalist performance in this striking concert film, blending intimate close-ups with sweeping shots of the vast venue, all shot on 16mm and 35mm film.

Elite ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson fell deeply in love while reaching the pinnacle of their sport. Their drive sharpened into a shared dream: to climb and ski the direct North Face of Everest - the most difficult and dangerous climb on the mountain and the most coveted ski line on earth. Thousands have summited the mountain via Nepal's southeast ridge, but only a handful have ever reached the top by this route — and no one has successfully skied down. Already known for their extraordinary feats in the mountains and no strangers to loss, Morrison and Nelson stake everything on this daunting challenge. “Everest: The Other Side” is directed and produced by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, and produced by Shannon Dill, Anna Barnes, Bob Eisenhardt, Janet Yang. The executive producers are Carolyn Bernstein, Tim Horsburgh, Nina Fialkow, David Fialkow, Andrew Reiner, Elizabeth Reiner, Moudhy Al-Rashid, Sam Frohman, Kenneth A. Howery, Jason Bowden, Will Griffith, Bettina Kadoorie. The film is edited by Bob Eisenhardt, ACE, and Simona Ferrari. The directors of photography are Clair Popkin, Jimmy Chin, Christopher Murphy.

Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, a Romanian-Norwegian Pentecostal couple, move with their five children from Romania to Norway after Mihai’s parents die, seeking closeness to Lisbet’s family, who share their faith. Settling in an isolated coastal village, they form a bond with their neighbors, the Halbergs. When their daughter Elia appears at school with bruises, suspicions arise about the family's strict religious upbringing. Fjord explores clashing worldviews, conformity, tolerance, and the boundaries of freedom and intimacy.

Across five continents, the film encounters farmers, scientists, and Indigenous leaders reshaping humanity's relationship to land.

An intimate portrait of iconic 20th-century artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, told through the eyes of those closest to him: his family.

A definitive and unvarnished examination of the controversial and headline-making CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter.

Churchill, Manitoba sells itself as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World,” but what happens when the mascot becomes a problem? In their debut feature, Canadian filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman track a polar bear through encounters with tourists, trucks, sirens, traps, wildlife officers, hunters, and relocation. The town profits from ursine spectacle, but Vanden and Weisman portray bears as neither scenery nor symbol. Instead, the bear becomes our protagonist, trapped in a system built to watch, sell, manage, and remove it. Nuisance Bear overturns the nature documentary from the inside. Every chase, stare, and shutter click asks who is really intruding on whom. Moving between Churchill and the Inuit community of Arviat - with guidance and narration from late Inuit elder Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons - the film touches on issues of climate crisis, conservation, tourism, colonial settlement, and coexistence. Winner of the highly coveted Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, this is a formally daring work about spectacle, survival, and the violence hidden inside the word “nuisance”.

A decade after his death, genre-defying filmmaker William Greaves has one last trick up his sleeve with what he considered the most important event he captured on film: a 1972 party he engineered with the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance.

Four strangers' paths cross by chance, leading to complex emotional entanglements that challenge their existing relationships and force them to confront uncomfortable truths about love and commitment.

In 2006, To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history.

Through five portraits of relatives and mentors, five expressions of resistance, Pegah Ahangarani sketches her life story. Drawing from personal archives, home videos, street protests footage, newspapers, and recorded voices, she retraces more than 40 years of Iran’s history. From the early days of 1979, until the war that began in 2026, she pieces together intimate and collective memories, forming the portrait of a country shaped by political repression and in constant hope for a revolution.

Filmmaker Ross McElwee has spent forty years recording himself and his family, creating documentaries that chronicle the shifting contours of American society through the lens of personal history. His son Adrian grew up inside those films, and eventually began experimenting with the camera himself. When a Hollywood producer acquires the rights to adapt McElwee’s 1986 breakthrough SHERMAN’S MARCH into a work of fiction, twenty-year-old Adrian sees a chance for his father to finally reach a wider audience. As the adaptation stalls, Adrian gets swept into a deepening drug addiction and dies from a fentanyl overdose, leaving behind hours of personal video footage. Retracing Adrian’s final years, McElwee reckons with what his camera captured and what remained hauntingly out of frame. As he reflects on a lifetime behind the camera, Ross’s own effort to remix and remake the movie that Adrian never got to finish takes on new significance. An ever-expanding hall of mirrors built from decades of home movies, REMAKE is both McElwee’s attempt to hold onto his son, and to let him go.

