Screen Test: Pénélope Palmer

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time. (Silent short, voiced in 1937 and 1996.)

A short film created for Spanish TV touching on the subject of Catalonia's struggle for independence, interspersed with symbolic images.

Mr Hublot is a withdrawn, idiosyncratic character with OCD, scared of change and the outside world. Robot Pet's arrival turns his life upside down: he has to share his home with this very invasive companion.

A socially awkward teen gets caught between a changing friendship and a life-altering discovery.

A newbie of the criminal underworld is tasked to transfer and extract some mysterious data, but they bit off more than they can chew.

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

Bugs takes a wrong turn off the Hollywood freeway and tunnels into the headquarters of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Crusoe, played by Yosemite Sam, has been living off coconuts for 20 years when Bugs washes up on his island.

To the sound of a heartbeat and made entirely without the use of a camera, this film projects abstract forms and illuminations on a night-black background and suggests as Tambellini says, “seed black, seed black, sperm black, sperm black.”

This is a story about love.

Now aged 17, Antoine Doinel works in a factory which makes records. At a music concert, he meets a girl his own age, Colette, and falls in love with her. Later, Antoine goes to extraordinary lengths to please his new girlfriend and her parents, but Colette still only regards him as a casual friend. First segment of “Love at Twenty” (1962).

A young woman is struggling with her mental health, as it begins to slowly push her over the edge.

A young girl who treated her pets as comrades and liked to play with construction blocks, experiences her life changing after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

A radical remix of the recent Transformers film, via synthetic collapse and critical revenge on its old & new fascist tropes > celebrating SPEED. NOISE. + DANGER. The fervent declarations & violent poetry of the Futurists are superimposed on the mythic morphology of the Autobot blockbuster’s machine mayhem. Images of death & destruction reign in a delirium of transformations as, to quote Marinetti: “We Decompose the Universe!”

Jacob, Tony, and Brandon are on a night drive through the wooded outskirts of an unknown city. While his friends sleep, Jacob remembers where he's seen the upcoming overpass, the man standing on the other side of it, and the abandoned parking garage sitting above the road.

The short film is a poetic interpretation of the writer's mental journey during the writing process. The writer, played by Bryan Cranston (AMC’s Breaking Bad), creates a woman in his mind, played by Lela Edgar, while working on his next script.

In February 2012, I went to Ishinomaki, a town North of Tokyo that was half destroyed by the tsunami of March 11th, 2011, to meet the disaster victims who now live in temporary housing. I spent several days in the North, under the snow, listening to these people talk candidly about what they had lived through, telling their own stories without the media as an intermediary. Their testimonies were terrifying, harsh and sad, but at the same time touching, sincere and human. From the pictures and interviews that I collected, I decided to make a film, not to reflect how awful the events were, but to communicate the singular and even surreal nature of each person’s experience. My intention wasn’t so much to focus on this particular event in Japan, but rather to make these stories more universal as a way of paying tribute to all the victims of natural disasters throughout the world.

How bootleg video kept the Pakistani film industry alive under censorship in the 1980s and 90s.

Mère Ubu

Père Ubu