Birth Control Your Own Adventure

What are they? What do they seek? When all the lights go out, they will wander. And you will never see them.

Chema is an expat architect from Spain who lives in Amsterdam. He has built up a new life there as a wind-up toy maker. He creates small pieces of art from recycle items.

Rainer Kohlberger applied various algorithms to extract the noise from a vast number of action films and used this to reduce the dramaturgy of the narrative to its essence. keep that dream burning oscillates between maximum abstraction and pure blur. Within the blurriness, objects form and disappear. The surface allows the space to be conceived.

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”

In 1988, Tilda Swinton toured round the Berlin Wall on a bicycle - starting and ending at the Brandenburg Gate - accompanied by filmmaker Cynthia Beatt. As Swinton travels through fields and historic neighborhoods, past lakes and massive concrete apartment buildings, the Wall is a constant presence.

This short documentary focuses on the very end of Washington Boulevard, where the city of Los Angeles meets the ocean and the Venice Pier begins. The rough and simplistic concrete pier braves pacific storms and provides stillness and stability. People come to walk, to fish and ease their minds. The film takes a closer look at the diverse people all around the pier. Among them the filmmakers find two citizens, both immigrants, who take us on their personal journey through history.

Originating in Europe in the 16th century, the Mennonites are a Protestant religious sect, related to the Amish. Instead of compromising their way of life, they have been continually forced to migrate around the world to maintain their freedom to live as they choose and have found a home in Mexico.

The life of a last mesquite is in danger right after an ecocide took place to build a shopping mall. Against an uncertain future, it´s voice will combine past and present to remember the cutting down of it’s equals and the fight for their preservation.

Somehow we are all birders and birds at the same time. We capture moments, but don't we live caged in our memories?

What's in the middle of the year 1994? The memories recorded on cassette of a birthday party in the midst of a convulsive context.

Teng and Mai seek temporary refuge inside a shelter for pregnant women and girls. Mai, unlike Teng, is not a first time mother. She went to Manila to work as housekeeper after her passport was faked by the agency that’s supposed to help her get a job abroad. On the other hand, Teng left Negros Occidental without her father’s consent. Her eagerness to provide for her family was driven by her mother who abandoned them. Their personal dilemma led them to a shelter where they receive proper care as they prepare for motherhood. Now that their stay has come to an end, they are bound to make the hardest decisions of their lives not just as daughters to their parents but as mothers to their babies.

The history of Chinese migration to Mexico, from its birth at the start of the twentieth century, through the Mexican revolution, the anti-Chinese movement, and up to the current state of Chinese migrants in the country. A documentary about xenophobia in Mexico and the search for identity of a group of people caught between two cultures.

Found footage anti-war film comprising film documents of the Austro-Hungarian and Italian army on the Alpine front, and from first generation picture material by war-film pioneer Luca Comerio.

Working from archives of private film footage from a trip to India by the upper class of the late 1920s, a period of strong anti-colonial outbreak, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi deconstruct the images and analyze the attitude and behavior of Westerners in the East.

Using images shot in Russia and Armenia from World War I to the 1930s and retrieved from a Soviet film archive, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi constructed a meditative film about the status of Armenians as a people without a state. Inspired by the diary of Gianikian’s father, People, Years, Life uses rare footage depicting the region’s major historic events: the end of Tsarist Russia, violence in the Caucasus during World War I, the 1918 Armenian exodus from Azerbaijan. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi’s treatment of the material manipulates the speed of the images, adds color and music, and magnifies various parts of the image, so that the movement of bodies across the frame begins to carry the weight of exile, mourning, dispossession.

Comprised of images shot by amateur photographers and German soldiers in the Balkans from the twenties through the forties, BALKAN INVENTORY was begun by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi in response to the tragedy unfolding in the former Yugoslavia.

Inspired by their beloved Dolomite area in Northeast Italy, a battle theater in World Wars I and II, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi continue to explore issues of war and peace in their most recent production. The film uses shots of ordinary toys found in the area, many missing limbs and other pieces, to represent, in both direct and oblique ways, the historical period between Fascism, Nazism, and the postwar era.

In this filmic comment on Fascist ideology - which uses footage from the recently discovered archives of Luca Comerio - invisible hands push captive animals to fight among themselves.

The Devil Never Sleeps is a “whodunit” documentary about family secrets. Filmmaker Lourdes Portillo received a phone call informing her of the mysterious death of her wealthy Mexican uncle Oscar. Officially ruled a suicide, Portillo’s relatives claimed murder, offering several possible suspects including a business partner, a ranch hand, and Oscar’s young widow who stood to inherit everything. Traveling to Mexico, Portillo attempts to learn the truth about her powerful uncle. Using interviews, old snapshots and home movies, she finds a complicated web of family secrets, intrigue, rumor and betrayal that makes her enigmatic uncle’s murder seem ever more likely, yet ever more obscure. As the Mexican saying goes, “When evil is lurking, the devil never sleeps.”

Right alongside Jerusalem, in a Russian Orthodox Convent in the Mount of Olives, in the middle of the Arab quarter, lives the 82-year-old Estonian nun Mother Ksenya.