The General Returns from One Place to Another

After the earthquake; D. surrounds himself with nature, becoming a recluse. Both D. and the nature go through a transformation as the seasons change. Winds howl, waves soar and the crickets chirp no more. The storm wets the dried earth, healing its cracked surface and starting a new cycle of life. D. disappears and the summer house returns to its lonely existence.

Viewed at its seams, a National Geographic slideshow from the 1960s and '70s deforms into a bright white distress signal.

An ill wind is transmitting through the lonely night, spreading deception and myth along its murky path, singing the dangers of the mediated spirit.

Some images of the landscape and the spaces that house them. "Every single entity contains an adumbration or landskip of the whole Universe" (Jan Baptist van Helmont, 1650). Images becoming life—life becoming images.

Home is where we grow up or settle permanently. And this home is always shaped by nature. Today, we human beings change and shape this more than any law of nature. HEIMAT NATUR is a visually stunning journey through the nature of our homeland, from the peaks of the Alps to the coasts and the depths of the North and Baltic Seas. In between is a cinematic foray through steaming forests, shimmering moors, over rose-blossoming heaths and the colorful cultural landscape around our villages and towns. In extraordinary images this nature is shown from its most beautiful side, examining the state of the native habitats. Slow-motion and time-lapse photography as well as intimate shots of familiar and unfamiliar species, some filmed for the first time, making the film a cinematic nature experience for the whole family.

An investigation about human intervention in nature, from the subjective point of view of the camera, the environment and its transformation are observed.

In Seán Martin's "Koan IV", an opening provocation suggests that the things we see continually hide the things we'd like to see. What we see after this is mist in a Scottish landscape. Martin's patient, enigmatic film contemplates a popular image of romance and intrigue attributed to a rural identity, alluding to what is hidden, what is real and what does not exist.

Annette Philo brings us to the Scottish landscape and its associated dream-like mystique. With gentle overlays, vivid purples and blues, and alluding to the hidden graves of the last of the Knights Templar, Philo’s depiction of bluebell island lulls us into a contemplation on the duality of what we see for ourselves, and what is cultivated as cultural, historical and national identity.

"I was visiting Jerome Hill. Jerome loved France, especially Provence. He spent all his summers in Cassis. My window overlooked the sea. I sat in my little room, reading or writing, and looked at the sea. I decided to place my Bolex exactly at the angle of light as what Signac saw from his studio which was just behind where I was staying, and film the view from morning till after sunset, frame by frame. One day of the Cassis port filmed in one shot." -JM

A prairie landscape undergoes a metamorphosis: rural idyll to over-urbanized dystopia. Director Anne Koizumi laments the changing face of her hometown of Calgary in this critique of the bacteria-like spread of suburbia and exurbia. This film was made as part of the third edition of the NFB's Hothouse apprenticeship.

This video creates an awareness of the different forms of beauty found in cities. Explains that art, not luxury, is necessary and that nature enriches cities. Shots of San Francisco, Rome, and the Gold Rush town of Columbia, California. The film extols the modern outdoor shopping mall, enhanced by public art and parks, as an important aspect of civic architecture and design.

Valérie Jouve is a weel-known photographer, and Grand Littoral is her first film. Out the outskirts of Marseille, in a landscape criss-crossed by motorways, railways and srubland paths, some figures that seem to be from her famous photos passby and bump into each other. They act as our guides in a tour without beginning or end. How do you look at a place without taking possession of it? How do you describe characters without confining them within a given plot? How do you make the transition from still shots to moving pictures? this brief, musical film leaves us asking these and other unresolved questions.

A mysterious web of international shortwave radio towers once dominated the Tantramar marshlands near Sackville, New Brunswick. For almost 70 years the RCI shortwave towers broadcast around the world. Due to budget cuts, the site was decommissioned in 2012 and dismantled in 2014. Examining themes of identity and memory, the film captures images of the towers over four seasons in various weather conditions, accompanied by the voices of residents and technicians narrating accounts of hearing radio broadcasts emanate from their household appliances.

The goddess Diana and her two attendants traverse the rugged terrain of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains in pursuit of the elusive wolf. An Engraver (Matthew Barney) furtively documents their actions in copper engravings and provokes a series of confrontations. The characters communicate through dance, letting movement replace language as they pursue each other and their prey.

Garden designer Lynden B. Miller explores the life and career of Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872-1959), America's first female landscape architect.

A minimalistic film that is exploring space by means of the landscape.

A trip behind and beneath the street-level skin of the city on the hidden paths of industrial history and once-and-future transit.

A portrait of Eric Lyons and Span, under the scrutiny of Ian Nairn, as well as the residents of their estates.

Bernard faces the stereotype of an animal predator, one you wouldn’t cross paths with. Feeling resigned, he tries to express the truth about his isolation, and suppress the call of nature in him.

A travelogue along the scenic highways of Cape Breton Island—particularily along the Cabot Trail near Keltic Lodge.