"In medical terminology, absence of genitalia in females is referred to as "gynatresia". In other words, an extreme defect that goes beyond a mere illness" 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
Life drums the playfulness out of a boy as he grows up.
Emma is a young woman who's yet to find herself. In the meantime, she has to deal with the high expectations that society has set for women.
La sorcière de Crans
Gaining ideology from their last album Disco Volodar, the short film uses the core theme of space. The short film is filmed at Unit 3 Regents Trading Estate, the usual area for Sounds From The Other City. Using the philosophy of avante garde pioneer Maya Deren ‘one must at least begin with the body feeling’, the films opening is of the four piece standing atop of the hill in the Pendle countryside. This quickly melts into a warped reality and lands you into the POV of a camera and trapped in a liminal space where you see a band in session.
Sistiaga painted directly on 70mm film a circular (planetary?) form, around which dance shifting colours in a psychedelic acceleration matched by the soundtrack’s deep-space roar and howl. - Cinema Scope
Colossal explores the complexities of grief and the process of grieving as understood through the myth of a Man as he ventures through shifting landscapes ruminating.
ISLANDS explores a cinematic journey of two astronauts. As they enter Earth’s atmosphere the structure transforms. The spacecraft becomes the meteor from a myth of a tribesman; it triggers an old lady’s memory of a lover from her past. As these diverse characters converge in a plane of reality, we confront a particular form of gravity we covertly feel—falling in love.
At first, there was Tagalog, Gym Lumbera’s short and, to his mind, unfinished narrative about the infidelity that comes between a husband and wife in their twilight years, shot on film and reflecting his own real-life infidelity.. And then there was a storm, a real storm and not a metaphorical one, that flooded his house and submerged, and subsequently damaged, the only copy of Tagalog. This damaged version, entitled English, became the missing piece that completed the film. The new work is named after Taglish, the bastard hybrid, some say corruption, of Tagalog and English, and has become a meditation on love and language and the ways in which we betray and destroy them.
From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It’s Halloween at the Equator, Andrei Tarkovsky for the jungle set.
On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.
Begotten is the creation myth brought to life, the story of no less than the violent death of God and the (re)birth of nature on a barren earth.
The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.
1 minute experimental film.
La orilla que se Abisma is conceived as a journey, a trip along a river. Like rivers, like all journeys, the film has meanders, small riverbeds, detours and moments of rest.
Filmmakers use archival footage and animation to explore the culture surrounding nuclear weapons, the fascination they inspire and the perverse appeal they still exert.
Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.
Sarah is a debt collector who lives among the inhabitants of the village of Guimbal on the island of Panay. She wants to find the young man who appeared to her in a dream and goes to the island of Negros. Here, as she interacts with the inhabitants, Sarah continues her search, gathering memories of life and war, dreams, myths, legends, songs and stories that she takes part in and at times revolve around her. She is the daughter of an ancient mermaid, a revolutionary, a primordial element, a virgin who was kidnapped and hidden away from the sunlight. “The film is a retelling of fragments of the American occupation. Dialogue, shot in the Hiligaynon language, is not translated but used as a tonal guide and a tool for narration. Using unscripted scenes shot where the main character was asked to merely interact with the villagers, I discard dialogue and draw meaning from peoples’ faces, voices, and actions, weaving an entirely different story through the use of subtitles and inter-titles.”
"Mapang-akit" is an offshoot of a documentary project made with an Icelandic filmmaker and uses the outtakes from the Hudas Hudas festival in Antique, where a community bonds over a large effigy of Judas Iscariot during Holy Week. Amidst it is a found story of a man who returns home to his death after pursuing a woman in a neighboring village.
This documentary aims to register this unknown side of James Joyce: His Greek Notebooks. Trieste. Bloomsday, 2013. Dance in slow motion, accompanied by text. By deconstructing the body, we turn it into a memory: of the body, of life, of texts. The biographical references to Joyce and Mando Aravantinou, combined with the diagonal slicing of the image, cancel the realism of the landscape, including that of the Narrator’s space/study. As a culmination, Joyce’s letter “A request for a loan in Greek” functions as a timely denunciation. Various routes through cities, such as Trieste, London, New York, and Athens; languages such as Greek and English. In addition to the primal myth of Ulysses, there is another issue: Greek is “the language of the subject of Ulysses”