Historias lamentables

In a locked down train station, a homicide detective conducts an interview with a tormented monkey who is suspected of murder.

Four high school friends hatch a plan for a farcical heist that sends them spiraling into a series of surreal events littered with clowns, fast food, and ‘rakenrol’, in an even more absurd nation of squalor and entertainment.

Of late, Kago has also taken to posting his even less-known video work to his YouTube channel. In these jokey short films, many of them crudely animated, Kago's sick sense of humor reaches its full heights of absurdity. There's a playful surrealist sensibility to Kago's work, as well as a tendency to revel in the ridiculous, the crude and the disturbing. His work straddles a weird boundary between avant-garde experimentation and low-brow fart jokes — the punchline of one of these films is literally an oozing torrent of shit — although, admittedly, his videos seem to lean a bit more heavily towards the fart jokes than his comics. But hey, who doesn't appreciate a good fart joke once in a while?

The Chumscrubber is a dark comedy about the lives of people who live in upper-class suburbia. It all begins when Dean Stiffle finds the body of his friend, Troy. He doesn't bother telling any of the adults because he knows they won't care. Everyone in town is too self consumed to worry about anything else than themselves. And everybody is on some form of drug just to get through their days.

Forty-year-old Andreas arrives in a strange city with no memory of how he got there. He is presented with a job, an apartment - even a wife. But before long, Andreas notices that something is wrong. Andreas makes an attempt to escape the city, but he discovers there's no way out. Andreas meets Hugo, who has found a crack in a wall in his cellar. Beautiful music streams out from the crack. Maybe it leads to "the other side"? A new plan for escape is hatched.

An account of Baron Munchausen's supposed travels and fantastical experiences with his band of misfits.

The wicked Blue Meanies take over Pepperland, eliminating all color and music. As the only survivor, the Lord Admiral escapes in the yellow submarine and journeys to Liverpool to enlist the help of the Beatles.

In this dark comedy of manners, soccer moms Jill and Lisa seek the approval of their "friends" – at all costs. Set in a surreal world, Greener Grass explores one's willingness to endure present pain in exchange for future validation – or at least a perfect smile.

A teenage boy with severe anxiety goes about a day in his life.

The film presents a series of unrelated "pictures": a police commissioner who, faced with four friars stripped by two women, must decide whether they are real or false friars (but he can't); a professor who, suffering from acute dysentery, is dismissed for unworthiness by the Institute Council; a football referee trying to escape the ire of angry fans; an endless marathon in Piazza Navona; a true but crazy producer, a not crazy but fake producer and a group of actors who want to take revenge on one and the other; a "club of toasts" that spends its time toasting to this and that, to elect new members and honorary members; finally, a censorship commission that, aboard an old and very battered car, fails to reach his workplace.

A spell of time in the life of a family in rural Tochigi prefecture. Yoshiko is not an ordinary housewife, instead working on an animated film project. Uncle Ayano, a successful music producer, is looking to get his head together after living in Tokyo. Meanwhile, Sachiko is concerned with why she seems to be followed by a giant version of herself. As the lazy days pass by, each member of the family is followed in a series of episodic vignettes.

A student walks into class and notices something is wrong. Strange events begin to escalate.

Based on the idea that drugs have influenced some of our greatest minds (Poe, Baudelaire etc.), this film documents just how influential drug experiences have been on the minds of great writers, poets and thinkers.

Jorge and Alberto are two wizards in Buenos Aires. One works as an assistant in a courthouse, while another is pining for his magical glory days. During their weekly ritual, they discover that Saturn has turned, which mostly means much mayhem and doom. They are proven right, when Argentina’s president storms in and asks Jorge and Alberto to save her daughter from the clutches of Judge Fayo, a man who wants to achieve the triumph of neoliberalism. During their search for the girl, Jorge and Alberto will have to deal with demons from another dimension. And that all before midnight! Time to dust off their magic tricks, because the fate of the world is at stake!

Winnipeg Film Group. Deep in the winter of 1986. Guy Maddin is in the process of filming Tales from the Gimli Hospital and needs to rub a dead seagull on somebody's chest. Immediately, Dave Barber agrees, submitting his bare flesh to Maddin's road kill and to film history. (This film was commissioned by the Winnipeg Film Group's Cinematheque for its 25th anniversary, Silverscope)

A struggling drug addict is plunged into a tortured netherworld, where he must defend his spirit from a ravenous horde of soul-addicted junkies.

In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.

Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett ventures downtown for a hookup with a mystery woman.

World famous pop group the Spice Girls zip around London in their luxurious double decker tour bus having various adventures and performing for their fans.

Two professional executioners accidentally find love in a small factory town.