SHAUN THE SHEEP: THE BEAST OF MOSSY BOTTOM sees the residents of Mossy Bottom Farm looking forward to Halloween – until the clumsy Farmer trashes the Flock’s beloved pumpkin patch! When Shaun turns MAD SCIENTIST to fix the problem, things rapidly spiral out of control... With The Farmer missing and a wild beast roaming the woods of Mossingham, all the ingredients are in place for a monstrously fun family adventure.

Vietnam War's first Black special ops team reunites to share their untold story, revealing hidden military history and exploring whether confronting the past can heal old wounds.

The Bend in the River chronicles five close friends over nearly fifty years. Starting in 1978, director Robb Moss documents his friend’s outdoor rent-free life during one clothing-optional rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. In 2003, he filmed his friends again coming to terms with their transition from being young and carefree to responsible and middle-aged. Now, in 2025, Moss finds his friends in their 70s grappling with the choices they’ve made as individuals and as a generation. Cathy, Barry, Jim, Danny, and Jeff have lived most of their lives. They’ve held jobs, been married, had children, seen those children married, divorced, remarried, helped raise grandchildren, dreamt, suffered, succeeded and survived. The film interweaves moments from the distant past with those of the recent present, taking viewers back-and-forth through time and inviting candid reflections on what it means to live and grow old.

A found footage documentary from a concert tour in 1995 that features live performances, candid interviews and a behind the scene view of what it's like to be on tour with the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Beck, Pavement, Rancid, The Amps and Bikini Kill.

Explores the romantic journey of PK Mahanandia, a Delhi street artist who trekked 6,000 miles by bicycle in 1977, venturing across continents to reunite with the woman he loved.

A filmmaker applies lessons from a Hallmark movie writing workshop to pitch a documentary about concrete.

A religious fanatic marries a gullible widow whose young children are reluctant to tell him where their real daddy hid $10,000 he'd stolen in a robbery.

Harry Lehman (John Turturro) is an aging pickpocket who plies his trade with ever-diminishing returns in a drastically changed New York. Wallets stuffed with cash have been replaced by easily cancelled credit cards, and Harry struggles to make ends meet as he cares for his disabled wife, Rosie. When he unwittingly purloins and fences a valuable USB stick, Harry finds himself in a race against time to return the loot or face the rage of a vengeful crime family.

The Story of Documentary Film traces the history of documentary from its very beginnings to the present day. Drawing on Mark Cousins’ decades of research, the series re-examines classics of the genre including Hoop Dreams, The Gleaners and I, Shoah, Stop Making Sense and Paris Is Burning. Alongside these celebrated films, it introduces audiences to striking new discoveries and overlooked works from across the globe, with a spotlight on the many great female filmmakers who have too often been written out of the history of documentary filmmaking. Structured chronologically, but interspersed with stand-alone thematic sections, the series challenges prevailing assumptions about what documentary is, offering a captivating new perspective on the history of a form that continues to shape how we understand the world around us.

On the outskirts of a village by the sea, lives a Fisherwoman; smelly, single and perpetually ridiculed. One day, fed up with her stuffy, small-minded neighbors, she commissions herself a husband to be made from wicker. In an otherwise conservative town, this unconventional romance sparks outrage, jealousy and chaos.

Young lovers Sailor and Lula run from the variety of weirdos that Lula's mom has hired to kill Sailor.

Shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup, CIA agents Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell) are dispatched from Santiago to Easter island by their bureau chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi). Amongst the Island's iconic statues, and as the longtime partners wrestle with their dark pasts and present conspiracies, Chris's newfound bond with a pair of rebellious students (Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas) threatens to send everyone’s trip to this remote paradise sideways.

Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss. From boundary-pushing directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim comes You Can See Everything.