A pack of strays – seven dogs and one woman live in the shadows of Moscow. Hidden from the totalitarian authorities, two species share their existence on the verge of disappearance. They are straying in constant restlessness through a savage landscape where the city is cracking. Shot from the animal’s point of view, patterns of mutual dependence and taming begin to blur.
When asked a question on politics, late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once answered: “I write about love to expose the conditions that don’t allow me to write about love.” In TWO TRAVELERS TO A RIVER Palestinian actress Manal Khader recites such a poem by Mahmoud Darwish: a concise reflection on how things could have been.
In Manhattan's Central Park, a film crew directed by William Greaves is shooting a screen test with various pairs of actors. It's a confrontation between a couple: he demands to know what's wrong, she challenges his sexual orientation. Cameras shoot the exchange, and another camera records Greaves and his crew. Sometimes we watch the crew discussing this scene, its language, and the process of making a movie. Is there such a thing as natural language? Are all things related to sex? The camera records distractions - a woman rides horseback past them; a garrulous homeless vet who sleeps in the park chats them up. What's the nature of making a movie?
A young woman is fed up with the usual consumer's television and begins to make her own television, or more correctly, closevision. She is now a reporter who wanders around Berlin with her camera and 'telecasting apparatus' on her back. Her livingroom has been transformed into a studio and here the different programs are assembled and aired: statements, interviews, realistic and phantastic programs.
Soul Cage is a non-verbal documentary, which shows the process of creation. The specially composed music builds the dramaturgy of the film on equal rights with the image. This “cinematographic sonata” explores the boundaries of documentary and operates with details, shadows and mystery. The film gets inside the art process of Johanna Forsberg, who lives in the north of Sweden. From the raw metal mesh, cold and resistant, through the fragile moment of creation, to the darkness of the workshop – where everything is possible and the creations have their own life and souls.
Los días azules
A solo audiovisual performance. Eighth entry into deeply beguiling series of works responding to the Alps acted as the closing night event of Alchemy Film Festival. The images are studies of the Alps degraded and distorted live at the front of the auditorium; the picture pixelated, streams of colour engulfed the screen like a crashed desktop, and as hawks hovered over the mountains they left staggered trails of glitches across the screen like computerised vapour trails. The audio was also created live using short atonal precomposed tracks. The aim was to create a digital alchemy, an abstracted journey into the mountains, a wild wonder inside and out.
Experimental short film by Barbara Sykes
A funeral car cruises the streets of Medellín, while a young director tells the story of his past in this violent and conservative city. He remembers the pre-production of his first film, a Class-B movie with ghosts. The young queer scene of Medellín is casted for the film, but the main protagonist dies of a heroin overdose at the age of 21, just like many friends of the director. Anhell69 explores the dreams, doubts and fears of an annihilated generation, and the struggle to carry on making cinema.
The basis of the experimental film Sky Spirits are real-life shots of fireworks. The authors of the film have collected these shots from the year 2001. to 2008. The experiment explores the ultimate limits of fireworks as sources of light, showing this through real-life dynamic light patters which are led through video processors, resulting in chromatically rich animated samples. The material is "laboratory" processed and then formed into a film unit, while respecting the dramaturgy of fireworks. The original sound was used, which was, of course, subsequently processed, too. The whole work process is a kind of "homage to the tape" because the entire work is completely recorded and realised on digital video tapes, without using any kind of computer program.
Amongst the contemplative static shots of decaying architecture weaves an abstract narrative unveiling the life-cycle of a higher perception, too large to perceive. Shot at various sites across south-east England, INFRASTRATA is a study on the concept of super-organisms, and the relationship between structure and nature.
A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.
Breathe deeply: in 3 years, your molecules will circle Earth, as today’s oxygen came from nature.
An exploration of the space where femininity and criminality collide. The film collages archival footage clips culled from silent films, original footage and computer-generated imagery with a series of narratives drawn from true crime confessions, early criminological texts, and the filmmaker's own reflections. The result is a cool and piercing meditation on the way the categories of "woman" and "criminal" have been constructed.
A documentary about a person who cleans his room with a vacuum cleaner, filled with disasters and mishaps.
Documentary with fragments and records about the boundaries between art and counterculture, based on a debate held at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, in October 1968.
A film essay that intertwines the director's gaze with that of her late mother. Beyond exploring mourning and absence as exclusively painful experiences, the film pays tribute to her mother through memories embodied by places and objects that evidence the traces of her existence. The filmmaker asks herself: What does she owe her mother for who she is and how she films? To what extent does her film belong to her?
A trip that the author makes to a distant beach trying to find the place where his grandfather made a painting years ago.
An inspiring 75min DIY documentary film on new art and the young artists behind it. It was all filmed on the heat of live action of the first NOVA Contemporary Culture Festival, July and August 2010 in São Paulo, Brazil.
An experimental short film about wind and sunlight sweeping across tree leaves.