Powerfully and heartbreakingly detailing the challenging process that LGBTQ refugees must go through to find safety and security while starting over in the US, Tom Shepard’s inspiring new documentary profiles four people who have come to San Francisco to save their own lives. Over the course of this unforgettable group portrait, Subhi (from Syria), Junior (from Congo), and Mari and Cheyenne (from Angola) experience roadblocks and triumphs as they reflect on their respective histories and try to create a home for themselves in an environment that is not always welcoming. Once in San Francisco, they are met with setbacks but each maintains hope for a better future – Mari and Cheyenne record an album, Subhi starts a tour speaking on behalf of Syrian refugees and finds love, while Junior faces challenges of homelessness and gender non-conformance.
Taking a cue from Franz Kafka's "Letter to My Father," this highly personal film follows Czech director Jan Nemec as he attempts to engage in a dialogue with his deceased mother. While alive, Nemec's mother had a troubled relationship with her son; this rumination seems to be Nemec's public platform for coming to terms with unresolved familial issues. The director embellishes his film by linking personal events with 20th century history.
Draussen bleiben
“The European Dream: Serbia” is an investigative documentary by journalist Jaime Alekos about the tortures of Hungarian police to the refugees and migrants they catch trying to cross their border and the harsh living conditions in which they survive in Serbia awaiting an opportunity to enter the EU.
"…elegant yet rustic in its simplicity of execution; tugged gently toward different sides of the set by hints of color and motion interactions, positive and negative spaces, etc., and the unyielding delivery on one of the great apotheoses of poetic cinema at fade-out time." – Tony Conrad
An experimental sports film made partly during the Scandinavian Open Championships in Halmstad in 1970, partly during the Chinese players' exhibition tour in Denmark immediately after the SOC. First of all, it is a film about their style, about the artistic culmination that is ping-pong at its best, it records China's comeback into the international sports world.
Rafi, Salman, Said and Ali are all under 18 years old. They come from Afghanistan, Syria and Pakistan. After months of wandering, fleeing wars in their country, they found themselves stuck in Calais, where they are trying to survive, waiting for something better. Their dream: to get to England. How? By climbing into containers or slipping onto the axles of trucks, risking their lives. Who cares about these isolated minors in the Calais Jungle, the largest slum in Europe?
SONG 5: A childbirth song (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).
Believe it or not, esoteric film sages, i.e., Phil Solomon, are open to the possibilities of working with video — and even video games. This is a film that takes images from the notorious wanton car-jacking shoot-em-up Grand Theft Auto video game.
A silent succession of black-and-white photographs of the city of Montreal.
The four Afghan refugees who have applied for asylum in Austria strike up the song, “The caravan moves on” again and again. Encouraged by the journalist Lucy Ashton to record their lives on their smartphone cameras as a video diary, the friends film their precarious daily routine between visits to authorities, small jobs, and changing accommodations. Yet even when hope is lost, one certainty remains: the power of friendship.
Escaping a refugee life from war-torn Syria sparks hope for a family looking to adapt to an American life.
Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.
A day in the life of director Boris Lehman: he wanders from cafe to bookshop, cinema to museum, writer to musician, and into the storeroom of the film archive... He celebrates his birthday in an alleyway, with a friend, and finishes his journey with an escapade to Bruges and a stroll by the North Sea. The camera plays dirty tricks and the sound recorder gets carried away, to the point that both are clearly telling Boris to stop filming. Yet he persists…
A mysterious web of international shortwave radio towers once dominated the Tantramar marshlands near Sackville, New Brunswick. For almost 70 years the RCI shortwave towers broadcast around the world. Due to budget cuts, the site was decommissioned in 2012 and dismantled in 2014. Examining themes of identity and memory, the film captures images of the towers over four seasons in various weather conditions, accompanied by the voices of residents and technicians narrating accounts of hearing radio broadcasts emanate from their household appliances.
An experimental docu-fiction short from hours of collected material shot by the director. Different scenes, from drunk parties with friends to shots of the Dutch landscape during a train ride, are cut together to see if a narrative story can be constructed from nothing but randomly shot footage.
Every weekend for six years, Jessica takes a bus from NYC, where she lives and works as a set decorator, to Boston, her hometown, where she cares for her dad, Aloysius, who is 87 and has advanced Alzheimer's disease.
An intimate portrait of the nuns of Kala Rongo, a rare and exceptional Buddhist Monastery exclusively for women situated in Nangchen, in remote and rural northeastern Tibet. These nuns are receiving religious and educational training previously unavailable to women, and playing an unprecedented role in preserving their rich cultural heritage even as they slowly reshape it. They graciously allow the camera a never-before-seen glimpse into their vibrant spiritual community and insight into their extraordinary lives. Some shy, some outspoken, all are committed to the often difficult life they have chosen, away from the yak farms and herding families of their birth. It is the story of their spiritual community, one that couldn't have existed 20 years ago but is thriving today.
Two women – one passive and resigned, the other aggressive and domineering – interact in various locations in New York city. The film explores the dynamic between them before ending with a showdown at the roller-coaster on Coney Island.
Kitten of vluchteling?