Variations on Iserois Landscapes

In 2002, Lana Kaiser became well known in the first season of the German version of the Idol television franchise. She was born in 1985 and went by her birth name Daniel Küblböck. At only 17 years old she polarised the audience with her androgynous appearance and open bisexuality. On September 9th 2018, Lana disappeared from a cruise ship on her way to North America. Most media outlets and the majority of the public didn‘t consider calling her by her chosen name, Lana Kaiser. Philipp Gufler's video installation is a personal portrait of the singer and entertainer.

In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the last name of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years. Institute Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses Lumière, Le Cinema! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures. The result is not only a glorious re(telling) of the genesis of cinema but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.

Canceled short film.

In early 2020, MUTA - International Festival of Audiovisual Appropriation and Cine Íntimo rescued and digitised a Peruvian archive of orphaned 8mm and Super 8 home movies. With the aim of restoring these lost memories, we sent the images around the world. This omnibus film is the result of the intervention of this material, by 14 experimental filmmakers. Fourteen perspectives and ways of experiencing appropriation. Fourteen variations on the intimate.

Istanbul: Chronopolis is an experimental documentary that explores the city as a living organism where the linear flow of time is disrupted and the past and future coexist. Structured around a thematic cycle of birth, speed, and decay, the film uses rhythmic visuals and archival footage to bridge temporal gaps. Through a fourteen-minute mathematical edit, it replaces linguistic narrative with the evocative language of time-lapse and slow-motion cinematography. The project invites the audience to transcend chronological time and experience Istanbul as an eternal moment—an entity existing solely within its own timeless cycle.

Memory is a collaboration with musician Noah Lennox (Panda Bear), exploring the relationship between a musician and filmmaker and their personal reflection on memories. From Super 8 home movies and entirely handmade, this film explores familiar memories, the present moment combined with past experiences and how it all seems to evade from our present memory.

Pictures taken between France and Mexico running at 8 frames per second.

During the last forty years, the photographer Sebastião Salgado has been travelling through the continents, in the footsteps of an ever-changing humanity. He has witnessed the major events of our recent history: international conflicts, starvations and exodus… He is now embarking on the discovery of pristine territories, of the wild fauna and flora, of grandiose landscapes: a huge photographic project which is a tribute to the planet's beauty. Salgado's life and work are revealed to us by his son, Juliano, who went with him during his last journeys, and by Wim Wenders, a photographer himself.

A seagull, a dog, a child, a call to prayer; Looking through a window, the corridor of a train, the wall of a medina; Everyday life is momentarily paused through the eyes of a stranger in an unknown land.

An experimental odyssey through altered realities and reconstructed archives, where wandering voices of the past, present, and future unravel the elusive nature of time and memory.

A grandmother faintly narrates her quilts, as seen through the warped glass lens of a broken camera, a laptop webcam, and a clunky Xerox scanner.

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.

Rummage is an experimental documentary of the legendary rummage sale that takes place in Far Hills, New Jersey every first weekend in May and October.

Made with virtually no budget during COVID-19 quarantine in 2020, IRANIAN LIVES MATTER abstractly recounts the true story of what occurred in Iran during the November 2019 protests, sparked by a surprise hike in gasoline prices, which quickly spread across the entire nation and was subsequently crushed by the dictator's iron fist, resulting in the death of approximately 1500 protesters, as reported by Reuters. IRANIAN LIVES MATTER is an experimental documentary, an audio-visual endurance test that audibly takes its audience through the chaos in the streets of Iran as the brutal regime cracks down on Iranian protesters, while visually showing the hands of the dictatorship as it crosses out 1500 lives one by one to further emphasize the scale of the massacre and show to a world desensitized to news of mass killings in the Middle East what the term "1500 dead" truly means.

Hercules travels by bicycle from Krefeld on the Lower Rhine to Olympus, the throne of ancient deities. The Hercules myth, as a primal myth of male power, is questioned through biographical reflections and the staging of mythological echoes. The dramaturgical structure of the hero's journey disintegrates in a multi-material perspective into questions about male identity, ideals and remorse.

A speaking into the void.

The Kurdish Iraqi poet and actor Zeravan Khalil travels with his dog through an Alpine gorge after fleeing from IS war and genocide. As he remembers the abomination, he writes a poem with the title “You drive me mad” in Kurmanji Kurdish. In his home country, Yazidic Kurds are forbidden to work in his profession. Then he eats his apple and wanders through Europe’s middle with more hope.

‘Under the Weight of a Waking Dream’ is Zefier's debut swan song to the ending year. Comprised of poetry and endless enumerations is a diaristic film chronicling the lessons and contradictions found throughout the human experience.

A woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler, meditations on time and memory expressed in words and images from places as far-flung as Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco.

Then, now, where? how?