yaya/ayat explores identities, being lost in translation and distance. But at its core it's about the filmmaker longing for a relationship with her geographically distant grandma and her journey to Greece to find her. This is an experimental documentary about how being a part of any diaspora shapes a person's identity.
Cartas de Arapuca
Landscapes revealed themselves through text, paper through movement, while the sun gave them relief. This is a journey across found words, enunciating a discovery, their textures constructing the sea and the waves, in a travelogue from the first exploration, the first step over the sand towards the shore. “Amor” writes this joy to underline it in its time, captured on paper. This film has been composed through a scanner, and it’s the first chapter of the “Reír al Sol” series.
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.
La petite Chaise
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.
Disrupt, reject, destroy, avoid: At the interrupted rhythm of the broken photographs that a granddaughter has rescued from her grandfather’s hands, the last piece reconstructs the memory of an older man who has decided to leave behind his life impulses to surrender to sleep and calm. An essay on the act of joining our memories, the illusion of remembering and the freedom to forget.
"The Boy Of The Fish" follows Noon, a young boy living in a Syrian refugee camp, who finds solace and a sense of freedom in a whale-shaped doll he names "Bahr." Set against the challenging realities of camp life, Noon’s journey is both a story of resilience and a testament to the boundless imagination of childhood. Through vivid symbolism and a unique soundscape, the film explores themes of loss, hope, and the longing for freedom amidst confinement. Shot entirely on an iPhone due to restrictions in the conflict zone, the film combines raw authenticity with poetic depth to capture the emotional landscape of a young soul navigating adversity.
What are they? What do they seek? When all the lights go out, they will wander. And you will never see them.
O tecido da memoria (My room number is cucumber)
Cinema da nossa gente
In 1967, Beulah struck Reynosa. Family survives through images from memory circling the wreck. Rituals of celebration and violence like hurricane, shift between dancing, cyanotypes, blue fire and lost family archive. We have come to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. Thus invent colors that burn the eyelid like 火藥.
Parole tremanti
This poetic film follows director Marialuisa's journey with Anita and Leticia, Central American women traveling with the Caravan of Mothers of Missing Migrants.
During World War II, the photographer Francisco Boix and other Spanish Republican prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp, where 120,000 people died, managed not only to survive their indescribable experience, but also, after the war, to reveal to the world what really happened in that hell, saving from destruction thousands of official photographs taken by the SS.
This poetic experimental documentary is a tribute to the multifaceted life of Brianna, Jorge Lozano's daughter, a collaborative reflection intertwining fiction film archives, acting, and photographs to evoke memories and breathe life into moments and events. Her singing serves as a connecting thread, offering parallel interpretations. The film explores events since 1978, employing a non-chronological and non-linear approach, providing a unique artistic perspective. Shot in Colombia, Spain, and Costa Rica, it culminates in Victoria, BC, where she was tragically murdered. However, it focuses on celebrating her life and her essence employing diverse formats, including super 8mm, VHS, Super VHS, 3/4", 4K HD, Drone 5K video, GoPro, and Instant 360.
An up-to-date look at Youth Suicide with an examination of the warning signs, statistics and causes, along with possible ways teachers and parents can use to help their child overcome this important social issue. Also includes a look at the media and its handling of the social issue through the Netflix series "13 Reasons Why" and the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, "Dear Evan Hansen."
The veiled story of Japanese diaspora in Mexico and the endurable impact of historic silence in its descendants is portrayed through testimonies and an exploration of landscape and choreography, questioning the formation and theatricality of individual and collective identity. When everything that's left of history are memories, how are invisible wounds healed? Yurei goes through different zones in Mexico towards an exploration of memory.
Farmers in the Île-de-France region, they filmed life on the farm, working in the fields, and family and village celebrations on 8 mm or Super 8 film. From the 1950s to the 1980s, these testimonies unfold a history of rural life: we move away from a peasant and family model to industrial agriculture for export. Through these family images, I attempt to answer my own questions about our agricultural future. In the 1950s, the land of Île-de-France fed us.
TAMAN HUTAN Chapter Four: The Wound Response focuses on the rubber craze of the 20th century through both archival documentation of wages and an interview with Cek Anuan on his grandfather Rasimin who worked with English naturalist Henry Nicholas Ridley. Focusing on the Singapore Botanic Gardens as the site of interaction between colonists and labourers, the film reveals the wounds of those erased from colonial records but who remain inscribed within nature itself.