Mel Schwartz escaped the Great Depression on a bicycle adventure he'd remember for the rest of his life... until Mel lost his memory to Alzheimer's. Now over seventy-five years later, his grandchildren set out to recreate his life-changing journey and find those memories before they slip away. Cycle of Memory explores the importance of intergenerational connection, healing painful pasts, and leaving a meaningful time capsule for the future.
Ritual de Luz
A newspaper clip of a 30-year-old movie makes our middle-aged protagonist in the middle of his peak years to look for his best childhood friend. The journey leads him back to his teenage years in the 1990s depression, over-generational substance abuse and past encounters. This partly essayistic, autobiographical documentary tells the story of friendship and generational experiences while also pondering on the causes and effects of destinies in the judgmental atmosphere of our society.
A documentary focused on the proliferation of bedbugs in Marseille.
Musing on the nature of memory, Don Hertzfeldt recounts stories about a kiss from The King, a floating child in a backyard and a giant foot.
Pegah talks about Gholam, a man who’s not like her father, mother, uncles, or aunts, even though he’s always present at family gatherings. Gholam films these everyday scenes with his own camera. At the time, Pegah can’t imagine what the purpose of these films might be, but she’s happy to pose before the lens of this family friend, who she’s certainly very fond of.
Like a visual elegy, My Memory Is Full of Ghosts explores a reality caught between past, present and future in Homs, Syria. Behind the self-portrait of an exsanguinated population in search of normality emerge memories of the city, haunted by destruction, disfigurement and loss. A deeply moving film, a painful echo of the absurdity of war and the strength of human beings.
Notre-Dame de la Garde: Basilique hors norme
Day after day, an elderly woman recalls the Spanish Basque country of her youth — while forgetting she is consigned to a retirement home in Chile.
In Asturias, the Duro Felguera company dismissed 232 employees in 1993. From then on, a ten-year struggle began for the workers to be reinstated. "Resistencia" is the story of a workers' struggle that ended up triumphing.
Las Preguntas que Perdimos
About to turn 100 years old, Santo Amaro School closed its doors in 2020, amid the pandemic, leaving former students in deep sorrow. The story of the school is now told by different generations of students, teachers, nuns and employees, who return to the school building to remember their time over there: an unreachable past, which, through memories, becomes present once again.
A rare close-up of the Abakuá —an Afro-Cuban religious brotherhood that has been hidden from outsiders until recently. A symbol of resistance for over 200 years, the Abakuá society has managed to survive slavery, the Spanish domination and the Revolution, spite of all the bias and misunderstandings about their traditions and rituals.
Five Jewish Hungarians, now US citizens, tell their stories: before March 1944, when Nazis began to exterminate Hungarian Jews, months in concentration camps, and visiting childhood homes more than 50 years later. An historian, a Sonderkommando, a doctor who experimented on Auschwitz prisoners, and US soldiers who were part of the liberation in April 1945.
A glimpse into a visual representation of memory; A Christmas-time series of meals, coffees, and movies, with friends, lovers, and housemates. Faced with the compounding of faces and places, each moment begins to collide with one another: voices are muddled, and faces are broken. How is memory created? How are they separated from one another?
Dança de Recordações
10 May 1943. Something is spotted drifting ashore off the coast of Northwest Donegal, Ireland. Something that would change the lives of the local people forever.
Tan só o demo lembra
In 2014, Tsai Ming-Liang was invited to make a film for the MarseilleFID, Marseille International Film Festival. Since he was not familiar with Marseille, he decided to make a film as tourist, capturing the beautiful Mediterranean sunshine in the late summer of that year. He also invited famous French actor, Denis Lavant, to appear alongside Lee Kang-Sheng playing Xuanzang. "Journey to the West" was invited to be the opening short film at the Berlin International Film Festival the same year.
Nesrin and Erdem talk about their relationship, which they don’t remember in exactly the same way. Çevik’s visually stunning essay uses their conversations to forge a pensive treatise on what it means to forget, where word and image play an equal role.