Cinematic Melancholy

With noise-canceling headphones, they communicate with an inaudible counterpart. Decoupled, they move around the room and meet their surroundings. Intimate stories and needs are discussed. The personal blends into a shared portrait.

An essay style film in the vein of Orson Welles' "F For Fake" and Jon Jost's "Speaking Directly". From 2011 to 2013, filmmaker Kristian Day randomly documented the art and actions of the award winning metal sculptor, James Bearden. Refusing to make another artist documentary, Day insisted on illustrating Bearden's creative process through surreal and id oriented story telling.

On April 1st, 2022, my grandfather passed away and i felt lost. I think my path changed when, some days after he passed away, i was offered a small VHS camera. "Moving Memories" is a visual journey that makes the viewer reflect on our momentary presence on earth and questions the nature of memory. Throughout this journey, we get to the conclusion that memories are more than just static photographs in our minds, they're alive and in constant movement, changing while we evolve as individuals. These memories have influence and help us to move on.

Through the footage from his family's Handycam, the director creates a portrait of his family that is falling apart.

Metropia

Florent Tillon takes an anthropological lens to Las Vegas, Nevada. What he finds is some curious new species of Americana. (Dorothy Woodend, DOXA Documentary Film Festival)

A street in downtown Warsaw transforms into a kaleidoscopic portrait of Polish society. Behind the viewfinder is an Indian immigrant, who seeks to overcome the boundaries between himself and an anxiety-ridden country.

Make Moravia Great Again

This experimental Western horror film set in the Moravian region of Slovácko offers a new take on the legend of Saint Wenceslas. Against the backdrop of a shabby folk festival, the mythical prince Boleslav, a zombie from a wine cellar, battles his brother Wenceslas over the nature of Czech statehood and a plate of tomato soup.

The second part of the endless series about Moravia offers an even darker descent into the soul of Moravia, which is, however, intoxicating like a slightly delirious state after a sip of wine and chewing on a clod of mother earth. A visually distracting journey focused on the undercurrents of Moravian identity, whose echoes even Friedrich Nietzsche would not want to hear...

In this new video essay, filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe delves into the dread-inducing mood and tone of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s modern horror classic Cure, deploying a dizzying range of cinematic references to unravel the film’s eerie magic.

Morena

Television was invented as a result of scientific and technical research. Its power as a medium of news and entertainment altered all preceding media of news and entertainment

Reminiscences of a trip to Čáslav

Every image in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography comes from gay erotic videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism. The video provides a glimpse of young men responding to the pressures of an unfamiliar world, one in which money, power and sex are now connected.

From the behavior, discourse, and appearance of individual actors, Vachek composes, in the form of a mosaic, a broad and many-layered film-argument about Czechoslovak democracy in the period of its rebirth, all administered with the director’s ini­mitable point of view.

"No Refunds" is a visceral, tangled descent into the transactional dynamics of intimate encounters, told through the language of bodies, sheets, and reflections, where the purchase of queer sex work is laid bare. As the filmmaker simultaneously takes on the roles of client and audience, the boundaries between documentary and performance fade, unraveling the artifice at the heart of sex work and the act of filmmaking.

Premiered at the 2017 Locarno International Film Festival.

In this video I share my experience as the first Resident of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin during the winter of 2016-2017. Produced for the Goethe Institute.

Equal parts documentary, visual essay, experimental collage narrative, and parodic homage to and of all things Barbie, this caustic and exciting visual foray embraces the complicated terrain of feminist discourse, cultural criticism, and political rhetoric, as well as insights on gender, identity, and personal experience where all roads lead back to the phenomena that is Barbie.