Combining high definition and Super 8 footage, Lampedusa is composed of interwoven narratives based on a series of real events. In 1831, a volcanic island suddenly erupted from the sea a few kilometers off the southern coast of Sicily. An international dispute ensued, as a number of European powers laid claim to this newfound “land”. The island receded below sea level six months later, leaving only a rocky ledge under the sea…
The title comes from Sergei Yesenin's last poem before comiting suicide. Using Virginia Woolf's last letters as a base, this film is meditation on the power of the word and its undertsanding and the the last moments before saying "goodbye".
This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."
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.
An anthology of one-minute films created by 51 international filmmakers on the theme of the death of cinema. Intended as an ode to 35mm, the film was screened one time only on a purpose-built 20x12 meter public cinema screen in the Port of Tallinn, Estonia, on 22 December 2011. A special projector was constructed for the event which allowed the actual filmstrip to be burnt at the same time as the film was shown.
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.
A collage of newsreels, trailers, clips and other visionary and unseen fragments of sight and sound regarding the late plastic artist Helio Oititica.
The Greek island of Syros is visited by a series of unexpected guests. Immutable forms, outside of time, aloof observants to human conditions.
A manufactured memory.
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
Nature, gymnastic movements, a cat...
Glen Denny observed: "This film is not ocean, it is panther stalking jungle." Camera flows because it is free to move through space.
The film takes us through the working day of protagonists, factory workers. Their basic working tool is their body, ready to execute strenuous manual tasks. Day after day the same story, the same faces, the same spaces, the same tasks. Feeling confined, they seek a sheet anchor, a way out, an escape. They venture into the unknown, dance, drift and float in the air.
An alchemically treated lullaby to the end of cinema, featuring Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
A documentary portrait of Utopia, loosely framed by Plato’s invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel.
The Island is a short film shot entirely on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast of Malaysia that became the largest and longest-operating refugee camp after the Vietnam War. The artist and his family were some of the 250,000 people who inhabited the tiny island between 1978 and 1991; it was once one of the most densely populated places in the world. After the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shuttered the camp in 1991, Pulau Bidong became overgrown by jungle, filled with crumbling monuments and relics. The film takes place in a dystopian future in which the last man on earth - having escaped forced repatriation to Vietnam - finds a United Nations scientists who has washed ashore after teh world’s last nuclear battle. By weaving together footage from Bidong’s past with a narrative set in its future, Nguyen questions the individual’s relationship to history, trauma, nationhood, and displacement.
Crashing waves, the cry of a gull, silence.
A Tibetan Lama. His disciple. The disciple's wife, young boy and terrier. An old tugboat crossing the Mississippi River. A man in his seventh month of solitude. His hermitage built by his own hands. The man's bloodhound; his cat. Clouds crossing the Continental Divide. A mountain stream. A girl. The sun.
Omniscient perspectives shoot vibratory gleams through human projectors statically displaced across the screen. Superimpositions at fever pitch falling apart and compressing into new molecular lattices. Peripheral fantasies imagine forth collusioned destinies. A yin/yang interchange makes light's transparency into density, while the darkness metamorphoses into thin lucidity. Hands in peristaltic motion grasp and release, conjuring interstitial embroideries. Landscapes yield their own maps in topographical patterns.
Creates a reorientation of vision in a union of sights and sounds which suggest a different way of appreciating and understanding the fundamental integrity of experience.