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Poster for Birth of a Nation
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Released
1997 · FILM

Birth of a Nation

Written by
Runtime
85 min
Documentary
Streaming on
  • The Criterion Channel

Synopsis

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 31

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Steve SingletonShot by Ian WilsonScored by Andy J ClarkDesigned by Jamie Leonard

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