VICTORIA XXI

Young artist Kyoko wreaks havoc on everyone that she encounters when Japan's oldest major movie studio asks a batch of venerable filmmakers to revive its high-brow soft-core Roman Porno series.

Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes thought-provoking connections between life on Earth and the cosmos, and, ultimately, art and science. Structured around the ten most significant celestial bodies of the Milky Way, Apple Pie’s inquiry begins with the furthest point in our solar system, Pluto, as a lens back towards our home planet and the ‘mechanisms by which certain aspects of scientific knowledge are digested, appropriated and subsequently manifest within the general human complex’. Christopher Francis Schiel’s dry, functional narration brings a network of ideas about our existence into focus, while Hamilton’s visual tableaux, as an extension of his multifaceted practice, veer imaginatively between psychedelic imagery and performance art.

Toroid is an experimental audio-reactive animation work that demonstrates the possibilities of harnessing digital waveforms of electronic origin into a continual source of power. By making the invisible visible, the work bears similarity and inspiration from the extensive quantum energy research at CERN which seeks to uncover and control the particles in and around us. In this era of over-production and over-algorithmic data illusion of choices, Toroid inserts itself in the digital narrative as a power source simulation showing a possibility for ensuring a positive flow of eternal (renewable) energy working in parallel with the natural order.

Norman McLaren made Scherzo early after his arrival in North America in 1939, but the film was subsequently lost. In 1984 the original materials were found and the hand-drawn images and sound were reconstituted. Picture and sound dance triple-quick in this animated version of a musical scherzo. A film without words.

Both a scientific and dreamlike documentary at once, Ghost Cell is a stereoscopic plunge into the guts of an organic Paris seen as a cell through a virtual microscope.

Like reading the back pages of a discarded journal revealing the thoughts of a young man slipping into madness, Hers Is A Lush Situation mixes a disjointed narrative with an underlying thread of black humor to give a subtle view on what young, urban lives really look like today.

Jacob, Tony, and Brandon are on a night drive through the wooded outskirts of an unknown city. While his friends sleep, Jacob remembers where he's seen the upcoming overpass, the man standing on the other side of it, and the abandoned parking garage sitting above the road.

Filmmaker and teacher, Stéphane Marti has been researching experimental cinema as an art form liberated of aesthetic codes and the economics of big budget cinema. His work is primarily focused on the themes of the sacred and the human body. An avid supporter of the Super-8 format, he has been fighting for its merits as a tool. He has used this format film after film and has been sharing his experiences with new filmmakers during his workshops at the Sorbonne’s College of the Arts (Paris I).

Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.

In a hybrid film, both documentary and fiction, five young women describe the feeling of grief when losing a parent at a young age. Anna returns to her father's home, a year after his death. In one weekend, she lives through a storm of emotions as these may come and go in the process of grief.

A completely new story based on existing footage from the series Columbo.

A man in drag sits on a couch holding a fan. The wallpaper behind him is floral patterned. Although the man does little more than looking around and waving his fan, Zwartjes created enormous tension.

Behind the closed doors of their room, two brothers share a secret of self-discovery. But when the elder Marek starts growing up, bringing his childish curiosity to an end, he realizes that they’ve crossed the boundaries of brotherly love – something that the younger David is still unable to understand...

From the ocean, a volcanic island rises into steamy mist. The black rock of the earth stands in sharp contrast to the billowing vapor that hovers and drifts above the surface. A narrator describes how the island’s first inhabitants sought to explain the violent eruption by attributing the devastation to the wrath of angry gods. With breathtaking black-and-white cinematography, this poetic exploration considers the human relationship to this volatile land, where residents live alongside the looming threat of eruption with reverence, fear, and awe. A collection of scenes where dark and light miraculously coexist illuminates both the physical and spiritual landscapes of this extraordinary place, where life endures the perils of the natural world.

Through a very surreal chase of spying and surveillance, Catafuse, a dubiously dressed "creature", hunts down specific human targets with the help of Molosstrap. But in a world completely run by the shadowy hands of the pharmaceutical industry, the lines of reality become so blurry and complex, that the mastering of insanity might just be the only way out...

Short film by Mary Ellen Bute

The relationships between the stained glass rosettes and the floral forms, between the architectural geometry and that, random, of the branches of trees form a dazzling catalog of plastic obsessions of an era.

A woman who can't stand the passing of time turns herself into a black hole. A thousand unchanging years pass inside her warm and dark embrace until, finally, the Singularity awakens inside.

Maniac Summer consists of images and sounds recorded in Paris in the summer of 2009. It is a sprawling triptych without a beginning or end and with no specific subject or topic. The camera is positioned in front of a window and left running. It observes movements, registers noises coming from the street or nearby park, captures Chantal Akerman going about her business in her apartment: smoking, working, talking on the telephone. Fragments from the artist’s everyday life are featured in the installation’s central video, while the adjoining panels are more symbolically charged; in them, various images from the former have been isolated, modified and repeated. These abstract afterimages act as a kind of memory, looking back to the images in the installation’s centrepiece as so many shadows of its reality.

A song of love to the city of Genoa. The film wanders the streets of the city center and explore the beautiful cemetery and then climb the hills which offer an amazing view over the old town crossed by a highway and port.