For this work Alÿs purchased a gun in Mexico City then walked through the city streets with the weapon in his hand. After eleven minutes he was arrested by the police. The following day he repeated the action, this time in cooperation with the police. By presenting a record of this dramatic action alongside footage of its reenactment, Alÿs blurs the boundaries between documentation and fiction. Questioning the concept of authenticity, this work demonstrates “how media can distort and dramatize the immediate reality of a moment,” the artist has said. Gallery label from Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, May 8–August 1, 2011.
The documentary maps more than a hundred years of Czech visual culture, offers stories of well-known and lesser-known brands and shows that top graphic art is still being created in the Czech Republic today. The film is guided by Nicho Lowry, an American native with Czech roots, an avid collector and graphic design lover who embarks on an adventurous journey in the footsteps of the best of Czech visual culture. During his journey, he meets a number of contemporary graphic designers, as well as the legacy of icons who have passed away, many of whom have succeeded abroad. The film will lead Nich to his own roots through the uncovering of Czech identity and will introduce Czech graphic design to those who do not know the Czech Republic.
Documentary about the work of the Estonian cartoonist and animation director Priit Pärn
A young person records a quiet walk through the woods. What begins as a casual video slowly reveals something harder to say.
A young man beneath a tree reading his poetry falls into a dream.
On a psychedelic night, the protagonist speaks endlessly to his friends, friends we never hear. Beneath his loud, crude monologue, a different figure slowly emerges, someone who uses every word to push the world away. The film becomes an intimate journey into a mind that builds its own walls, only to lose itself within them.
From its creation to its destruction, we follow a humanoid robot whose task is to take care of a Hungarian high-school. Every day is a new kind of torture in this weird, anti-comedic experimental short film.
Stan Hill Jr. is a Haudenosaunee artist living in Miawpukek First Nation Reserve, Conne River, Newfoundland. In “The Bear Inside a Whale,” he and his family discuss racism, identity, religion, creation and art, along with the cultural extinction of the Beothuk of Newfoundland. Throughout the film, we follow Stan carving a bear out of a whale vertebra. And we visit The Rooms (museum) in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where Stan talks about viewing and reclaiming Indigenous artefacts.
When a game night turns into a challenge, Pedro decides to take matters into his own hands and find the right gallery for his paintings.
A gradual immersion into Greece and its stories.
Using footage from socialist era Mongolia, Nomadtitude deals with the transition of the traditionally nomadic people to a lifestyle of urbanization. A changing of roads throughout the years and the movement of people from all across the country to the cities. A timeline of changing physical and spiritual paths. Primary instincts of the nomads, such as having a deep respect for natural surroundings, were forcefully replaced by socialist dogma and, later, capitalist machinations. This work presents the roads taken and not taken by the Mongolian nomads up until now. (Zulaa Urchuud)
In a world where freedom is constantly under threat, democratic societies are always on the lookout to ensure that the hard-won conquests of the historically recent past are not rolled back, but rather evolve towards individual and collective freedoms of expression and coexistence. (Khalil Charif)
Bounded Intimacy (part of the trilogy of Super 8mm shorts It’s Just Business, Baby) examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea and Tribeca districts, renowned as a sites for sex work, sex clubs and illicit sexual activity. Bounded Intimacy explores the seduction of a nameless woman and the camera. The relationship between the two remains unknown and ambivalent as to whether or not the encounter is “authentic.” The nature of their relationship is irrelevant as the camera captures the authenticity of the desire in the encounter between the two. (Ayanna Dozier)
It’s Just Business, Baby is also part of the trilogy of the same name. The film captures an encounter between a client and a working girl where the lines of care are blurred following a session. The film repeats this encounter with the same actors switching parts to trouble the relationship of power that exists between that dynamic. (Ayanna Dozier)
A director attempting to create an unconditionally truthful film becomes obsessed with the topic of death. In an intrusive way he relentlessly pushes dark scenarios of death aimed at his portraitures, creating a tension ridden and emotional set, blurring the lines of experimental docu-fiction drama.
Three women engage with the medical system to confront strange dreams that may not belong to them. Early one morning, I regained consciousness in a hospital bed as the sun was coming up. I was sixteen. First thing I heard was the news: Princess Diana had died in a car accident. Two hours earlier, I was hitchhiking home from a party with friends. We were picked up by a Toyota hatchback; the driver was drunk, but we were desperate. At the bottom of the twisted mountain road we crashed into the wall surrounding my town’s cemetery. As I watched updates on Diana from my hospital bed, images of her smashed-up car crept into my mind and imprinted as my own. (Yuula Benivolski)
Adolf Hitler faces himself and must come to terms with his infamous career in an imaginary post-war subterranean bunker where he reviews historical films, dictates his memoirs and encounters Eva Braun, Josef Goebbels, Hermann Göring and Sigmund Freud.
Short avant garde film. Views of rippling water.
no matter what, i want to be next to you captures the filmmaker’s intimate experience as the primary caregiver of his mother, illuminating the daily routines and emotional labour involved as their bodies gradually yield to the march of time.
Modified flashlights and stripped down video projectors explore the visual complexities of the ordinary world: a tunnel, a clump of grass, a discarded table, the underside of a bridge, fog, a piece of rock and a tree. All the images were shot in real time, there is no animation, but through the power of a peculiar form of illumination they become mysterious and evocative.