He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life

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

An unhinged, diaristic examination of devastating friendship breakups.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An intimate glimpse into 3 years of serene moments, compiling video, polaroids and other things that were lying around when editing.

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.

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

Raphael, Yervant Gianikian's father, survived the Armenian genocide in 1915 in Eastern Turkey. In April 1988, while living in Venice, he sat for his son's camera and read an excerpt from his memoirs, translated from Armenian into Italian.

I wasn’t told. I wasn’t told it would be so difficult to live together. To keep a family together. To maintain love and happiness. I wasn’t told, and if someone had told me I wouldn’t have listened. I chose to live with my camera in my hand, filming the trajectory of feelings, from the golden age to the lost paradise, from being born to being reborn.

Blending candid interviews, experimental moments, and reflective narration, this 55-minute personal doc explores what it means to grow up when the people who love you also struggle to accept who you are. Through screen-recorded calls with friends, street interviews, and distant footage of everyday life, I examine my upbringing as a queer non-binary trans person—where love, expectation, and shame often coexisted—among a sea of other stories about adolescence. Anchored by a conversation with a close friend and fellow artist, the film sits in the tension between care and rejection, asking if anyone is even really special—or maybe all of us are.

Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

A filmed diary which chronicles two visits to the Olivas, a family of Spanish beekeepers from Salamanca, at the time of the honey harvest, in August and September. Their work and their itinerant life are seen from a friend's point of view.

A Different point from the eyss of Yuval Shamshins's life, in the modern days of the Covid-19. The movie is built upon the small moments of life, full of Metaphors and Images in order to built a cinemathic perspective.

For years, together with his partners from the production company O Quadro, he has been betting on cinema as a tool to explore the typical issues of youth. In this film, Evandro Scorsin turns the cameras on himself as he deals with the dilemmas of the passing of time and the imposition of adulthood. In an exercise in autofiction where cinema and life merge, the film is also a cinematic love letter to the beloved masters (especially Nicholas Ray). Coming and going between two countries and times, it records the vertigo of displacement and the reinventions inherent to an immigrant experience.

An old man comes across a fascinating archive, then meets a woman who introduces him to the life of a banker, patron and philanthropist. A moving essay that is part documentary, part film diary.

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.

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.