State of Exception

Tattooing — "the world's oldest skin game" — is the subject of this iconic documentary. Writer/director Geoff Steven scored a major coup by signing Easy Rider legend Peter Fonda as his presenter. Travelling to Aotearoa, Samoa, Japan and the United States, the doco traces key developments in tattooing, including its importance in the Pacific, prison-inspired styles, and the influence of 1960s counterculture. Legendary tattooists feature (including Americans Ed Hardy and Jack Rudy), while the closing credits parade some eye-opening full body tattoos.

Seeing is to painting what listening is to politics. Survival as an artist demands both. Paint Until Dawn is a documentary on art in the life of James Gahagan (1927-1999), who painted all night to push the limits of vision. His life and thought reveal a correlation between art and activism through an interesting angle: the creative process itself.

Fomos, Somos e Seremos Comunistas

At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it behind obscure financial structures in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth may be hidden in British offshore jurisdictions and Britain and its offshore jurisdictions are the largest global players in the world of international finance. How did this come about, and what impact does it have on the world today? This is what the Spider's Web sets out to investigate.

In Pablo Picasso's career, a blue and pink period gets the attention they deserve. It is between 1901 and 1907 that the seeds of all his future work lie, for it is then that Picasso turned his back on his father's teachings and broke free from academic constraints and himself at the beginning with everything that crossed his path. This documentary takes a look at Picasso's various metamorphoses, shaped by a struggle between zest for life and dark thoughts. A world shared by his friend Jaime Sabartés, who wrote it in a collection of memoirs. Art documentary (2018) by Gaëlle Royer.

Murales

Tracing the Future follows In the Wake exhibition artist Naoya Hatakeyama as he photographs the devastated landscape of his hometown of Rikuzentakada after 3/11. Hatakeyama, who represented Japan in the 2001 Venice Biennale and is renowned for meticulous photographs that explore the relationship between humankind and nature, suffered enormous losses on 3/11: his family home was washed away in the tsunami and his mother lost her life. Tracing the Future delves into the artist’s deeply personal response to the disaster and explores his four-year-long mission of documenting the place of his upbringing.

Rutinas

Anton Spielmann (18) and his two younger friends Basti Muxfeldt and Jonas Hinnerkort are living in their family homes with their parents in an idyllic village close to Hamburg. The three of them founded the band 1000 Robota. The band has an ambitious aim: „We want to cause creation not to remind of it”, and they want to live up to their ideals. In a society affected by economic pressure 1000 Robota are questioning themselves and others and they don‘t want to meet other people‘s expectations. In a world of excessive supply they are looking for significance and want to unite with others to create a new way of youth culture. But soon they have to face some serious difficulties.

Personal accounts from the Alta actions in the years 1979 to 1981. Large police forces were deployed against the demonstrators. The dispute over the Alta river began as an environmental issue, but became a major turning point for the Sámi people's struggle for equal rights in Norway.

The film shines a light onto federal chancellor Angela Merkel and her now ending 16-year-long tenure. An era, not an episode. And a vagarious relationship history between the chancellor and the Germans. Who has changed whom here?

When Sergio Chamorro and Daniel Cruz declared their cat Morris an eligible candidate in the municipal elections of Mexico's state of Veracruz, they thought of it as a joke. But the cat's surging popularity on social media made them reconsider. Now a leading candidate, Morris's political opponents are urging citizens not to vote for the feline.

In February, Just Jam's event at The Barbican was cancelled at the last minute. It was an event that seemed to be yet another victim of the London authorities now notorious risk assessment procedure, Form 696.

On October 21, 1967, over 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. It was the largest protest gathering yet, and it brought together a wide cross-section of liberals, radicals, hippies, and Yippies. Che Guevara had been killed in Bolivia only two weeks previously, and, for many, it was the transition from simply marching against the war, to taking direct action to try to stop the 'American war machine.' Norman Mailer wrote about the events in Armies of the Night. French filmmaker Chris Marker, leading a team of filmmakers, was also there.

A growing group of Dutch people in their twenties see the earth becoming less livable. They join the climate group Extinction Rebellion and campaign to fight the climate crisis. There is little they shy away from in their struggle: nightly campaigns, high-altitude actions, and even arrests or a criminal record. Everything for a better planet.

"What we were trying to do was the ultimate form of architecture, which was predicting how society would use space, land and time." Curtis Schreier, ANT FARM Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm is the first film to consider the work of the renegade 1970s art/architecture collective Ant Farm, best known for its iconic land-art piece Cadillac Ranch. Radical architects, video pioneers, and mordantly funny cultural commentators, the Ant Farmers created a body of deeply subversive multidisciplinary work that questioned the boundaries of architecture and everything else in the process. Incorporating breathtaking archival video, new footage shot over ten years and animation based on zany period sketches, this film is about the joy of creation in a time when there were no limits. —Beth Federici

A short documentary on how people view art and its value in today's society.

In 1543, at the University of Salamanca, in Spain, Fray Antonio Román, an Augustinian monk who spreads humanist ideas, considered heretical, among his more inquisitive students, a clandestine group of four led by the brilliant novice Luis de León, mysteriously dies in unspeakable circumstances. In the present day, the historian Lara Cabanes is hired to find out if the monk was murdered, as is suspected and she is told, but the task will not be easy to achieve.

Bas Jan Ader rides his bike into a canal in Amsterdam.

This short film is part of a mixed media artwork of the same name, which also included postcards of Ader crying, sent to friends of his, with the title of the work as a caption. The film was initially ten minutes long, and included Ader rubbing his eyes to produce the tears, but was cut down to three and a half minutes. This shorter version captures Ader at his most anguished. His face is framed closely. There is no introduction or conclusion, no reason given and no relief from the anguish that is presented.