Movies: Autobiographical

Iron and Silk is a 1990 movie based on the eponymous book by American writer Mark Salzman. It details his journey to China after college to study Chinese wu shu, better known in the west as kung fu, and to teach English. Though not trained as an acto...

The first part of Bill Douglas' influential trilogy harks back to his impoverished upbringing in early-'40s Scotland. Cinema was his only escape - he paid for it with the money he made from returning empty jam jars - and this escape is reflected most...

The story, set in the heady post-war 50s into the early 60s , revolves around a love triangle between Tomoko, long playing the mistress to married older writer Shitto and the new stud who comes into her life, Ryota Kinoshita. Tomoko is sick and tired...

G.J. Echternkamp tells the story of his relationship with his parents, his mother Cindy and his step-father, Frank. Frank used to be a member of OXO, a band from the '80s whose one hit wonder scored with the song "Whirly Girl". Cindy was the ultimate...

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Leo Popper is a happy family man living in rural Bohemia in the years preceding the Nazi invasion. Out of economic necessity he moves with his family to the big city and becomes an enterprising vacuum cleaner salesman. There he embarks on a series of...

When Jamie's maternal grandmother dies, he and his brother Tommy are separated - Tommy is taken off to a welfare home and Jamie goes to live with his other grandmother and uncle. His life is far from happy, filled with silence, rejection and bouts of...

A true story about a gay boy growing up in the collapsing USSR, his courageous mail-order bride mother, and their adventurous escape to Seattle in the 90s....

Danny sets out to uncover the story of his estranged father. Piecing together mementos, stories from his dad’s old friends, and hard conversations with his mother, Danny starts on a mission to solve the puzzle of his father and finds himself instead...

Adaptation of Arthur Miller's semi-autobiographical play about Quentin, a Jewish intellectual from New York who must reexamine his life and his troubled relationship with Holga....

Heironymus Merkin is an internationally successful singer approaching middle age who retells his life story in a series of production numbers on a seashore in front of his two toddlers and aged mother. Merkin's promiscuous relationships with women ar...

A semi-autobiographical short about a young man musing about the nostalgic joy of being a careless child....

Aussie boys of Asian descent candidly discuss their status as a "minority within a minority"....

Filmmaker Alan Berliner chronicles his lifelong battle with insomnia in this intimate documentary. The cameras roll as he tries to quiet his overly active mind so he can get a decent night's sleep, capturing the details of what it's like to suffer fr...

Waris Hussein’s acclaimed drama is based on the autobiography of Firdaus Kanga, who stars in the lead role of Brit, a young man born with brittle bone disease, which causes him to have never grown beyond four feet tall. The film follows his sexual aw...

This is a book excerpt adaptation from Anna Akana's "So Much I Want To Tell You: Letters To My Little Sister"...

Just after Isidore moves to France to study filmmaking, his best friend dies back in the US. Through documentary, performance, and animation, a ghostly portrait emerges, prompting Isidore to question his relationships with his parents and his boyfrie...

A lone passenger is reflected in the windows of a train crawling through layers of textures towards Minsk. During his absence, the city has not changed: all the streets are frozen, long-gone voices can be heard in the empty rooms and around the corne...

Little Pu spends a summer in Norrland with all his relatives. He and his brother get to hear the story about the watchmaker who hung himself, learns to shoot with a bow and follow his father on a bicycle trip....

In his first HBO comedy special, Gary Gulman offers candid reflections on his struggles with depression through stand-up and short documentary interludes. While speaking to issues of mental health, Gulman also offers his observations on a number of t...