The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.
Against the backdrop of an unfathomable megalopolis, in a story that follows the associative qualities of a dream logic, the protagonists quote from concepts of neo-liberal elitism, and a mix of religious delusions and hallucinations of the apocalypse. The film begins in a sacral space, where Randi, a figure that references Ayn Rand, transforms a parapsychological medium into two digital clouds and sends them on a journey through a megalopolis in full growth. There they materialize as two bodies, which go by the names of Mr. Freedom and Ms. Independence.
Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.
The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.
A psychiatrist and his needy patient discuss their relationship in a snow-covered field.
A man who is paranoid and deluded by his own conspiracies that someone out there is after him must come to terms with the root of his suffering.
Featuring a cast that includes Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, Mike Watt of the legendary hardcore band Minutemen, and Pettibon himself, this deadpan narrative pays dubious homage to the 1960's radical underground. In this crudely rendered home video of a commune of stoned revolutionaries, the cameras are hand-held, the edits in-camera, and the dialogue is wryly on-target. Pettibon's band of outsiders reenacts a countercultural moment defined by rock music, drugs, and ideological paradox — and in so doing, captures their own late-80's West Coast grunge milieu as well.
Buenos Aires. Exe, 25 years old, has just lost his job and is not looking for another one. His neighbors and friends seem as odd to him as they always do. Online, he meets Alf, a boy from Mozambique who is also bored with his job and who is about to follow Archie, another boy who has run away into the jungle. Through the dense vegetation of the forest, Archie tracks ants back to their nest. One of them wanders off course and comes across Canh, a Filipino, sitting on top of a giant heap of earth and who is about to go back to his strange, beautiful home town, where he too has a miserable job.
Ion is a seemingly normal guy whose life goes by without a hitch. A phone call; a meeting with a friend; small, unimportant everyday situations. One day he gets into a car with two other people. They cross the border between Spain and France. The next morning, their lives will change forever.
A filmmaker recalls his youth in the town of Onomichi. In the present, he shoots a film in Onomichi alongside his cast, crew and family.
Colossal explores the complexities of grief and the process of grieving as understood through the myth of a Man as he ventures through shifting landscapes ruminating.
At first, there was Tagalog, Gym Lumbera’s short and, to his mind, unfinished narrative about the infidelity that comes between a husband and wife in their twilight years, shot on film and reflecting his own real-life infidelity.. And then there was a storm, a real storm and not a metaphorical one, that flooded his house and submerged, and subsequently damaged, the only copy of Tagalog. This damaged version, entitled English, became the missing piece that completed the film. The new work is named after Taglish, the bastard hybrid, some say corruption, of Tagalog and English, and has become a meditation on love and language and the ways in which we betray and destroy them.
Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.
The daily lives of three young women that live together in a big city in Brazil and go through crucial moments in their lives.
A Philosophy - Monopáti
Contemplates the notion of "identity" through the experiences of a Puerto Rican woman living in the US. In a wonderful mix of fiction, archival footage, processed interviews and soap opera drama, the film tells the story of Claudia Marin, a middle-class, light-skinned, lesbian Puerto Rican photographer / videographer who is attempting to construct a sense of community in the US. Confronting the simultaneity of both her privilege and her oppression, this experimental narrative becomes a meditation on class, race, and sexuality as shifting differences.
For a young boy, ordinary facts and things of daily life seem to have great importance.
In Razor Blades, Paul SHARITS consciously challenges our eyes, ears and minds to withstand a barrage of high powered and often contradictory stimuli. In a careful juxtaposition and fusion of these elements on different parts of our being, usually occurring simultaneously, we feel at times hypnotised and re-educated by some potent and mysterious force.
Lois Patiño dissects the movement of a fire, analyses its fleeting ephemeral forms, and transforms them with sound to enrich the meaning of the images. The Image Burns begins as a reflection on our perception and becomes an intense interaction between the parts, between the images and the spectator. We look at the fire and the fire looks back at us.
A short film about the meeting of a Trappist monk and a Zen Buddhist master.