“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
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.
Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive
Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound , finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.
'It was in San Francisco at a punk festival. I was already high and the air was so thick in the rooms that you could cut it with a knife. I had a photograph camera with me; I stood in a corner of the entrance hall and took 36 pictures on slide film. At home I put the slides into a slide projector. I took out the lens and filmed the slides by filming directly from the projector - using single frames according to a certain plan.'
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).
Miguel, a debutant director, and his young team live a series of tribulations during the shootings of their first film, which unrolls between Lisbon, Venice, Paris and Madrid.
A former student of a recently deceased and forgotten '60s filmmaker provides commentary to the late director's film, offering a unique interpretation as only he could.
"Washington Heights" tells the story of Carlos Ramirez, a young illustrator burning to escape the Latino neighborhood of the same name to make a splash in New York City's commercial downtown comic book scene. When his father, who owns a bodega in the Heights, is shot in a burglary attempt, Carlos is forced to put his dream on hold and run the store. In the process, he comes to understand that if he is to make it as a comic artist, he must engage with the community he comes from, take that experience back out into the world, and put it in his work.
A young man and his dog encounter a sinister force while on a walk through the woods.
Noite de Lamentações (Night of Wails)
A Los Angeles detective discovers the unbelievable while searching for a missing child and in the aftermath his life begins to unravel.
A story of diaspora. The film criticises the myth of Swiss neutrality, which violently masks structural, systemic, and social passivity.
Young artist Kyoko wreaks havoc on everyone that she encounters when Japan's oldest major movie studio asks a batch of venerable filmmakers to revive its high-brow soft-core Roman Porno series.
In a city inhabited by drawn beings, an indigenous boy witnesses a holographic appearance. It is the arrival of an entity of unknown materiality. With a mysterious presence and exotic allegories, it starts to enchant the residents, awakening their most insane senses.
Inside the claustrophobic scenery of a fancy apartment in the city of Frankfurt three men and a woman lock themselves in for ten days. Oskar and Julia are a couple. They have sex and let themselves be filmed. Benjamin and Bastian are behind the camera, trying to get pictures of absolute intimacy. Closeness as it can only be found among lovers.
An experimental docu-fiction short from hours of collected material shot by the director. Different scenes, from drunk parties with friends to shots of the Dutch landscape during a train ride, are cut together to see if a narrative story can be constructed from nothing but randomly shot footage.
BARE BONES is an experimental short film written, directed and scored by DEBBY FRIDAY. Conceived during the Covid-19 lockdown and shot in Vancouver, BC on 16mm, the film tells the story of a young woman who swallows a bee and begins to undergo a hallucinatory and transformative experience. Abstract visual sequences depict time and space fracturing around her as she succumbs to wave after wave of pure feeling.
Normality is a human state of good intentions, empathy, caring and wanting to do the best for those we love and the world at large.
Russian emigré Dimitri Kirsanoff’s film, alternatively titled Death of A Stag and Une chasse à courre, is a post-war study of a traditional stag hunt. The pursuit of the animal finds a cross-cutting parallel in the felling of a tree in the forest.