Media

During the first eighteen months of the Covid Pandemic, working remotely with other artists and musicians, I made three videos based on three stories by Edgar Allan Poe. All three of the stories make reference to a plague: Masque of The Red Death, Shadow and The Sphinx.

Masque is the longest of the three videos. We didn’t know how long this would be the situation of the world, each of us isolated, communicating over suddenly essential video conferencing–isolated except for essential..

The second short video, SHADOW, I made with Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell of Happenstance Theater. Operating the cellphone with which the video was filmed was left to the performers Mark and Sabrina, as well..

The final of the three short films made from Poe’s three tales about the plague is SPHINX. By the time I had begun working on this third film Covid had become more manageable. Alisha Trimble and I worked together in..

When the NY filmmaker read that Netanyahu said in the future Israel would be Super Sparta, he decided to make—in solidarity with the Palestinian people—the essay film Super Athens.

I had already written lyrics and sang as Death Driver, which can be heard in my feature film Ikopnophile Z. In 2024 I decided to perform as Death Driver in this music video, with music by Silent Strike.

A video installation made with interdisciplinary artist Alisha Trimble. It is inspired by the Eumenides by Aeschylus and Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles. It was filmed in an active marble quarry on the side of Mount Pentelikon, from which the marble was taken to rebuild the Acropolis in the 5th Century BCE.

Vienna, 1913, Europe is on the brink of WWI. Two young men become friends: Hugo, a musician from a privileged family, tries psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. Adolf, a struggling artist, obsessed with vegetarianism, falls in love with German Nationalism.

Chris, a theory-obsessed ne’er-do-well, debates critical theory and identity with two women in his life: Laura, a photographer and Vanessa, a professor of sociology.

An interview with Antu Yacob on playing Gloria in ADIEU LACAN.

Cinematographer Valentina Caniglia discusses filming ADIEU LACAN with director Richard C. Ledes

French documentary filmmaker Richard Hamon speaks with US filmmaker Richard C. Ledes about what first interested them about making films and about the early days of cinema, particularly in France.

An interview with Ismenia Mendes on playing Seriema in ADIEU LACAN. Director Richard C. Ledes conducts the interview.

A young woman Seriema, who is trying to understand why her path to motherhood has reached an unbearable impasse, travels to Paris to undergo psychoanalytic treatment with the maverick French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

Imani Oakley Explains the New Jersey Ballot stars Imani Oakley, candidate for the US Congress for the 10th Congressional District of New Jersey. The film is produced and directed by Richard C. Ledes. Imani Oakley makes the case that the way names are displayed visually on the New Jersey ballot unfairly favors certain candidates over others.

SPEAKER is a short film on immigration and the construction of race in the United States. It is built around two main elements: a speaker cabinet built by the filmmaker's grandfather and excerpts from the Film FORECLOSURE, a feature fiction film also directed by Ledes.

A personal encounter with the world of the refugees currently detained on the Greek island of Lesvos.

I was saddened to learn of Anthony Bourdain's suicide. In the 80s in Paris I worked as a volunteer at a crisis hotline. Bourdain's death...

Half romantic comedy, half documentary, a unique take on Hurricane Sandy with exclusive footage by a first responder shot as his own neighborhood goes up in flames.

Billy, A Greek-American whose life falls apart during the housing crisis, moves into a house haunted by traumas of racism and decides he has to lynch his son to prove he is white.

A short documentary film about the neo-Nazi party in Greece known as Golden Dawn and how the New York City Greek Community is confronting it

With levity and sadness, two grown children and their aging parents struggle with the decision whether the older generation should stay in the house where they have lived for fifty years.

A business executive hires a detective anonymously in order to have himself followed.

In 2006, shortly before his marriage to the artist Micki Watanabe, I interviewed my friend Harley Spiller at home as he showed me what he had collected in his apartment on the Upper East Side. Named by Art & Antiques magazine as one of the nation's "Top 100 Collectors," Harley has said his preference is to collect “ordinary things people don’t think twice about.”

1953, a woman living in an abusive relationship in a small town with a local gangster decides that the latest scientific invention, a transorbital lobotomy, will solve her problems.

Richard C. Ledes narrates a journey through the grounds of the old Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center, exploring the Surgical Building's facade and a graveyard void of names

Based on the "grandmother's tale" in the play Woyzeck by Georg Buchner a short film made by Richard C. Ledes in and around Paris in 1984. It is narrated by a woman (Nelly Alard) who plays Marie, the lover of Woyzeck (Rafael Mahdavi).