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Full Frame Picks (By): Poetry Fox

    Chris Vitiello in a fox suit, seated with a typewriter on a table in front of him

     

    Chris Vitiello is a writer—and the current Durham Poet Laureate. As the Poetry Fox, he writes custom poems on typewriters at hundreds of events nationwide each year. His most recent books are Irresponsibility and Obedience and his art criticism won the 2017 Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism.

    Full Frame’s 2026 lineup is a robust collection of new and archival documentaries from around the world. With so many great films to choose from, we thought it would be helpful to have a guide. We asked Chris to select the five films he’s most excited to see at this year’s Full Frame—we think you’ll be intrigued by his picks.

     

    Passes are on sale now through April 8, 2026. Single tickets available beginning April 9. Purchase a pass >>

     

     

    black and white image of Barbara Hammer holding a camera

    BARBARA FOREVER (Brydie O’Connor)

    I like compulsive artists and Barbara Hammer was one of those. When I saw Nitrate Kisses, it was a look into a realm I’d not had a look into, a unique experience for me, and formally expressive of queer life too, and so I wanted to see everything she made. So I would jump at this chance to see her life story. She made like 100 films—a person for whom living and making films was the same thing, always documenting expressing witnessing asking exploring all at once and unceasing. And yet all of this just became kind of a single fact through her work. Sometimes objectivity and subjectivity are the same thing.

     

     

    A woman puts in an earring, looking into a mirror

    THE COOL WORLD (Dir. Shirley Clarke)

    I am a big Shirley Clarke fan—her film Portrait of Jason is a favorite, so thrilling and harrowing. But I’ve seen a lot of her short, abstract work too (thanks, Criterion!) and love how she captures the ethos of 60s New York City. The restlessness, the inequity, the energy, the critique. Clarke always does what jazz does—expressing something within but also pointing at something all around. Her subjectivity is essential, her particular way of witnessing what’s happening. Seeing what she saw in Harlem then is a rare opportunity. And also Frederick Wiseman produced this film and he just passed away and has been on my mind.

     

    IDEAS OF ORDER (dir. Erin Espelie)

    I want to see any film that Erin Espelie makes. She does what I want to do in a poem—bring many disparate things together to connect them into a resonant whole. Entropy, mice, cancer, oxygen: it takes an expansive intelligence and a curious vision to bring all of this into a singular, profound existential statement. Espelie makes films that are about the entirety of time and space—and locates your life within that expanse. Who else does that? (If Espelie’s film hadn’t been on the program, I would have chosen Jessica Beardsley’s Life Without Dreams here, which I’ve actually already seen, and it’s evocative and epic and great in this same way.)

     

     

    A woman lies on a bed, looking up at the ceiling

    MOTHER LIDIA (Dirs. Juan Bautista Tagle, Joaquín Nercasseau)

    I have a fascination with healers like the Chilean woman who is the subject of this film. Like, you would be complaining to a neighbor about some problem, physical or psychological or whatever, and they would say “you should go see the old woman up the street,” and you would go to that house and give the dollars wadded up in your pockets to someone in the kitchen, and they would motion you into the bedroom, and the old woman would be in there, almost infirm with this uncanny ability to see the truth, and you would dump out the junk drawer of your problem, and she would tell you what to do. There are many neighborhoods with many Mother Lidias and I want more insight into all of this, I want the glimpse that this film affords us.

     

    A man stands at a mic, delivering comments. To his left, a seated man is suppounded by children's picture books on display.

    TRUE NORTH (Dir. Michèle Stephenson)

    When I look down the Full Frame program, I don’t primarily gravitate toward “issue” or “history” films like this one. But the idea of liberation has been on my mind, and specifically how difficult it is for a revolutionary movement to transition into power, from outside to inside. Often they become the regimes they had revolted against. The Black Liberation movement didn’t. So I’m curious to see not only the information in this film, but see what lessons there might be for the moment. To be frank, we protest today, almost identically to how they protested in the 60s, and that seems weird to me. I think this film might be incredibly useful. I would watch it with pen and notebook in lap.