This independent film follows the actions and inner thoughts of four unusual individuals as they go about their lives in Tokyo, occasionally meeting up with one another. Their thoughts tend to focus on questions of death, existence, and the conflict of society against the individual. All of the action is performed silently, with narration dubbed over.
A film that places the bright and dark sides of life close together. From an understatement beginning, the movie drives up to an ecstatic highlight with a love act between two young people. The orgasm becomes an enormous image flow into the crematorium's death machine.
Using both found footage and her own material, Nina Fonoroff recollects the memory of her father. Constructing and deconstructing a portrait, she weaves family and friends’ remembrances with an inquiry into her own work process. Her searching attitude suggests that with the loss of her father came a question of the role, not of a particular father, but the father figure—a refusal of authority, and an appreciation of her father’s cycles of learning, teaching, learning. As Danny Kaye, playing Hans Christian Andersen, tells a group of children the story of the piece of chalk that saw itself as a the source, not the transmitter of knowledge, one senses Fonoroff’s sorrow at the loss inherent in the film image, and a yearning for the source of the image, not just its projection.
Morte em pleno verão
Emerging from a period of withdrawal, a social recluse or ‘hikikomori’ relates her inner experiences against the backdrop of an illuminated and restless urban environment that never sleeps.
Shortly before his death, Romitelli together with his friend Paolo Pachini and the poetess Kenka Lèkovich, resurrected the dream of a total scenic art (a furnace of sensations, they called it, an_ initiation rite_) in the manner of the Futurists: rhythms and gleams of light striking metals (for the video part), poems in iron and chrome singing of fusion with matter (Kenka Lekovich), acoustic/electric music highly amplified, filtered, spatialised, in as artificial a manner as possible. An Index of Metals bears vigorous witness to this determination to go beyond: sizzling orchestration, electric and psychedelic; a voice which plays on effects, murmurs with reverb, cackles into a megaphone, screams like a pop star; and an electric guitar score of a kind that no ‘serious’ composer has ever written, sliding across an infinite range of tones with a lightness of touch and blurring of contours.
White Sands is a 3 screen projection 16mm film installation which reflects on the visible and invisible manifestations of the nuclear fuel chain on the land, air, water and people of New Mexico.
If Not is a meditation on love, inspired by If Not, Winter by Sappho, translated by Anne Carson. Filmed in Ephesus and Brooklyn.
An amateur stand-up comedian seeks company online after the bar closes on a winter's night, but fails to connect with her surroundings and herself.
“Past Perfect” is a spirited meditation on the elusiveness and inaccessibility of (Jewish) history as conveyed through sightseeing tours of “Jewish” Poland, a grandmother’s recollection of life in America during War II, and memoir-like “last moments” of a great aunt believed to have died in Treblinka. Shot almost entirely in contemporary Poland, “Past Perfect” lyrically portrays the relentless yet ultimately futile attempt to resuscitate a history literally gone up in smoke.
Sites Unseen is a 3 channel 16mm projection of the Jewish cemetary in Warsaw, a photograph of a great Aunt who died in Treblinka, and my late grandmother eating her morning cornflakes.
A super 8 projection which references the essay “On the Jewish Question” by Karl Marx.
This experimental video breaks the many silences surrounding lesbians and AIDS. Interweaving the voices of two friends, Internal Combustion reflects on the often unspoken tensions within this epidemic of survival and power and mourning and loss .
A story about a woman descending into mental illness.
Alaska is a wordless experimental film with a simple, droning soundtrack that sounds as if it is a piece for violin and refrigerator hum.
Dear features the interior world of two teenage Chinese girls in New York City, whose diary entries reveal their concerns related to growing up as immigrants amidst the ever-gentrifying landscape of Chinatown.
Bubble is a short film performed by Zeena Parkins and the Plastic Girls, Eleanor Hullihan and Erin Cornell in a public park in Brooklyn, NY.
The town Minot is home to a U.S. Air Force base that guards 150 nuclear missiles buried in northern North Dakota. The weapons of mass destruction placed there 50 years ago are still targeted at Russia. Minot, North Dakota portrays an American landscape where people live with nuclear bombs in their backyard.
Alex and José, is a 16mm single channel projection that explores gender, movement and form.
A silent film portraying winter across three continents.