Avant garde/experimental film. A mesmerizing trip through the psychedelic vastness of space.
Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes thought-provoking connections between life on Earth and the cosmos, and, ultimately, art and science. Structured around the ten most significant celestial bodies of the Milky Way, Apple Pie’s inquiry begins with the furthest point in our solar system, Pluto, as a lens back towards our home planet and the ‘mechanisms by which certain aspects of scientific knowledge are digested, appropriated and subsequently manifest within the general human complex’. Christopher Francis Schiel’s dry, functional narration brings a network of ideas about our existence into focus, while Hamilton’s visual tableaux, as an extension of his multifaceted practice, veer imaginatively between psychedelic imagery and performance art.
Two buddy farmers are visited by aliens who like their domestic cabbage soup.
Alien
A Japanese salaryman finds his body transforming into a weapon through sheer rage after his son is kidnapped by a gang of violent thugs.
A meteorite, strange vegetation, a colour: an experimental take on H.P. Lovecraft's spiral into madness, shot with a vintage camera on truly unique LomoChrome 16mm film.
Ripples uses images cut together to visualize the mind's eye of an architect as he considers his next project.
Ian Haig’s The Foaming Node essays the discovery and emergence of new bodily organs in meticulous and captivating detail. We follow the last remaining observers, members of a cult of sorts, who have experienced both the transmissions of The Foaming Node, and their own personal and strange bodily transformations. They discuss exactly how the changes associated with The Foaming Node have affected them, telling fascinating, visceral, detailed tales that reach beyond science, alternative medicine, and corporeality.
“I don’t believe in love because I’ve never seen it,” responds a young woman to an unseen interviewer in the first few minutes of the movie. This bleak portrait of loneliness and social exclusion is set on the edge of a desolate swamp where an aging clown and his daughter are struggling to survive. The location could be the end of the world, a place where hope has vanished along with a belief in the afterlife and the existence of God. The two unfortunates live together without the likelihood of change, as fear, aggression, and anger take hold of them – but they also experience sudden moments of tenderness.
Taking place in the fifth reality to be discovered by humanity, Into The Alternate follows an inhabitant and foreign visitor as they struggle to survive within a collapsing ecosystem.
Europe, 2028. A humanlike creature washes ashore, carrying with him a motionless body he calls his mother. He is on a mission of some kind, reporting on the dwindling human activity in an increasingly automated world.
Sunspring is a short film about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that's what we'd call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.
France, June 1944. On the eve of D-Day, some American paratroopers fall behind enemy lines after their aircraft crashes while on a mission to destroy a radio tower in a small village near the beaches of Normandy. After reaching their target, the surviving paratroopers realise that, in addition to fighting the Nazi troops that patrol the village, they also must fight against something else.
At a small seaside resort that is at risk of being submerged by the ocean, the inhabitants have been ordered to leave. Among those resigned to their fate are a reality TV candidate, a porn movie actress and a gay couple roaming the pine forest in search of themselves.
ISLANDS explores a cinematic journey of two astronauts. As they enter Earth’s atmosphere the structure transforms. The spacecraft becomes the meteor from a myth of a tribesman; it triggers an old lady’s memory of a lover from her past. As these diverse characters converge in a plane of reality, we confront a particular form of gravity we covertly feel—falling in love.
After a collision with a comet, a nearly 8km wide piece of the asteroid "Orpheus" is heading towards Earth. If it hits it will cause an incredible catastrophe which will probably extinguish mankind. To stop the meteor NASA wants to use the illegal nuclear weapon satellite "Hercules" but discovers soon that it doesn't have enough firepower. Their only chance to save the world is to join forces with the USSR who have also launched such an illegal satellite. But will both governments agree?
In a near future, the world order has changed. With its 10 millions of unemployed citizens, France has now become a poor country. Its people wavers between rebellion and resignation and find an outlet in the shape of TV broadcast ultra brutal fights in which the players are legally doped and unscrupulous.
Experimental short film by Michio Mihara.
Mona relates her dream. Crawling through an apparently endless wooden crate, she encounters diverse characters while the crate itself is moving towards a fiery destruction.
A visually experimental adaptation of the classic Frank Stockton short story.