This collection of short films represents a hint of the tectonic shift in the underground film world in connection with the punk rock “movement.” Restored from original negatives, it showcases the reasonably well-known alongside the extremely rare, from music shorts to impressionistic documentary.

The Unbookables is a narrative documentary about stand-up comics who have spent their careers pushing limits–on stage and off. Relegated to small venues and touring in a crappy van through the Midwest they careen between the desire to succeed and the reality that there may be nothing left to lose. Road life is far from glamorous: comics come and go and cruel pranks and hard drinking punctuate their obsidian dark comedy on stage. They succeed and fail-spectacularly. When they face being fired for going too far on stage, the conflict culminates in a showdown: compromise or double down?

The third and most successful of four stand-up act movies release by Richard Pryor on film. The stand-up act includes Pryor’s frank discussion about his freebasing addiction, as well as the infamous night on June 9, 1980 that he caught on fire.

Performance artist Marina Abramovic prepares for a major retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

A documentary on the electric guitar from the point of view of three significant rock musicians: the Edge, Jimmy Page and Jack White.

In America, we define ourselves in the superlative: we are the biggest, strongest, fastest country in the world. Is it any wonder that so many of our heroes are on performance enhancing drugs? Director Christopher Bell explores America’s win-at-all-cost culture by examining how his two brothers became members of the steroid-subculture in an effort to realize their American dream.

Follows three young Texas cowgirls tasked with carrying on their families’ legacies amidst a volatile landscape and industry. The film explores the modern West: a place where the male cowboy mythology must answer to a new, honest, and some would say subversive, female story. The jarring transition between generations illuminates the weight of heritage and tradition. As the old guard wanes, these three women stand amidst the vast ranchlands of Texas. Who has the authority to claim our traditions when only those who have been overlooked are left to carry them on?

Isolation Man is a film about super-powered human called ‘the Exquisite Vanishteer’, has caused a catastrophe by making the population of the western hemisphere disappear. The remaining eastern journalistic community interviews and follows up on the superhuman to discover his humanity… before United Nation forces move in to neutralize him.

Physicist Ted Hall is recruited to join the Manhattan Project as a teenager and goes to Los Alamos with no idea what he’ll be working on. When he learns the true nature of the weapon being designed, he fears the post-war risk of a nuclear holocaust and begins to pass significant information to the Soviet Union.

From the team behind Man on Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. Following Nim’s extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true nature – and indeed our own – is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.

Stephen Dorff and director Casey Tebo take us on a journey into the vast and confusing world of legal cannabis and hemp in the United States where things are not exactly what they seem. A plant, a medicine, a drug? Illegal for decades for many confusing reasons, the most glaring being systematic racism, we’re still stuck in that rut today in many states. It’s almost as if everyone has a different take, which is why even in these forward thinking times, Cannabis and Hemp still remain – BARELY LEGAL.

Maryam Zaree was born in one of Iran’s most notorious political prisons. In her documental debut, she embarks on a personal search for clues: in an effort to break the silence, she talks with her parents about the violent circumstances surrounding her birth. And she asks other children born in Evin about their experiences and the traumatic consequences. Maryam Zaree’s cinematic approach unfolds through her own biography, but beyond this it alerts us to the horrors of persecution and dehumanisation in Iran and the rest of the world.