Why Man Creates

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

As daylight breaks between the border cities of El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, undocumented migrants and their relatives, divided by a wall, prepare to participate in an activist event. For three minutes, they’ll embrace in no man’s land for the briefest and sweetest of reunions.

On Canada's Pacific coast this film finds a young Haida artist, Robert Davidson, shaping miniature totems from argillite, a jet-like stone. The film follows the artist to the island where he finds the stone, and then shows how he carves it in the manner of his grandfather, who taught him the craft.

Animated short.

A very little man attacks two huge feet and fights with all his power against them until his downfall. While dying, he is still convinced that he is the winner. However, the feet continue running like nothing happened.

A black-and-white film that takes an ironic look at alienation between the races and the sexes. It is a mix of cell animation, painting, live action and early Atari computer animation.

The Fox, once again, is plagued with a toothache, and once again is in search for a dentist to relieve his agony, and he, once again, finds Mr. Crow, pretending to be a dentist. This leads to no end of painful consequences for Mr. Fox.

The film sheds light on the topic of the high divorce rate among young people in the form of journalistic statements and scenes as well as analytically reflected statements and statements of experience by sociologist Dr. Ursula Hempel, divorced and single mother of two adolescent children, and her cousin, a puppeteer who is also divorced.

Every day is a Black Friday for the man, everything goes wrong. No wonder that even the heroic decision to end his life fails.

It’s a Date is a culmination of his preoccupations, a weird but humanistic look at a couple on a first date. It seems to be going well until the man decides to really open up and get (sur)real.

This animated short by Theodore Ushev is like a whirlwind tour of Russian constructivist art and is filled with visual references to artists of the era, including Vertov, Stenberg, Rodchenko, Lissitsky and Popova.

A young poet falling in love. A city that awaits a drama to unfold. A time of sadness and conformity, a time of decisions. There is light, there is hope, there is poetry behind the dark clouds of our world.

Working men and women leave through the main gate of the Lumière factory in Lyon, France. Filmed on 22 March 1895, it is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made, although Louis Le Prince's 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene pre-dated it by seven years. Three separate versions of this film exist, which differ from one another in numerous ways. The first version features a carriage drawn by one horse, while in the second version the carriage is drawn by two horses, and there is no carriage at all in the third version. The clothing style is also different between the three versions, demonstrating the different seasons in which each was filmed. This film was made in the 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and at a speed of 16 frames per second. At that rate, the 17 meters of film length provided a duration of 46 seconds, holding a total of 800 frames.

Rainer Kohlberger’s abstract film was created entirely without a camera. Through digital algorithms, he precisely arranged a rhythm of light and shadow that pulsates off the screen into our physical space with blinding intensity. The presence of light is almost felt as we are sucked into the image to become its ghostly accomplice. As we leave the theatre, the optical vibrations continue to haunt us.

Animated short film

After the death of his Arabic teacher, an American-born filmmaker in the northern African country of Chad revisits home videos to explore the moment they started making movies together.

Joshua Gen Solondz assmbles footage shot around the world over the past decade and manipulates it into a blurred compendium that privileges darkness and abstraction over the picturesque to an intense, strobing degree.

A synaesthetic portrait made between French Polynesia and Brittany, Color-blind follows the restless ghost of Gauguin in excavating the colonial legacy of a post-postcolonial present.

A hotel room and a few sweets, their wrappers stacked like gold leaf... An interview with Chantal Akerman and ongoing coverage of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, and what emerges is a genuine tragedy, as simple as Racine's.

Outrageous animation from this female cartoonist.