O tecido da memoria (My room number is cucumber)

Las llaves de la memoria

On nous appelait Beurettes

A documentary featuring internationally renowned photographer Toni Hafkenscheid as he explores hidden stories behind iconic architectural structures once considered "Visions of the Future" from the 1960's. This film is a light-hearted look at the way we perceive life and embrace modern advancements. It is a photography expose that becomes a personal journey of self-discovery while exploring innovative Visions of the Future that celebrate memories of Toni's, and our, collective past.

A rare close-up of the Abakuá —an Afro-Cuban religious brotherhood that has been hidden from outsiders until recently. A symbol of resistance for over 200 years, the Abakuá society has managed to survive slavery, the Spanish domination and the Revolution, spite of all the bias and misunderstandings about their traditions and rituals.

Fordlandia Malaise is a film about the memory and the present of Fordlandia, the company town founded by Henry Ford in the Amazon rain forest in 1928. His aim was to break the British rubber monopoly and produce this material in Brazil for his car production in the United States. Today, the remains of construction testify to the scale of the failure of this neocolonialist endeavor that lasted less than a decade. Nowadays, Fordlandia is a space suspended between times, between the 20th and 21st centuries, between utopia and dystopia, between visibility and invisibility: architectural buildings of steel, glass, and masonry still remain in use while traces of indigenous life left no marks on the ground.

In 1952, Amédée took his own life by jumping into the Seine. No one knows the reason for this tragic act. His story comes to us in bits and pieces.

About to turn 100 years old, Santo Amaro School closed its doors in 2020, amid the pandemic, leaving former students in deep sorrow. The story of the school is now told by different generations of students, teachers, nuns and employees, who return to the school building to remember their time over there: an unreachable past, which, through memories, becomes present once again.

In California's Bay Area, a painful memory lingers of the Port Chicago disaster of WWII, when hundreds of the Navy's first Black Sailors perished, and the White officers in charge were protected by the chain of command.

Shot in Havana and processed at Phil Hoffman's Film Farm, Marcel Beltrán Fernández's Casa de la noche explores those same histories from the point of view of an insider, as a lived experience that is evocatively mirrored through ripped and torn celluloid.

In this film from late in his career, Kramer returns to Hanoi after nearly 25 years to re-envision the city’s struggle through an uncertain and daunting past, present, and future. The Vietnamese characters in the film are diverse: Kramer’s former guide from an earlier visit in 1969; a tight-rope walker in the national circus; a man who took photos of B-52s and another who lost his fingers shooting them down.

Diniz Galvão

An experimental short film shot on Soviet Sveta 8mm film stock expired in 1984. It documents the 25th birthday of the filmmaker.

The true story of Doug Bruce who woke up on Coney Island with total amnesia. This documentary follows him as he rediscovers himself and the world around him.

Sin libertad: 20 años después

This film is a poetic composition of recorded history and non-recorded memory. Filmmaker Rea Tajiri’s family was among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And like so many who were in the camps, Tajiri’s family wrapped their memories of that experience in a shroud of silence and forgetting. This film raises questions about collective history – questions that prompt Tajiri to daringly re-imagine and re-create what has been stolen and what has been lost.

A meeting between the daughter and the grandmother of the director, Iván Mora Manzano, at a time when the memories of one, the girl’s, were taking shape, and the other’s the grandmother’s, were vanishing. This starting point is used as a pretext to talk about other topics such as the importance of family memories and the search for memory.

In Memoriam (La derrota conviene olvidarla)

Downtown Recife’s classic movie palaces from the 20th century are mostly gone. That city area is now an archaeological site of sorts that reveals aspects of life in society which have been lost. And that’s just part of the story.

A Hora do Primeiro Tiro

After the coup in Uruguay in 1973, thousands of intellectuals and artists fled the country. The filmmaker’s father was among them and left for Europe. After his passing, she came upon some Super 8 movies and audio files he had recorded. Through this archive, she started building a new family story trying to reveal and understand the silent pain of exile.