Auf der Suche nach dem Glück

John Hurt narrates this highly charged and doom-laden public information film from the 1987 AIDS awareness campaign. A cliff-face explodes in slow motion; an industrial drill bores into a huge block of rock; the word 'AIDS' is chiselled into the polished surface of a granite headstone and a "Don't Die of Ignorance" leaflet drops onto the surface along with an elegiac bouquet of white lilies. The solemnity of the accompanying voice-over quells any vestiges of ambiguity.

With its simple and iconic imagery this was public information film at its most sensational: expensive special effects and high-concept production design brought public information filmmaking into the realm of state-of-the-art corporate advertising. The film was the result of a £5 million cinema and television campaign aimed at combating the growing spread of HIV and AIDS. With restrictions around the overt promotion of condom use on television and a growing chorus of moral campaigners promulgating their own agenda, the straightforward and doom-laded approach was probably the only viable option for campaign mastermind Sammy Harari. But the result was a hard-hitting and memorable campaign which undoubtedly fulfilled its brief of pervading public consciousness. There are two versions; the one shown in cinemas did not feature John Hurt's famous voiceover.

It Happened Here

An adrift man must fall into the depths of drug abuse to resurrect his past lover, oblivious to the catastrophic consequences.

Short film on Raoul Servais' Servaisgrafie process/invention.

Slapstick - a tribute to 100 years of cinema: authorities, in their efforts to create order, often create disorder, not noticing this.

When a stubborn old man and a fretful teenaged girl are forced to share a hospital room, an unexpected friendship forms over their hatred of fake cheerfulness and bad hospital food.

(des)Conexión

Čardášová Julie

Alex's first date with Ben is going great. He's handsome, smart, and really seems to like her. There must be something wrong with him.

After her mother discovers she has a drug problem, a troubled teenage girl finds herself in an inpatient rehabilitation center, where she must decide between the realm of people who belong on the inside or change her outlook to join the often difficult world of reality on the outside before the choice is made for her.

A short film about the star-crossed romance between a humble slave and gentry girl. It contrasts its story of Iron Age lovers with their two modern-day equivalents.

This short story is a prequel to our favorite friendship unit, Apple. Follow her in her adventure from the other side of the Wasteland, right before her memorable encounter with the Kid!

In what could easily pass as a Twilight Zone episode, this film shows what happens when a troubled carnival owner returns back to his childhood home to escape God. Films like this would be shown to adult church groups to stimulate discussion - such as “was this man being stalked by Jesus in wooden shoes?”.

This classic from Rolf Forsberg, in the style of Fellini and Bergman, tells the story of a gardener who decides to introduce ants to his garden, because they will benefit what grows there. He is disturbed when the ants spend all their time fighting. He sends his son to teach them how to live peacefully.

Rita, a blind child, shelters a boy on the run who suddenly breaks into her home. It's a mysterious, enigmatic meeting that lets Rita experience a brief moment of freedom.

Michael Paul Smith is a unique character. He has spent most of his reclusive life struggling through bullying, prejudices and health issues until he found a way to eliminate it all. His answer was to create a fictional town called Elgin Park. We go deep into the mind and the magic behind Michael's 1/24th-scale recreation his town.

An ex-boxer desperate to connect with his only son gives him a gift on his 21st birthday that will change their lives forever.

Like a Santiago Álvarez squared (or multiplied by 4K, to be more precise), Siegfried A. Fruhauf –a descendant of Austria’s Great Generation of Tscherkassky, Deutsch and Arnold– rede- fines with Vintage Print the power of film as imagination, at the service of an amazing economy of resources. If the pioneer of Cuban montage cinema became immortal when he left us his phrase “give me two photographs, a moviola, and some music, and I’ll make you a film,” Fruhauf slims down that recipe by cre- ating thirteen hyperkinetic minutes out of a single, century-old glass negative in decomposition. Ranging from figurative to ab- stract art, analogy to digital, and documentary to experimental, Vintage Print’s definitive achievement is that it reverses a road movie in its own terms, and the first thing that is left behind is the very same notion of cinema.