The Art of Love

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.

Richard Rhys, a painter in Victorian London, is the prime suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders. In a chance encounter he meets a wealthy reformer and socialite, Victoria Thornton, married to the richest man in England. Their passionate love affair results in a pregnancy and possible scandal and ruin. It is a story of redemption and true love.

A young poet is driven mad by his internal demons.

Giulia is an independent young woman who is prepared to offer her body and her spirit against all the religious taboos.

Three friends form a bond over the year, Johnathan is gay, Clare is straight and Bobby is neither, instead he loves the people he loves. As their lives go on there is tension and tears which culminate in a strong yet fragile friendship between the three.

A teenager contemplates his relationship with God and others as his days are filled with loneliness.

A pathetic love letter.

An immigrant woman struggles to take care of her sick daughter who is kept hidden in an abandoned church and feeds off raw meat. Unable to get a doctor to visit her, and with the fear of deportation hanging over her head, she turns to a priest for help. When his faith is questioned a terrifying truth is uncovered.

An ordinary funeral procession moves along its path from church to cemetery. Observing, you slip from reality into a place where time has lost its linearity, looping through the odd images thrown off by a distorted reality. Images of non-existence, of varying reflections of death issuing from both past and future, concrete yet abstract, horrible yet desirable. A family asks a young psychiatrist to be their guest for a while to untangle the circumstances of their father's illness. He's developed a suicidal fixation for ropes and knots among other things. While deeply involved in analyzing the patient's delirium, the doctor begins to lose track of what is taking place. The task of "how to help" is twisted into "who am I? Doctor or patient? Chance guest, member of this suffering family, or a catholic priest who has dreamed this all up?" In order to get a handle on it all, it's best to start from the beginning, but why do things keep shifting, changing?

Two young men and two girls on a moonlit night confess to each other in their strange fantasies and loves that go beyond the usual standards.. The impetus to making the film was the book of the same name by the Russian religious philosopher Vasily Rozanov, who died 100 years ago. His treatise was devoted to the study of sexuality and its denial in Christianity. The film was made in the style of experimental films of the 1920s with a non-linear narration full of strange surrealistic images. He is black and white and devoid of dialogue. Filmed on film 16 mm of firm "Svema", released in the USSR. This added to his exoticism. The image was put to the music of Alexander Scriabin “The Poem of Ecstasy” (1907).

Based on a true story, Crossed phone lines in 1989 lead to a life changing conversation between two strangers, who eventually meet in an unusual way.

A man falls in love with a half-woman/half-phoenix who fell to Earth from the sky.

A winter dread gnaws at the anxieties of a young couple.

Two forever intertwined lovers, Edwin and Rosko, recollect on their long spanning relationship. What seems like a normal healthy relationship is revealed to have a dark brewing secret underneath. They explore their sexuality together but everything changes once they begin to taste the flesh of another...

We are freeing us from gravity and fleeing from reality. We are weightless, free. Everything becomes VACUUM.

A woman Diane, has an affair while her husband is away with a younger woman, Jane. But as time passes the identities of the women come into question and revelations as to the nature of their relationships comes to the surface. All while strange occurrences happen around them, seemingly linked to mirrors around the house and a strange light that appears during the night.

The personification of Death's love for a lonely man is challenged when he falls for a lively woman.

A man and a woman relive moments of their lives transfigured on the landscape of a beach. Past, present and future merge in the cadence of the waters, which come and go revolving memories and old silences. So the characters go through a sort of trail of desire, leading the edge of the abyss of themselves, where all days born and die, the horizon of all passes, all eventides.

Big money artists and mega-collectors pay a high price when art collides with commerce. After a series of paintings by an unknown artist are discovered, a supernatural force enacts revenge on those who have allowed their greed to get in the way of art.

A fisherman throws himself into unknown waters, where fish have long gone, wrapped in silent mystery. In this journey without return the landscape sometimes assumes the role of the other and the other soon reveals the reverse or a mirror of him self in the ineluctable solitude of the horizon.