Refuge

In the last fifty years the culture of Zen has spread far beyond Japan. Zen centers and zen retreats have sprung up throughout America and Europe. When Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen, brought Zen to Japan from China 800 years ago, it quickly took root and became an integral part of Japanese life. Yet what do we know about zen practice in Japan today? The Zen Mind is a fascinating journey across Japan to explore zen in its natural habitat.

For over 30 years, Martin Bisi has been recording music from his studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. He has worked with many influential musicians, including Sonic Youth, Swans, Herbie Hancock, Brian Eno and the Dresden Dolls. Now though, he finds himself squeezed in by the approaching gentrification of his neighborhood.

Stop for Bud is Jørgen Leth's first film and the first in his long collaboration with Ole John. […] they wanted to "blow up cinematic conventions and invent cinematic language from scratch". The jazz pianist Bud Powell moves around Copenhagen -- through King's Garden, along the quay at Kalkbrænderihavnen, across a waste dump. […] Bud is alone, accompanied only by his music. […] Image and sound are two different things -- that's Leth's and John's principle. Dexter Gordon, the narrator, tells stories about Powell's famous left hand. In an obituary for Powell, dated 3 August 1966, Leth wrote: "He quite willingly, or better still, unresistingly, mechanically, let himself be directed. The film attempts to depict his strange duality about his surroundings. His touch on the keys was like he was burning his fingers -- that's what it looked like, and that's how it sounded. But outside his playing, and often right in the middle of it, too, he was simply gone, not there."

Every five years hundreds of thousands of international visitors come to Kassel, Germany, to be part of the documenta, one of the world's most important exhibitions in modern and contemporary art. For the duration of 100 days, the small town changes its face and becomes the centre of international art. The documentary team of Katrin and Susanne Heinz tries to capture the atmosphere - letting artists, visitors and of course the artworks speak for themselves.

Planen - Bauen - Siegen

The Execution of Wanda Jean chronicles the life-and-death battle of Wanda Jean Allen, the first black woman to be put to death in the United States in the modern era.

In October, during the tense days of the Nagorno-Karabakh war, the director takes his camera to the village of Ashagi Nuvedi in Lankaran. The film follows the daily lives of fishermen — Sakhavat, Ramesh, Rza and Tehran — living in the shadow of the war. They go out to sea every morning amid news from the front, fearing empty nets, and hoping for a miracle — a goldfish in difficult days.

Shot with stunning elegance and clarity, NAKED SPACES explores the rhythm and ritual of life in the rural environments of six West African countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkino Faso, Togo, Benin and Senegal). The nonlinear structure of NAKED SPACES challenges the traditions of ethnographic filmmaking, while sensuous sights and sounds lead the viewer on a poetic journey to the most inaccessible parts of the African continent: the private interaction of people in their living spaces.

Susan Sontag scrutinizes the ongoing Arab-Zionist conflict and the growing divisions within Jewish thought over the question of Palestinian sovereignty. Shot in ̶I̶s̶r̶a̶e̶l̶ Occupied Palestinian Territory during the final days of the Yom Kippur War. Promised Lands is less straight documentary than visual collage. There are images of combat zones and soldiers, but also everyday street life, desert landscapes, funerals, supermarkets, the Wailing Wall. The soundtrack is snatches of radio, bursts of church bells and gunfire, and an extended voiceover from two politically opposed thinkers from ̶I̶s̶r̶a̶e̶l̶ Occupied Palestinian Territory.

A wry look at the effects of sexual repression on lesbian and gays in former Czechoslovakia. After the Revolution explores the impact of the new gay movement, combining personal accounts and rarely seen propaganda film. After 40 years of totalitarian silence about sexuality, lesbian, gay and transsexual contributors reveal how they reacted to exclusion from communist norms of heterosexuality and parenthood, including in the case of some women, by changing sex.

In a family of four generations of independent women the daughter-mother bonding is very strong.

This 16mm artists film documents the making and design of a wooden community pavillion on Kyrl's Quay, Cork made collaboratively with Meitheal Mara boatbuilders.

A film by Myles O'Reilly documenting some of the beautiful music brought to Cork for the Quiet Lights Folk Festival.

Through the experiences of two women in Paris and London, Ghost Dance offers an analysis of the complexity of our conceptions of ghosts, memory and the past. The film focuses on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who observes, 'I think cinema, when it's not boring, is the art of letting ghosts come back.' He also says that 'memory is the past that has never had the form of the present.'

Las cosas simples

Des poules et des grosses voitures

Vincennes, cité royale

A film that conveys some of Peter Wessel Zapffe’s philosophical ideas.

Where do you find the essence of your existence? On the peaks of the highest mountains in the world? Even higher, on an uninhabited planet from which you can never escape? Or is it in the deepest sorrow, by leaving a trail of destruction that will never be forgotten? This documentary essay follows various people on their quest and inevitably leads to the question: how far do you want to go?

Prof. Petr Vopěnka is a worldwide famous Czech mathematician, author of many books concerning history of Maths, geometry above all. He is an original thinker, connecting mathematics with philosophy. He has become recognized by public because of invention of the biggest number (the so-called Vopěnka's cardinal) and thanks to being active in politics for two years - he was the first Minister of Education after 1989 revolution in Czechoslovakia. His portrait works mostly with non-synchron images trying to find the abstract qualities in the pieces of prof. Vopěnka's everyday reality, that should inspire the spectator for concentrated interpretation of the words that are mapping personality of Vopěnka - mathematician.