Several Portuguese creators occupy the director's chair in this collective short film shot during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown in an unfolding of personal perspectives.
In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.
Ich lebe in der Gegenwart - Versuch über Hans Richter
The rare short film presents a curious dialogue between filmmaker Julio Bressane and actor Grande Otelo, where, in a mixture of decorated and improvised text, we discover a little manifesto to the Brazilian experimental cinema. Also called "Belair's last film," Chinese Viola reveals the first partnership between photographer Walter Carvalho and Bressane.
Jean-Claude Rousseau's Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre is not only his first medium-length film, but a chance to discover this filmmaker whom Jean-Marie Straub has called, along with Frans Van de Staak and Peter Nestler, the greatest working in Europe. With this newly restored print there is also a possibility to discover the relationship between Rousseau's art of filming and Jan Vermeer's famous painting. As Prosper Hillairet wrote in 1988, four years after Rousseau had finished Jeune femme ... (for the first time as we know today): «Without adopting the usual systematic spirit and form of cinéma structurel, Rousseau presents us with simple images and leaves it at that. Keeps the image in hand. A minimalist and ascetic expression of cinema: a shot that lasts.»
A documentary that invites the viewer to immerse themselves in a intimate and thoughtful walk through Poblenou Cemetery in Barcelona, better know as "El Santet", to see what is happening at its surrounding areas and, especially, inside: work, buildings, people watching over those who are no longer here, cemetery workers... A trip through a space that is closer than we think.
Filmmakers use archival footage and animation to explore the culture surrounding nuclear weapons, the fascination they inspire and the perverse appeal they still exert.
During the Feria of Nîmes, a bullfight is filmed from the perspective of the animal, relegating the matador and public to off-screen spectators. A ritual at the frontiers of mysticism, carried by the sacrificial figure of the bull, revealer of our humanity.
A 6-year-old Tibetan boy leaves his family and flees to a refugee camp in northern India.
Works with sound recordings of Dion McGregor, who became famous for talking in his sleep.
H*ART ON dives off the deep end of modern art. A film about the yearning to create, to mould everyday emotions into a meaningful life and, most of all, to live beyond one's death. A struggle that gets to the existential core of each of us. How do you find meaning in everyday fear, love, sex and loneliness?
Filmed during the production of the Columbia Pictures western "Mackenna’s Gold," this short work presents a non-narrative visual study of the Arizona desert. Rather than documenting the film set itself, "6-18-67" assembles landscape images, time-lapse photography, and ambient sound into an abstract record of place and duration.
The film is an observational telling of a watchman in an apartment complex in Guwahati, Assam, India. It blends documentary to explore his alienation and raise the question of empathy vis-a-vis his occupation: its existence beyond what may be referred to as a linear time or the time occupied by the privileged. His time is interpreted as existing in an another time characterised by the banal quality of his job. The film attempts to do away with any narrative control where the subject (the spectator) too exercises a reciprocal gaze on the filmer: by becoming an observer to his own filming, the film's own privileged gaze is confronted.
As technology accelerates, our species' collective imagination of the future grows ever more kaleidoscopic. We are all haunted by temporal distortion, perhaps no more than when we attempt to remember what the future looked like to our younger selves. As the mist of time devours our memories, the future recedes; each of us burdened by the gaping mouth of entropy. Yet, emerging technology provides a glimmer of hope; transhumanism promises a future free from mortality, disease and pain. Does our salvation lie in digital simulacra? We're here to sell you the answer to that question, for the low, low price of four hundred and seventy seconds.
"Ryuta is 5 years old. Even though he is my son, I sometimes wonder what this small person is to me. Even though I see his joys and sadnesses and know the feel of his warmth on my skin when I hold him, there are moments when my feelings for him become vague and blank." - Takashi Ito
"The majority of my 8-mm works were made for the three-minute "Personal Focus" film special put on in Fukuoka. This film is an animation of photographs I had taken on a regular basis as a sort of diary, and was made to have a rough feel to it." - Takashi Ito
Experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.
The television images of the collapse of the World Trade Center were preceded by manifold stagings of the building, either as a highly symbolic icon, a speculative destruction fantasy or merely as a spectacular backdrop. In Misty Picture, city symphony, disaster movie and media trauma therapy become one.
Journalist Dermi Azevedo has never stopped fighting for human rights and now, three decades after the end of the military dictatorship in Brazil, he's witnessing the return of those same practices.
A film about small Ontario town's struggle to restore a desecrated African-Canadian cemetery and the resulting turmoil over it.