Ocean Oasis

A short documentary exploring the ways LGBT couples show affection, and how small interactions like holding hands in public can carry, not only huge personal significance, but also the power to create social change.

Desconexión

Eerie images of landscapes after the Fukushima nuclear disaster shot on black and white 8mm.

This short, silent film captures a Sunday afternoon at a community skating rink. Iconic Quebec director Gilles Carle has the camera follow toddlers learning to skate, young girls flashing their skates and boys decked out in the colours of their favourite hockey teams. A picture perfect moment on a bright winter's day.

We all know the big bad wolf of fairy-tale fame—over hundreds of years the wolf has become a culturally imprinted symbol of fear that’s completely detached from reality. In fact there weren’t even any wolves in western Europe for a long time. But they’re back—for example in Germany, where these social animals now occupy a few scattered areas around the country that people have left to them.

This is a documentary film on the romantic and decadent atmosphere of Venice at the end of the 18th century. A vigorous comment by Jean Cocteau tells us of the sick souls and the sorrows of literary characters and musicians who lived the dream of this city. It is the Venice of Lord Byron, Alfred de Musset, George Sand, d'Annunzio; a Venice made of precious images, palaces reflected in the water, mysterious moonlights, little squares where unhappy lovers wander under the music of Richard Wagner.

Made on a wind-up Bolex camera, The Sound of Seeing announced the arrival of 21-year-old filmmaker Tony Williams. Based around a painter and a composer wandering the city (and beyond), the film meshes music and imagery to show the duo taking inspiration from their surroundings.

A short making of feature about the 1966 John Frankenheimer movie Grande Prix

Originally shown in IMAX theaters, this film presents highly detailed and lavish views of the gorgeous scenery of the Pacific Northwest, both as they appeared before the top 1,300 feet of Mount St. Helens was blown into the sky and during the disaster's dramatic aftermath.

A breathtaking view of Zion National Park filmed originally in the IMAX format.

Pereda returns with a small, mysterious and moving tribute to Chantal Akerman, conceived as a series of joyful impossible letters addressed to the great disappeared from the cinema, to answer her fictional question about renting her bright apartment in Coyoacán.

This short film explores the resolution of a plumbing problem through a narrative lens compiled from found footage sourced from pornographic websites.

A method soldier boys have for amusing themselves in their leisure moments. New comrades are frequently initiated by the old-fashioned sport of tossing in a blanket. The newly arrived recruit, who is the victim of their sport, enjoys himself, perhaps, less than the other participants.

In the province of Salerno in Campania, a village is attracting more and more pilgrims, sometimes several hundred a day. Arriving by bus, car and even on foot, they pray to Saint Antony to protect them from demons and disasters. They do this through the intermediary of a certain Giuseppina who embodies the dead soul of young Alberto, the grandson of the former seminarian who died accidentally some ten years earlier.

Afrique 50 is a 1950 French documentary film directed by René Vautier. The first French anti-colonialist film, the film derived from an assignment in which the director was to cover educational activities by the French League of Schooling in West Africa. Vautier later filmed what he saw, a "lack of teachers and doctors, the crimes committed by the French Army in the name of France, the instrumentalization of the colonized peoples". For his role in the film Vautier was imprisoned over several months. The film was not permitted to be shown for more than 40 years.

Stop for Bud is Jørgen Leth's first film and the first in his long collaboration with Ole John. […] they wanted to "blow up cinematic conventions and invent cinematic language from scratch". The jazz pianist Bud Powell moves around Copenhagen -- through King's Garden, along the quay at Kalkbrænderihavnen, across a waste dump. […] Bud is alone, accompanied only by his music. […] Image and sound are two different things -- that's Leth's and John's principle. Dexter Gordon, the narrator, tells stories about Powell's famous left hand. In an obituary for Powell, dated 3 August 1966, Leth wrote: "He quite willingly, or better still, unresistingly, mechanically, let himself be directed. The film attempts to depict his strange duality about his surroundings. His touch on the keys was like he was burning his fingers -- that's what it looked like, and that's how it sounded. But outside his playing, and often right in the middle of it, too, he was simply gone, not there."

This short documentary tells the story of Garret Walsh, a twelve-year-old Canadian body-builder.

Diário de uma onça

In 1936 and 1937 Harry Dunham shot "several hundred feet of film," being the first cameraman to penetrate into the Shensi region and obtain footage of the Communist forces in China. He smuggled his film out and placed it in the hands of Frontier Films. Leyda, Lerner, Meyers and Maddow (they had to use pseudonyms) spent four months preparing the film for publication. In that time, the Chinese situation altered to such an extent that Frontier had to change the scenario several times in order to keep up with events...the producers had to make a happy change in the theme of China Strikes Back. It was no longer a film showing the Chinese people moving toward unity. It became a pictorial history revealing the how and why behind a realized unity.

A short tour of the sites to see in and around Tartu.