Sieben Himmel

Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic.

This independent film follows the actions and inner thoughts of four unusual individuals as they go about their lives in Tokyo, occasionally meeting up with one another. Their thoughts tend to focus on questions of death, existence, and the conflict of society against the individual. All of the action is performed silently, with narration dubbed over.

Between a man and his lover lies a wall, between the man and the country he loves lies another wall. Can a one-sided dialouge breaks the walls and expresses the man’s feelings and sentiments? Or does the lover or the country wants the wall to be broken in the first place? This short was inspired by Amy Len’s dance choreography “Wall” and colloborated with Loh Bok Lai. The dance was originally choreographed for a performance in Japan Dance Wave Fukuoka ‘06 - Asian Contemporary Dance Now and later made into an experimental video combining elements of an actor and monologue. The video footages were also used for the dance piece itself in KL.

Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.

An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.

“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread. Shifting the focus from character to interior, Ben Russell and Rhyne Piggott mine the landscape of a beige-carpeted ranch style house for new insights into the architecture of suburban alienation.” - Anne Reecer, Cinematexas

A personal, subjective journey into the mind of Greta Thunberg, before realizing her calling as a climate activist. While struggling with mental health issues and bullying because of her Aspergers, she also grapples with the sense of impending doom due to the climate crisis. These same struggles and fears drive her to make change and become the person she is today.

Routine imprisoned Eva in an automatism that was ingrained in her spirit. Dromomania will perhaps be the expression that best illustrates her condition. She feels absent, and her frivolous glance catalogs each one of the small details of the journey that imprisons her every day. Her apathetic state is interrupted when she crosses an object outside the street and Eva is forced to finally face her demons.

Ode to Dorothy reexamines the relationships of the main characters in The Wizard of Oz, revealing these relationships to be much more complicated and dark then we first understood as children. Comprised of footage from The Wizard of Oz and Meet Me in St. Louis, two musicals starring Judy Garland, the tape takes existing, iconographic images and reinterprets the footage to create an alternative narrative to the original storyline intended by L. Frank Baum.

It follows the filmmaking journey of two filmmakers as they navigate through the urban sprawl of inner KL during the pandemic. It showcases the city in a raw, exposed and gritty fashion but still with a certain charm. Throughout their filmmaking process, they capture the peculiar events in the life of three strangers: the son (Fakhrul Aiman), the outsider (Eli Orkid) and the hustler (Nidusmas). They happen to express themselves in extreme ways at the sight of their own reflection in “the vantablack” -- they snap into a state of mind where they lose all their inhibitions and show their true self in a very physical way: through visceral, almost primal dance movements.

A man without his own half of the body is looking for the other half in the opposite sex. As for the integrity of his body, so for the sake of emotional healing.

An experimental journey through a year in the life of the director, using his always playing playlist to cross the boundaries of fiction and documentary. Through scenes of both comedy and tragedy, realistic documentary footage and experimental sequences of the director's environment and daily life we get a sometimes estranging image of a young man and also an intriguing insight in his mindset and how this translates to the imagery on screen.

Return to 'burn' only to find out you're already in that urn.

(Some of us) Still run down the same [mental&emotional] streets we revered/reproached/replaced as children.

Alban lives in a castle that he has just inherited in a small village in Charente-Maritime. Inside, the dilapidation has long since taken hold. He meets Jérôme, a young gypsy from the neighbouring town, with whom he has a sexual relationship. In this space that is impossible to rebuild, a strange intimacy is gradually invented, barely disturbed by the interruption of a young woman who has come to spend a few days in this residence.

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.

Short film produced by the BBC about JG Ballard's Crash. “The film was a product of the most experimental, darkest phase of Ballard’s career. It was an era of psychological blowback from the sudden, shocking death of his wife in 1964, an era that had produced the cut-up ‘condensed novels’ of Atrocity plus a series of strange collages and ‘advertisers’ announcements. After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised. Later there were further literary experiments, concrete poems and ‘impressionistic’ film reviews, and an aborted multimedia theatrical play based around car crashes. After that came an actual gallery exhibition of crashed cars, replete with strippers and the drunken destruction of the ‘exhibits’ by an enraged audience.” (from: http://aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.blogspot.de/2013/01/short-film-adaptation-of-jg-ballards.html)

While vacationing on a remote German island with his pregnant wife, an artist has an emotional breakdown while confronting his repressed desires.

A bohemian painter named Artist and a guitarist named James meet at a concert and have an instant connection. They start a philosophical discussion at her apartment, but they are interrupted by strange occurrences which reveal they are no longer in reality but an ominous dream world. Both Artist and James are confronted by characters and situations from their past, and they must work together to put the memory pieces together and escape to reality, if they can.

A sexual reverie unfolds over the course of one ethereal night. Characters wander through an erotic maze of love and lust, blurring the lines between wet dream and lucid nightmare as a macabre, erotic stage performance sends a ripple of lustful desires through its audience and performers.