Revolutions Per Second

For just forty days, filmmaker and writer Mark Cousins embarks on a peculiar journey in order to explore topics as the passion for cinema and certain aspects related to making films as style, ideas, emotions and practicalities; an ambitious exploration of the universal language of cinema by analyzing pieces of work that cross every artistic and cultural boundaries.

Why do we do incredibly difficult things that have no practical application? Is there a parallel between geographic and artistic exploration? Fram is a documentary and travel film about two friends journeying to the end of the earth, in order to make a dance film in the arctic wilderness of Svalbard. En route, they explore the history of our ideas of the Arctic, along with the grand questions of life, art and our place in the world. Sharing their love of discovering new geographic and artistic frontiers, choreographer-dancer-filmmakers and outdoor enthusiasts Thomas Freundlich and Valtteri Raekallio take the viewer on an engaging journey to a place where few have been and even fewer have danced.

The Weight of Sight is a playful and very personal essay where director Truls Krane Meby, through a massive archive of his own material - anything from DV-tapes to 35mm - explores the last 20 years of digital development - how it’s influenced the images we make, and our bodies. What kind of images do we get of the world now that everyone is a photographer, and what does it do with how we unfold our identities? How has the internet both captured and freed us? And will Truls even dare to show this film?

Divided into 26 parts, an attempt to remake James Benning's film, YouTube (2011) with similar internet footage after 13 years.

Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists.

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

The six-decade transformation of a block of houses, shown by means of artfully featured archival shots, highlights the beauty and sadness of human-made decay. In the blink of an eye 66 years pass by and a savings bank replaces a church.

It has been a lifelong dream of Kyrgyz director Melis Ubukeyev to create an elaborate film version of the Kyrgyz national epic 'Manas'. He spent years working with the National Academy of Sciences of Kyrgyzstan to gather material for this film project, which was ultimately to remain a dream. However, the director's efforts were not in vain: Not only did he make films in 1962 and 1988 about the highly respected Manasçı – folk singers who passed on the epic over countless generations in melodic speech –, but in 1995, on the occasion of the 1,000th anniversary of 'Manas', he also made a beguiling essay film that not only outlines the plot of the epic with the help of magnificent images and lavish costumes, but also gives a semi-documentary account of the history of the Kyrgyz people interwoven with the myth. Long inaccessible, the essay film has recently been restored by the film studio Kyrgyzfilm and uploaded to YouTube in 4K.

Kogonada looks at how the motif of doors reverberates through Robert Bresson's work.

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

A cinematic essay interweaving private archive images and a mixture of reflective, speculative and poetic intertitles that, like “an old movie from the 20th century”, invites us to meditate on what Des Pallières once liked to call “our old homeland”.

Province of Ciudad Real, Spain, December 29, 1990. During the annual march to the Herrera de la Mancha prison, held in support of the members of the terrorist gang ETA imprisoned there, the Basque rock band Negu Gorriak holds a concert, which is recorded, edited on video and turned into a tool of vindication. Decades later, a film crew tries to elaborate a personal essay around this event and its meaning.

Belfast-born actor Stephen Rea explores the impact of Brexit and the uncertainty of the future of the Irish border in a short film written by Clare Dwyer Hogg.

Initially a made-to-order documentary on Spain, the film becomes an open-ended work-in-the-making about the creative process. “Settling in the Spanish capital to make a documentary, Hanoun sketches out for us the different steps involved in making a film. The author turns his hesitations, his doubts and difficult working conditions into the constituents of his work”. (Raphaël Bassan)

The surrealist painter René Magritte questions the objective reality and emphasizes the arbitrariness of the relationship between an object, its image and its name: the evocation of mystery consists of images of familiar things gathered or transformed in such a way that they no longer conform to our ideas, whether naive or wise.

Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a country, of a century.

LA PELÍCULA DE MENTIRA

Hovory o lékařské etice

The sarcastic account of the assassination of five Spanish politicians between 1870 and 1973 is mixed with the narration of five short stories by Edgar Allan Poe illustrated by five skillful pencil artists. A documentary, a video essay, a collage, a provocative experiment where various pop culture figures and icons perform unexpected cameos. The macabre joke of a jester. Never more.

A film essay investigating the question of what “the West” means beyond the cardinal direction: a model of society inscribed itself in the Federal Republic of Germany’s postwar history and architecture. The narrator shifts among reflections on modern architecture and property relations, detailed scenes from childhood, and a passed-down memory of a “hemmed-in West Germany,” recalling the years of her parents’ membership in a 1970s communist splinter group.