Hollywood Without Make-Up

The diaspora of Filipinos around the globe is driven mostly by the economics of supply and demand. The yearning for something better, stability, and self-validation leads a handful of sojourners from the provinces of the Philippines into the arms of one of its former colonial masters — the USA. But what happens when they finally get what they want? And how? Filmmaker Dennis Empalmado explores the musings of Filipino expatriates and hopeful immigrants in "Naglalakbay" (Travelers).

SONG 5: A childbirth song (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).

After finding some videos she uploaded to YouTube when she was a child, Manuela attempts to follow the trail she herself has left on the Internet. A search that looks into all that things that won't never die and that, especially, thinks about the way we look at ourselves.

Memory mechanisms are mysterious: we only see the stories we choose in order to construct our own reality. Every mark is a message in time, the invocation of an absence. To travel in the memory is to walk in time, zigzagging, a long road permeated by a dark, indecipherable logic… if we could choose seven moments to sum up our entire life, which ones would they be? The Dance of the Memory is a documentary-essay that guides us in that autobiographical search, where image and memory intertwine. It mixes archive material with an aesthetic and subjective tone.

Home movies and their unique place in popular culture are the subject of My Father's Camera. Director Karen Shopsowitz weaves the history of home movies together with footage shot by her father--amateur filmmaker Israel Shopsowitz. Equipped with her dad's old Super 8 camera, Karen traces the history of home movies from the 1920s through to the amateur explosion of the '30s and '40s and beyond. She interviews a lively line-up of scholars and collectors, such as early members of the Toronto Film Club, a Japanese-American archivist who sees home movies as an expression of cultural diversity and a collector who hosts popular Webcasts that highlight new acquisitions.

The story of how Sicilian Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta (1928-2000), the Godfather of Two Worlds, revealed, starting in 1984, the deepest secrets of the organization, thus helping to convict the hundreds of mafiosi who were tried in the trial held in Palermo between 1986 and 1987.

Just after Isidore moves to France to study filmmaking, his best friend dies back in the US. Through documentary, performance, and animation, a ghostly portrait emerges, prompting Isidore to question his relationships with his parents and his boyfriend in Paris.

Follows filmmaker and actress, Maryam Zaree, on her quest to find out the violent circumstances surrounding her birth inside one of the most notorious political prisons in the world.

A dream walk through the United States of America; a meditation on the thoughts and ideals of its inhabitants, as they are exposed in their silent but eloquent home movies.

The recovery of family videos is the resumption of a path: the massification of VHS brought new levels to family recordings. With the incorporation of sound, home videos gave way to commentaries, speeches and the filtering of sounds, giving rise to a documentation of the sounds of each era. In this first-person film, Juliana Antunes revisits, reframes and recombines the discordances between norm and desire in the memories of an LGBT girl in a Brazilian suburb.

Few amateur films with sound were produced in the 1930s and fewer remain extant. A charming artifact that demonstrates the expressive possibilities and technical limitations of amateur talkies, "The Spider and the Fly" includes a backyard Labor Day gathering, a trip to the Riverview Amusement Park, and a homemade Halloween parade of witches and ghouls.

In this home movie collection of gay men, memory serves as an act of hope, power, and above all, resilience.

A film exploring the life of “Weird Paul.” After 30 years, 2000 videos, 800 songs, & 42 albums, he’s still not giving up on his dream.

In 1948, French singer Charles Aznavour (1924-2018) receives a Paillard Bolex, his first camera. Until 1982, he will shoot hours of footage, his filmed diary. Wherever he goes, he carries his camera with him. He films his life and lives as he films: places, moments, friends, loves, misfortunes.

The director Andrés Kaiser combines hundreds of amateur films and photographs from the treasure trove of images belonging to his migrant grandparents creating a cinematic firework of analogies.

A love letter to Mar del Plata made of images, times and a road trip. "The Happy Ones" is an experimental short documentary composed of past and present family footage. It portrays a place in the summer, the city of Mar del Plata, with a span of 20 years between past and present images (January 2000 and 2020). Despite the time that passed by, it's beaches, essence and people remain, always willing to keep dancing.

Alternating Philippines and Saudi Arabia as her home, the filmmaker uses personal home videos and present footage to tell the story of her family.

December 31, 2015. The Valencian bookstore Valdeska closed its doors permanently after forty years of activity. The result of four years of monitoring and filming, these 31 minuts of run time are part of a book unread, unknown and undiscovered. "Me voy. Me voy" it's not the story of a bookstore, not the portrait of an exceptional bookseller, it's a will to attach the things in the filmed image, to make something lasting showing the moment of its disappearence.

This documentary is a record of moments with family, friends, travels, outings, and a passion that Carla inherited from her father. The need to encapsulate time led her to film her daily life with Bahian friends in Barcelona, a city where she lived the best of her youth for eight years. When she decided to return to Brazil, everything took on new significance. It was then that she began the project of making a documentary to immortalize that period. The casual recordings turned into an obsession, and her friends were interviewed, totaling more than 50 hours of filmed memories and a year of editing in Brazil. This process was a painful stagnation in the past, an effort to make sense of material that fed a difficult feeling to overcome: longing. The result is a delicate film that reflects on exile, memory, time, family, change, and life.

Soy