"How Every Film You Watch Tells You To Love The Rich and What To Do About It" explores the representations of wealth in cinema. It looks into how most beloved characters are subtly more well-off than they should be, how criticisms of the system are crushed, how the rich have become the average in the world of the cinema. And it shows how these stories distort the view of the real world, and are used against you by politicians.
The Kennedy dynasty that has mesmerized generations. To this day their legacy lives on. Plagued by tragedy and scandal, they continue to bring positive change to the world.
A documentary chronicling the Beatles' rehearsal sessions in January 1969 for their proposed "back to basics" album, "Get Back," later re-envisioned and released as "Let It Be."
A pre-internet mash-up that mixes “Peanuts” and David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.”
Various international presentions are featured through satellite uplink.
Capturing John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in their electrifying element, 'A Hard Day's Night' is a wildly irreverent journey through this pastiche of a day in the life of The Beatles during 1964. The band have to use all their guile and wit to avoid the pursuing fans and press to reach their scheduled television performance, in spite of Paul's troublemaking grandfather and Ringo's arrest.
A haunting documentary on the pains of growing up male. It explores the inner and outer cruelties that boys perpetrate and endure. The film provokes the viewer to reflect on how our society can deprive boys of wholeness.
Animal Charm makes videos from other people's videos. By compositing TV and reducing it to a kind of tic-ridden babble, they force television to not make sense. While this disruption is playful, it also reveals an overall 'essence' of mass culture that would not be apprehended otherwise. Videos such as Stuffing, Ashley, and Lightfoot Fever upset the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing, revealing how advertising creates anxiety, how culture constructs "nature" and how conventional morality is dictated through seemingly neutral images. By forcing television to convulse like a raving lunatic, we might finally hear what it is actually saying.
A whirlwind of improvisation combines the images of animator Pierre Hébert with the avant-garde sound of techno whiz Bob Ostertag in this singular multimedia experience, a hybrid of live animation and performance art.
King of the Jews is a film about anti-Semitism and transcendence. Utilizing Hollywood movies, 1950's educational films, personal home movies and religious films, the filmmaker depicts his childhood fear of Jesus Christ. These childhood recollections are a point of departure for larger issues such as the roots of Christian anti-Semitism.
A woman is reduced to tears. She bends over backwards trying to be a good wife and mother. Her head is cut off from her heart. A doctor picks her brain. A boy inherits his mother's depression. Short of Breath is a haunting, emotional collage about birth, death, sex and suicide. It's like a punch in the stomach.
Borrowing a beloved song from his own 1984 feature Sister Stella L., Mike De Leon made this video in a damning response to the victory election of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. as president of the Philippines. In a prepared statement at the Cannes premiere of his recently restored Itim, he wrote, “Horror has now acquired a more sinister meaning. It is no longer about a ghost but about the monsters of Philippine politics, monsters that, after a long wait in the subterranean caverns of hell, have returned to ravage and rape my country all over again. The crazy thing is that we invited them back.”
Algerian director Hamid Benamra turns his focus to Mustapha Boutadjine, a charming, mercurial collage artist in Paris whose very work methods embody resistance, and celebrate those who work to liberate others. Boutadjine creates his portraits of Third World artists such as Miriam Makeba, and Algerian figures such as Assia Djebar from pieces of paper torn from high end fashion magazines and other, glossy, glitzy publications. Using this material is as much an act of rejecting bourgeois standards, which are often anti-North African in France, as much as elevating these figures and making them the social and visual standard against which we should judge ourselves, not the runway models of Chanel.
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, this magnificent star-studded tribute salutes the Fab Four. Appearing with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were guest musicians Joe Walsh, Gary Clark, Jr., Stevie Wonder, The Eurythmics, John Legend, Alicia Keys, Maroon 5, Dave Grohl, Katy Perry, Peter Frampton, and more.
Humankind has always dreamt of the night sky. Of the infinite freedom offered by the black void, and of the strong, shining beacon inviting us to ascend. This is a story, a history of the events that led up to our conquest of space, and the consequences throughout wider humanity. The film is a collage. Of genres, documentary and comedy. Of media, drawing from painting and film. Of films, cannibalising all film history. Of truth, both objective and subjective. Watch the small steps and let your mind take a giant leap.
Mike De Leon imagined Citizen Jake “as an indictment of the Duterte regime using its horrific forerunner [the Marcoses] as a template of authoritarian rule,” and he caused a stir, as usual, in posting this promotional short for the film on social media. This short is essentially a Director's Statement in video essay form, and has been screened at New York's MoMA in their Mike De Leon retrospective.
Dash Snow rejected a life of privilege to make his own way as an artist on the streets of downtown New York City in the late 1990s. Developing from a notorious graffiti tagger into an international art star, he documented his drug- and alcohol-fueled nights with the surrogate family he formed with friends and fellow artists Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen before his death by heroin overdose in 2009. Drawing from Snow’s unforgettable body of work and involving archival footage, Cheryl Dunn’s exceptional portrait captures his all-too-brief life of reckless excess and creativity.
An obscure Eastern cult that practices human sacrifice pursues Ringo after he unknowingly puts on a ceremonial ring (that, of course, won't come off). On top of that, a pair of mad scientists, members of Scotland Yard, and a beautiful but dead-eyed assassin all have their own plans for the Fab Four.
The wicked Blue Meanies take over Pepperland, eliminating all color and music. As the only survivor, the Lord Admiral escapes in the yellow submarine and journeys to Liverpool to enlist the help of the Beatles.
Baldwin’s “pseudo-pseudo-documentary” presents a factual chronicle of US intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate conspiracy theory, combining covert action, environmental catastrophe, space aliens, cattle mutilations, killer bees, religious prophecy, doomsday diatribes, and just about every other crackpot theory broadcast through the dentures of the modern paranoiac.