For example in 2005 the Festival showed a retrospective of the works of Soviet documentary maker Dziga Vertov alongside a season of a Studio Ghibli films.
He was apprenticed to Boris Kaufman, a brother of Dziga Vertov, who much later worked in the United States on such films as On the Waterfront (1954).
It regularly presented work by filmmakers such as Ken Jacobs, Johan van der Keuken, Yvonne Rainer, Christine Vachon, Dziga Vertov and many others who created films that were outside of the commercial mainstream in the United States.
Narrative cinema is usually contrasted to films that present information, such as a nature documentary, as well as to some experimental films (works such as Wavelength by Michael Snow, Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov, or films by Chantal Akerman).
In 2010 Glowicka and Flores collaborated again with the 15 minute performance piece RETINa inspired by the pioneering science of Étienne-Jules Marey that impacted cinema and the early documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov.
Other noted examples of the genre include Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's Manhatta (1921), Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), Andre Sauvage's Etudes sur Paris (1928), and Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929)
Mangolte credits Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) as the film that made her decide to become a cinematographer.