Investigates the politics of cinematic shot design, and how this meta-level of filmmaking intersects with the twin epidemics of sexual abuse/assault and employment discrimination against women, with over 80 movie clips from 1896 - 2020.
Ich lebe in der Gegenwart - Versuch über Hans Richter
Culled from four rolls of Super-8 film shot while the maker was a development worker in a small South American village, Daumë is at its center a film about ritual, power, and play. Daumë is both ethnography and critique; it is an interrogation into how to represent a place that can't be represented.
Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.
An ethnographic field report in which the Anthropologist describes the mythic creation of an unnamed ‘sun-scraping structure’ through the ritualized actions of the Red and the Blue Gods.
A look at the Black revolution in 1970s cinema, from genre films to social realism, from the making of new superstars to the craft of rising auteurs.
For millennia, Native Americans successfully stewarded and shaped their landscapes, but centuries of colonization have disrupted their ability to maintain their traditional land management practices. From deserts, coastlines, forests, mountains, and prairies, Native communities across the US are restoring their ancient relationships with the land. As the climate crisis escalates these time-tested practices of North America's original inhabitants are becoming increasingly essential in a rapidly changing world.
Clouds 1969 by the British filmmaker Peter Gidal is a film comprised of ten minutes of looped footage of the sky, shot with a handheld camera using a zoom to achieve close-up images. Aside from the amorphous shapes of the clouds, the only forms to appear in the film are an aeroplane flying overhead and the side of a building, and these only as fleeting glimpses. The formless image of the sky and the repetition of the footage on a loop prevent any clear narrative development within the film. The minimal soundtrack consists of a sustained oscillating sine wave, consistently audible throughout the film without progression or climax. The work is shown as a projection and was not produced in an edition. The subject of the film can be said to be the material qualities of film itself: the grain, the light, the shadow and inconsistencies in the print.
Sistiaga painted directly on 70mm film a circular (planetary?) form, around which dance shifting colours in a psychedelic acceleration matched by the soundtrack’s deep-space roar and howl. - Cinema Scope
What is inside the stars? How far away are they from us? Could life exist without them? All these questions have fascinated humanity since the dawn of time. So over the centuries, generations of astronomers, physicists and dreamers have tried to answer them. Among them, four little-known women have played a decisive role thanks to work that has changed our vision of the cosmos. Our documentary series "Chercheuses d'étoiles" (here proposed in full version) tells you about these great astronomical discoveries made by women forgotten by history. The video explores the immensity of infinite space, the origins of the world around us and the secrets of dark matter.
La scuola dei Geni
A first feature based on sexual events. An actress undertakes her desire of directing her first movie, without a budget or any production company funding her project. She gathers a group of professional actors and actresses, and proposes a project based on a very particular experience: stepping on their fears through a metaphorical 'leap of faith'. As the project advances, individual conflicts will arise affecting the shoot, making the movie crew wonder whether or not they should go on. Will they take the leap of faith with all its consequences?
Industrialization brings progress, but also harmful influences on the environment. Warning of the dangers of waste materials dumped into the air and the waters.
The community of Woodberry Down in Hackney rallies to save a beloved local plane tree from development.
An ode to thrift stores, reusing our clothes and local communities.
The Simplicity of Two Lives Between the Riot of the World
Tres mujeres, un camino
The quietly insistent and critical DEPOSITIONS attempts to restore some dignity to images of the communities of the Scottish highlands taken from patronizing BBC documentaries and news features from the 70’s and 80’s. DEPOSITIONS repurposes footage from the archives of the BBC and sound from the School of Scottish Studies, it is a film about differences and dichotomies: science and superstition, near and far, community and the individual.
A series of portraits, made for Television, of four diverse individuals brought together through shared residence. These short films were filmed in the tenement where I lived for eight years. The first is shot in our bedroom, which doubled up as my former partner's office, the three others were shot in architecturally identitical spaces owned by my then neighbours. Shot and edited on a single 16mm bolex camera using available light throughout, the films invoke reflections on the four individuals, how they occupy these particular spaces together.
This film is part of a project that has listened to over 40,000 people on masculinity issues and has resulted in a documentary and a tool book based on this publicly available study through an agreement with the Social Information Consortium (CIS) of the University of São Paulo.