Clear Skies, Light Breeze

"The prevailing stigmatization of the 'villero' universe is fed back by the images. In order to dismantle this stigmatization, other images must be presented or we need to reveal what the existing ones seek to cover up. The slum is usually represented from a limited and deceitful visual panorama. This representation has an intention. Cinema and television are two image-producing devices that strengthen the stereotypes that we have about the people who inhabit these spaces. And what happens in the field of painting? Do clichés reign there too? This visual essay seeks to confront various works by national painters and sculptors, belonging to the Palais collection, with the kinetic images of current cinema and television, to reflect on both the differences and the similarities in the meanings and discourses that both regimes of images can produce." César González

In this deeply personal video diary, a young researcher tries to make sense of her fascination for the film "The Pain of Others" by Penny Lane. A deep dive into the discomforting world of YouTube and online conspiracies, that challenges traditional notions of what documentary cinema is, or should be.

From the behavior, discourse, and appearance of individual actors, Vachek composes, in the form of a mosaic, a broad and many-layered film-argument about Czechoslovak democracy in the period of its rebirth, all administered with the director’s ini­mitable point of view.

KWAIDAN

This film essay is inspired by Leonid Trauberg's eponymous autobiographical text. It also sheds light on his public condemnation in 1949 as a leader of the "cosmopolitans," accused of "only causing harm to Soviet cinema," as well as his enthusiasm for silent slapstick comedies, the novels of P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton, and his fascination with the lost FEKS film, The Adventures of Octobrine.

The mind process behind the film, Transformers the Premake, explained by Kevin B Lee himself.

In an age of chaos, destruction, and decay, the resurrection of nature was the last ray of vitality and a testament to survival. The film ventures into the haunting remnants of humanity, the silent witness of its collective collapse, and the ethereal rebirth of nature in the absence of mankind. The intriguing scenes are experienced through an omnipresent and atemporal perspective.

In a world bedazzled by intractable images, do we need the essay film now more than ever? Kevin B. Lee weighs up this distinctively self-aware, searching form of cinema through both video and text.

In 2010, an obsessed gamer designed the perfect game of Sim City. Achieved through a repeating pattern of clustered high rises, “Magnasanti” exposes the hellish consequences of top-down civic design. In his new documentary, John Wilson explores how New York City is creeping closer and closer to realising this fictional metropolis.

An experimental short film, shot during the COVID-19 pandemic, made by one person. Using recorded scenes and archival footage, the short presents an unorthodox narrative to explore the themes of self-identification, identity, gender expression and androgyny.

A documentary based on the mutual experiences of a trio of directors, which portrays life in the border village of Bystré during the last year of the millennium. The film concentrates on the exuberant social life of the community, including many bizarre recent customs, as well as on several very intimate moments in the lives of the inhabitants.

Zaniklý svět Karla Pecky

Make Moravia Great Again

This experimental Western horror film set in the Moravian region of Slovácko offers a new take on the legend of Saint Wenceslas. Against the backdrop of a shabby folk festival, the mythical prince Boleslav, a zombie from a wine cellar, battles his brother Wenceslas over the nature of Czech statehood and a plate of tomato soup.

A reflection on the fate of humanity in the Anthropocene epoch, White Noise is a roller-coaster of a film, a whirlwind of sounds and images. The fourth feature-length work by Simon Beaulieu, this film essay plunges viewers into a subjective sensory adventure—a direct physical encounter with the information overload of daily life. White Noise transforms the imminent collapse of our civilization into a visceral aesthetic experience.

In this new video essay, filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe delves into the dread-inducing mood and tone of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s modern horror classic Cure, deploying a dizzying range of cinematic references to unravel the film’s eerie magic.

A variety of storefront mannequins look at, contemplate on, and talk about public space.

The women follows a woman's journey to redefine herself after her husband's death, navigating newfound freedom and self-recognition. Inspired by Marta Feuchtwanger, this essay film challenges perceptions of women's roles and relationships.

Im Reich Des Squatters

In the fourth and final instalment of Karel Vachek’s not-so-little Little Capitalist Tetralogy, preparations for an opera performance in the Czech capital’s art-nouveau National Theatre become the occasion for a reflection on rebels, dissidents, and others subversives who stand in battle, heroically and sometimes tragically, against majority opinion, established rules, or powerful institutions. "As the camera wanders over, around and through Prague’s lavish National Theatre, director J.A. Pitínský coaches singers through a rehearsal of Bedřich Smetana’s tragic opera Dalibor. Intercut with the tale of the 15th-century knight who, imprisoned, refused to name names, Vachek interviews, on the plush red seats of the empty theatre, a whole series of latter-day rebels.