Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

A Turkish woman in Brighton shares her visual diary. Witness her ups and downs, her intimacy and vulnerability. After revealing hers, the film invites you to confront your ‘tiny little things’. It presents a slice-of-life experience with an abstract flow and deals with one’s existence in this world. There is no escape from family and the things in your mind, even if you are thousands of miles away. The meaning changes constantly, and the camera becomes the extension of her mind. And somebody put that voice in her brain.

Through phone call conversations, an aspiring Ilocano filmmaker relates to his mother working in Italy about his dreams and struggles while documenting the invisible betweenness of their language and distance.

An unhinged, diaristic examination of devastating friendship breakups.

A sitting man listens to his thoughts, but can't catch any of them.

A loose collection of scenes in Hong Kong shot over a five-year period, this film begins with the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and ends right before the summer of 2019, when large-scale social unrest and violent resistance erupted. The everyday scenes capture the ambience and the landscape of change in the city, standing as a quiet prelude to the ensuing conflicts.

A personal documentary questioning the ways in which family imposed narratives force us into roles that we spend our lives either rebelling against or conforming to.

The day with the sky neither too blue nor too grey. With a hint of red. The train crowded and the backpacks between the feet. The loves on every corner, the ones we pretend not to see.

This short, started early on into sobriety, finished about nine months in, is a collage of diaries and notes, collected from within addiction and into recovery.

On January 1st, 1999, Caveh Zahedi started a one-year video diary. The idea was to shoot one minute each day. This is the result.

A short documentary project that attempts to encapsulate what it looks and feels like to be an American Teenager in 2022.

10/26

Reminiscences of a trip to Čáslav

Maria Lang is my very close filmmaker friend who lives in the southern german countryside. We see her gardening and visiting an exhibition of female impressionist painters.

In 2022, when the economic crisis in her native country was at its peak, she decided to visit her family there. She turned her short trip into a collage-like diary in which she reflects on her relationship with her homeland, which is in a state of protracted decay. The film is composed of spontaneous snapshots capturing the author's stay, interspersed with inserted captions serving as personal, often poetically formulated comments and observations. As a result, the film does not hide its strongly subjective perspective, but at the same time builds on it to make an important statement that shows the transformation of Lebanese society in everyday details such as the appearance of the city itself or in the intimate sphere of the author's family life.

Made over six years in the hotels of six different countries, Hotel Diaries charts the 'War on Terror' era of Bush and Blair through a seven-part series of video recordings that relate personal experiences to the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel/Palestine. In these works, which play upon chance and coincidence, hotel rooms are employed as 'found' film sets, where architecture, furnishing and decoration become the means by which the filmmaker’s small adventures are linked to major world events.

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.

As Janelas Me Diziam Que Os Carros Cor De Lembrança Ainda Percorriam as Movimentadas Ruas do Esquecimento

An average nobody explores the struggle of self-recognition through the lens of a photographer who has spent his life documenting everything.

This short experimental diary film reveals my struggles with mental illness in my adolescence and queer adulthood while simultaneously reflecting upon my joyous childhood experiences. I investigate when and how my depression began and explain that my relationships with the people I love have supported me through my harder times. The film incorporates footage shot over May and June 2023 and archival home videos. Overall, I aim to resolve my "growing pains" through the medium of diary film and by reconnecting with my younger self.

A short documentary by Jim McBride.