New York-based Zeitgeist Films was founded in 1988 in a single office. They have acquired and distributed over 200 of the finest independent films from the U.S. and around the world including the early works of Todd Haynes, Christopher Nolan, François Ozon, Laura Poitras, Atom Egoyan and the Quay Brothers. Their catalog has included films from the world's most outstanding filmmakers including Agnes Varda, Guy Maddin, Olivier Assayas, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kiarostami, Derek Jarman, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Peter Greenaway, Philippe Garrel, Yvonne Rainer, Jan Svankmajer, Margarethe Von Trotta, Andrei Zyvagintsev and Raoul Peck. Zeitgeist is renowned for ground-breaking documentaries which include Ballets Russes, Bill Cunningham New York, The Corporation, Derrida, Into Great Silence, Manufactured Landscapes, My Country My Country, Trouble the Water, Last Train Home, Up the Yangtze and many more.
Five Zeitgeist films have been nominated for Academy Awards and one, Nowhere in Africa, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2003. Zeitgeist’s films have been honored by festivals throughout the world with Grand Prizes at Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Tribeca, and IDFA in Amsterdam. The Museum of Modern Art honored Zeitgeist with a month-long, 20th anniversary retrospective of their films in 2008.
In 2017, Zeitgeist entered into a multi-year strategic alliance with renowned film distributor Kino Lorber and under that banner continues to release notable films like Michal Aviad’s Working Woman, Alexandra Dean’s Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, Alison Reid’s The Woman Who Loved Giraffes, Astra Taylor’s What Is Democracy?, Matt Tyrnauer’s Studio 54, and Matt Wolf’s Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You and Ric Burns’ Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, continuing the Zeitgeist tradition of distributing quality documentaries and narrative films.
