Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film

An experimental documentary portrait of director Malcolm Quinn Silver-Van Meter's grandfather

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?

Roda Viva Roda Brasil

Experimental film by Motoharu Jonouchi comprised of both archival footage from the 1960s Japanese student riots and dramatised re-enactions. It was created as a tribute to Michiko Kamba, a student victim of the riots.

Two friends walk and draw circles. It is what it is, idizwadidiz, c’est ce que c’est, seskecé. Nice weather.

Two halves split by the perseverance of a scorpion. Come on, feet.

Short experimental 16mm film.

Short experimental 16mm film.

Short experimental 16mm film.

An experimental film about that one hypnotic moment on a regular, unassuming Tuesday when one realizes that time has stopped and the universe has been sucked into a single smile.

This experimental nature documentary by Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts depicts climate change and the wave of extinction from the point of view of our near future. Actually, it depicts the age we live in now, or rather its fateful consequences.

Heartbeat

Experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.

The reception ebbs and flows as the unfamiliar landscape whirls by the window of a plane or train or car. Communication is delayed, fragmented, interrupted. Memories of a distant country.

A thrillingly lo-fi salute to the old-school, hand-crafted special effects that were once a mainstay of pre-CGI science-fiction films.

A small portrait of the volatility of intimacy and of breaking free from abusive cycles: made in response to a year of collapsing relationships and violent accidents that left me broken, dislocated and stuck in my apartment.

The last woman on Earth: Filmed inside Biosphere 2 in Arizona, Urth forms a cinematic meditation on ambitious experiments, constructed environments and visions of the future. The film considers what an endeavor such as Biosphere 2 might mean today and in the near future, in terms of humankind’s relationship with the natural world.

An eight-hour contemplative epic, entirely starring sheep.

Fixed and symmetrical shots make up the world where a beast wanders into the different stages of a scientific testing that has been exposed to. Human figures appear in harmless and impersonal spaces where they modify the animal biologically, without uttering words. Nowadays, man only seems to move around a constant improvement, a search for improving the nature that surrounds us, thinking about the possibility to taste a celestial candy.

The Island is a short film shot entirely on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast of Malaysia that became the largest and longest-operating refugee camp after the Vietnam War. The artist and his family were some of the 250,000 people who inhabited the tiny island between 1978 and 1991; it was once one of the most densely populated places in the world. After the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shuttered the camp in 1991, Pulau Bidong became overgrown by jungle, filled with crumbling monuments and relics. The film takes place in a dystopian future in which the last man on earth - having escaped forced repatriation to Vietnam - finds a United Nations scientists who has washed ashore after teh world’s last nuclear battle. By weaving together footage from Bidong’s past with a narrative set in its future, Nguyen questions the individual’s relationship to history, trauma, nationhood, and displacement.