Always Forward

A stream of mysterious rituals and symbols are encountered as a young boy journeys to school in the fantastical world of Kshya Tra Ghya.

The people of Antiquity had little problem with nudity and would not find graphic depictions of sexual acts as morally suspect or obscene. But Christianity changed perspectives, bringing in notions of shame and the negation of the body. This documentary looks at the erotic in art over the last two thousand years.

Eu, Punk

Taking its lead from French artists like Renoir and Monet, the American impressionist movement followed its own path which over a forty-year period reveals as much about America as a nation as it does about its art as a creative power-house. It’s a story closely tied to a love of gardens and a desire to preserve nature in a rapidly urbanizing nation. Travelling to studios, gardens and iconic locations throughout the United States, UK and France, this mesmerising film is a feast for the eyes. The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism features the sell-out exhibition The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887–1920 that began at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and ended at the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut.

México-raised and currently Chicago-based artist Sofía Fernández Díaz details her process of adorning found objects and handmade textiles with beads, dyes, and melted wax to imbue them with new meaning, and to give them patitas.

Artistic experimental documentary short that explores the universe of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. Sensorial experiences, the perception of the body, forms and tactile sensations are mixed and reflect the human race as part of the cosmos, getting lost to find itself. Art, stripped of its virtuous image, as an action of the common human being, the expression of living things, runs from the mechanical repetition of movements and attitudes.

The video revolution of the 1970s offered unprecedented access to the moving image for artists and performers. This Is Not a Dream explores the legacies of this revolution and its continued impact on contemporary art and performance. Charting a path across four decades of avant-garde experiment and radical escapism, This Is Not a Dream traces the influences of Andy Warhol, John Waters and Jack Smith to the perverted frontiers of YouTube and Chatroulette, taking in subverted talk shows and soap operas, streetwalker fashions and glittery magic penises along the way.

Paying tribute to artist Noah Purifoy and his Outdoor Museum, Matthew’s film ‘A Desert Moment with Noah’ rapidly animates 78 still Super 8mm images like a slideshow gone haywire. Exploring the of elasticity of time, the film manipulates the essence of a moment as it periodically pauses to allow the viewer a space with various objects, surfaces, and textures within Purifoy’s Joshua Tree sculptural environment.

The multi-talented outsider artist Richard McMahan is on a quest to painstakingly re-create thousands of famous and not-so-famous paintings and artifacts–in miniature.

How have the changing views on children been reflected in their representation in art? From Baby Jesus to the first photographic portraits, an exploration of six centuries of art history through the prism of childhood.

Scenes Seen with Allen Jones explores the motive of the artist's famed graphic works,, paintings and sculptures. The erotic overtones of Jones's work are both controversial and exciting, drawing the public's attention towards a new sector of the avant-garde. Jones is introduced in his London studio, where he is developing an idea for a new painting as he meticulously studies his model. During his days as a top member of the Pop Art movement in Britain, Jones evolved a singular genre of imagery: totemic forms of torso-less legs, sheathed in vinyl, which have become his artistic "signature."

How did Bonnard, one of the great masters of 20th-century painting, a secretive, anxious man with an ordinary everyday life, become this undisputed painter of intimacy, capable of transforming reality into a unique and incandescent world? Through his paintings, but also his private journals, his correspondence with Matisse and Vuillard, the photographs he loved, and the places where he lived, the film immerses us in the world of this master of color.

Manet’s portraits are rarely afforded such close attention as they are given in this exquisitely crafted and insightful film presented by art expert Tim Marlow. Manet’s portraiture comprised about half his work, giving life on canvas to family, friends and the literary, political and artistic figures of the day.

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.

New York based artist, Cindy Sherman, is famous for her photographs of women in which she is not only the photographer, but also the subject. She has contributed her own footage to the programme by recording her studio and herself at work with her Hi-8 video camera. It reveals a range of unexpected sources from visceral horror to medical catalogues and exploitation movies, and explores her real interests and enthusiasms. She shows an intuitive and often humorous approach to her work, and reflects on the themes of her work since the late 1970s. She talks about her pivotal series known as the `Sex Pictures' in which she addresses the theme of sexuality in the light of AIDS and the arts censorship debate in the United States.

A man entranced by his dreams and imagination is lovestruck with a French woman and feels he can show her his world.

An intimately raw and magical journey through the life, mind, and heart of iconic artist Frida Kahlo. Told through her own words for the very first time — drawn from her diary, revealing letters, essays, and print interviews — and brought vividly to life by lyrical animation inspired by her unforgettable artwork.

A veteran high school teacher befriends a younger art teacher, who is having an affair with one of her 15-year-old students. However, her intentions with this new "friend" also go well beyond platonic friendship.

Les chiens-loups

In this film, Laerte conjugates the body in the feminine, and scrutinizes concepts and prejudices. Not in search of an identity, but in search of un-identities. Laerte creates and sends creatures to face reality in the fictional world of comic strips as a vanguard of the self. And, on the streets, the one who becomes the fiction of a real character. Laerte, of all the bodies, and of none, complicates all binaries. In following Laerte, this documentary chooses to clothe the nudity beyond the skin we inhabit.