Filmed in Berlin, July 1990. Images of workers taking down the wall and street peddlers selling pieces of it to make a living.
Chapter Two represents a continuation of daily observations from the environment of Manhattan compiled over a period from 1980-1981. This is the second part of an extended life's portrait of New York.
A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.
A film about a young woman's future plans in Munich, Germany. MUNCHEN, RAPHAELA (also known as RAPHAELA RING MUNCHEN) is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series of commissioned shorts (made for the cost of a lunch between Plante and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson).
Follows the story of "Grizzly Man" Timothy Treadwell and what the thirteen summers in a National Park in Alaska were like in his attempt to protect the grizzly bears. The film is full of unique images and a look into the spirit of a man who sacrificed himself for nature.
The first film made by Markopoulos after moving to Europe, Bliss was shot over the course of two days using only available light to create a lyrical study of the interior of the Church of St. John on the island of Hydra.
An anonymous multinational company interested in capitalizing natural resources, deceitfully leads a powerful politician's wife and her chauffeur on to an empty flat in a big city promising them a better life. The couple are surveilled upon by a faceless representative of the company who not only controls the supplies that go into the flat, but also mysteriously, the space and time inside. As the couple are coerced and blackmailed into going through a series of role-playing, the lines between the past, present and future mystically get blurred. Also blurred are their very existence.
In a meditation on the meaning behind sports in a Post-Apartheid South Africa, three young girls muse on their hopes and dreams as aspiring Drum Majorettes.
An exiled magician finds an opportunity for revenge against his enemies muted when his daughter and the son of his chief enemy fall in love in this uniquely structured retelling of the 'The Tempest'.
A look at the varied new ways Americans are choosing to both find meaning and celebrate life as it comes to an end.
A portrait film about a Kentucky drag queen who ran his own club on Main Street in downtown Lexington, Kentucky.
A melancholic look at Mainz's Jubiläumsbrunnen, whose decayed charm is in a state of conflict with other buildings in Mainz.
Four young men have the same dream in which a mysterious voice tells them to search for Wal-Mart. They each awake and manage to find each other. A soothsayer offers very clear directions to their destination, but secretly plans to sabotage their journey. Several weird mishaps occur on their adventure.
The innovative and influential British filmmaker Derek Jarman was invited to direct the Pet Shop Boys' 1989 tour. This film is a series of iconoclastic images he created for the background projections. Stunning, specially shot sequences (featuring actors, the Pet Shop Boys, and friends of Jarman) contrast with documentary montages of nature, all skillfully edited to music tracks.
A aspiring novelist operates a tiny neighborhood bookstore. His wife is a talented painter. Their marriage is disintegrating, and they are about to sign their divorce papers. Meanwhile, the legendary Casanova and his lover Lavinia are characters trapped inside of a 17th-century children's book. The tragedy of the impending divorce triggers the release of Casanova and Lavinia from the confines of the children's pop-up book.
“Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days”, is a four hour feature film by Maximilian Le Cain and Rouzbeh Rashidi. Structured in two sections or ‘takes’ of two hours each, this dream-like, experimental project offers two complementary explorations of cinematic form that skirt around possible narratives, ducking through a series of fluctuating audio-visual categories and intensities.
Homo Sapiens Project (200) was completed in 2020 as part of the 20th anniversary of Experimental Film Society. This eight-hour experimental feature is constituted from short film experiments made between 2000 to 2010. These films have already undergone many metamorphoses over the years. They were always restless wandering spirits seeking a permanent place of rest but so far without success. Each section of Homo Sapiens Project (200) was made under the unique condition of living out a form of subtle therapeutic practice. Collectively they reflect major life-changing events, formalistic mutations and thematic shifts within Rouzbeh Rashidi’s filmography. In spite of this, they could not find the peace of a satisfactory final shape. Indeed, they are about peace, something that rarely (if ever) exists within Rashidi’s work. But now, after twenty years of roaming the subconscious, they have come to rest in a permanent retirement in one world, one very personal floating planet.
Homo Sapiens Project (201) was completed in 2021 as part of re-envisioning and restructuring Rashidi's filmography. This nineteen-hour experimental feature is constituted from many feature films produced between 2002 to 2014. These experimental features were made as a type of test or trial experiment. Rashidi assembled the films from footage accumulated over the years, archival footage, found footage and rushes donated by his close collaborators.
In this innovative blend of documentary and fiction, Rosa and Paloma, two trans Latina sex workers in Queens, New York, fight transphobic violence, persecution from the police, and defend their cases of trafficking in an increasingly anti-migration political environment in the U.S.
Sunny. Semantic sequences guide the gaze, a gaze that is sometimes raised, propelled downwards, then too high or motionless in front of an unrecognizable and yet so familiar vision. The images, linked by echoes of chromatic palettes and linear layers, scroll to the rhythm of a voice, reminiscent of an incantation. Sacred.