Festive Fireplace

Punto De No Retorno

Music live performance of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto at the Glass House.

Sonzai Zone is a speculative fiction film on intimacy and loneliness after the normalization of ambient communication media. An unlikely encounter between Yún and Souvd takes place in a near-future where social interactions are largely based on the mediation of human presence, known as ‘Sonzai-kan’. Shifting between XR games, Immersion Arcades and spatial home displays, their insidiously orchestrated relationship escalates into extreme idealization. Meanwhile, Souvd’s ex-girlfriend Ntzumi launches into undercover investigation.

Confined to an endlessly burning waiting room, a dying sedentary woman experiences herself blurring in and out of her body. In her last remaining fragments she tries to make amends with her spirit before her remaining fragments either decay or create.

The film choreographically covers the distance between two women and their mirroring selves, under Laurie Spiegel's soundscape and with the ambiance of VHS video. Their bodies, sometimes two and others four, are always connected with a rope, influenced by white noise retro interference, sound scratches and pauses. They approach each other until they connect and then finally completely disappear, nullifying the distance between them. The reverse movement of these similar bodies-idols aims to compose a dance of the two and the one, our close and more distant self and to reach to the void in between them.

An ambient representation of depression with a slowly fading score building towards an uncertain climax.

A black-and-white visual meditation of wilderness and the elements. Wildlife filmmaker Richard Sidey returns to the triptych format for a cinematic experience like no other.

Apocalypse

A short documentary about the life work and philosophy of William Blake featuring an interview with John Higgs.

A group of high school graduates are invited to their five year class of 1995 reunion. Fourteen people, each from their own cliques of their past high school lives, make their way up to the old high school hang out spot, buried deep in the woods for the afterparty. As the high spirits and festivities continue, things begin to go gravely wrong, and quickly the party spirals out of control.

Trapped and alone, a young man must confront the pain he's ignored when he finds himself face-to-face with consequence.

In the middle of the night, you never know who can be a witness of your decisions...

Beautifully filmed by New Zealand nature photographer Richard Sidey over the past decade around the polar regions, Speechless: The Polar Realm is a visual meditation of light, life, loss and wonder at the ends of the globe. This is the second film in Sidey’s non-verbal trilogy which is comprised of: - Landscapes at the World’s Ends (2010) - Speechless: The Polar Realm (2015) - Elementa (2020)

Here begins the land of phantoms.

A police officer finds himself worthless as he soon realizes there's no way he could put an end to a businessman associated with running a prostitution ring.

Lake gazes down at a still body of water from a birds-eye view, while a group of artists peacefully float in and out of the frame or work to stay at the surface. As they glide farther away and draw closer together, they reach out in collective queer and desirous exchanges — holding hands, drifting over and under their neighbors, making space, taking care of each other with a casual, gentle intimacy while they come together as individual parts of a whole. The video reflects on notions of togetherness and feminist theorist Silvia Federici’s call to “reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and our bodies.”

A compelling narrative told entirely through subtitles, lights, and chairs.

The observer gazes at the water, symbolizing life, & attempts to move upstream against the flow. When he reaches the source, he finds the struggle too much to bear. Eventually he decides to relax by the water, watching it flow by, embracing the calm. The water sound was recorded in Gheshm, Iran, while the visuals are from Abraham Lake & Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada.

A recollection of East-African Asian displacement in the 1970s to an ambient score.

A post-dubbed, micro-budget, horror-sci-fi anthology consisting of five tales woven together by the hallucinatory mind-melding of ceremonial slime drinking humanoids from another dimension.