Believe It or Not #12

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time. (Silent short, voiced in 1937 and 1996.)

Hansjürgen Pohland's short documentary is an audiovisual study that captures events and people on the streets on film. The special feature of the work is that the people and objects are portrayed exclusively through their shadows.

A Thousand Words explores a daughter's relationship with her stroke-stricken father through still pictures and 8mm footage he shot while serving in Vietnam.

We Should Have Coffee Sometime is a four-minute animated documentary exploring a loss of faith. The film begins with a meditation on the end of a relationship. About one minute later it is revealed that the relationship is not between friends or romantic partners but between co-director Maile Martinez and God. To complement and clarify the narration, the project employs a variety of animation styles.

Home movies and family photographs mixed with drawings and texts tell the story of a family that has lived with disease.

Johann Lurf‘s film Endeavour slides between documentary, avant-garde film, and science-fiction. This highly singular combination of materials and techniques gives the viewer of Endeavour a feeling of flight, as the film continually evades the gravity of genres and definitive definitions. Lurf uses NASA footage from a day and a night launch of the space-shuttle that follows the booster rockets from take-off to splashdown.

Multi-faceted artist Phil Niblock captures a brief moment of an interstellar communication by the Arkestra in their prime. Black turns white in a so-called negative post-process, while Niblock's camera focuses on microscopic details of hands, bodies and instruments. A brilliant tribute to the Sun King by another brilliant supra-planetary sovereign. (Eye of Sound)

A symphony of found footage scenes, each shot loosely connected to the one before.

From leaving Egypt 10 years ago, to almost dying a month ago in a car accident. This film is about the journey in between and the massive role the internet played in the life of prominent Youtuber and Yes Theory co-founder Ammar Kandil.

In the world's first media interview, shot in Paris in August 1886, the great photographer Nadar interviews the famous scientist and sceptic Chevreul on his 100th birthday. In their own words - originally recorded in shorthand - they discuss photography, colour theory, Moliere, the scientific method, the crazy ideas of balloonists, and - of course - how to live for 100 years. These two legends of the 19th century have a lively and interesting conversation. One was born before the French revolution; the other was destined to see the marvels of the aeroplane and the movies.

Nannies combines autobiographical elements with a reflection on the presence of nannies in Brazil. With a subjective narration, the film incorporates photographs, domestic footage and newspaper adds from the 20th century, as well as contemporary images of nannies and children, building a personal narrative about the presence of nannies in the daily lives of many Brazilian families. A situation where the affection is genuine, but does not dissolve violence and racism.

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

The subject matter of Memory Room 451 is the cultural and historical significance of 20th-century hairstyles – the Afro, the conk, dreadlocks – in Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Akomfrah has disguised this exploration as a science fiction story – in the manner of the groundbreaking writers profiled in The Last Angel of History – while providing a bravura display of the aesthetics of video art in the 1990s. The tale of visitors from the future who gather dreams from unwitting subjects in order to construct a history of the Black diaspora both defamiliarizes Akomfrah’s ongoing project and points to the danger that extracting history from memory can be a kind of expropriation.

Dom starych kobiet

Working men and women leave through the main gate of the Lumière factory in Lyon, France. Filmed on 22 March 1895, it is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made, although Louis Le Prince's 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene pre-dated it by seven years. Three separate versions of this film exist, which differ from one another in numerous ways. The first version features a carriage drawn by one horse, while in the second version the carriage is drawn by two horses, and there is no carriage at all in the third version. The clothing style is also different between the three versions, demonstrating the different seasons in which each was filmed. This film was made in the 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and at a speed of 16 frames per second. At that rate, the 17 meters of film length provided a duration of 46 seconds, holding a total of 800 frames.

On February 21, 1945, the Royal Canadian Air Force Halifax bomber NP711 with a crew of seven men took off from the Linton-on-Ouse air base in England for a bombing raid over Worms, Germany. The bomber never made it to its target. The Halifax was struck by anti-aircraft fire and crashed into a mountainside near Leistadt, Germany. All crew members were killed. The crash was so horrific that the wreckage was strewn over 1,000 meters. Seventy-seven years later the wreckage was recovered and the site was deemed a gravesite for the perished crew. This documentary film examines the last days of the seven-member crew and the recovery of the wreckage of Halifax NP711.

Have you ever woken in the night unable to move, certain that you are not alone? This is an experimental documentary examining what happens when dreams leak into waking life. It is about what is real, what is not, and if it even matters.

Two teenagers seek the fullness of their identities with time on top and normality against it. First hand testimony of transgender kids and the support of their family.

A brief history of the emergence and artistic innovations of tango in 19th-century Argentina and Europe. The film offers a mosaic of tango melodies, art works, dance performances, historical footage, photographs of Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th century, and texts by Celedonio Flores and Enrique Santos Discépolo.