Éramos Livres

After discovering a stranger’s livestream, a month unfolds under his balcony, through watching and being watched.

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.

Fifteen images of a camera running in a park and in obscurity searching the space of light through distorsion and the sensory of rapid motion.

Twenty images of a camera running next to a chemical platform and capturing abstract light throught improvised gestures and asymmetrical motion

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.

What are they? What do they seek? When all the lights go out, they will wander. And you will never see them.

Amid Guanajuato's vibrant streets, an aging filmmaker becomes a modern Don Quixote, joined by a spirited young animator as his loyal Sanchia. Together, they navigate themes of mortality, unfulfilled dreams, and the fragile line between madness and clarity, uncovering the transformative power of light, art, and the landscapes that shape our souls.

In an attempt to represent reality, the boundary between life and art blurs between fragmentary images of someone and the praxis of an essay film.

Something strange and unpredictable takes inthe mysteriously vacant rooms of Berlin’s infamous Techno club Berghain. A group of wild animals occupy the monumental spaces of the former power station. We explore the building together with the animals and experience its dimensions from a new, nonhuman perspective. The brutality of the industrial architecture is confronted with the beauty of these shy creatures.

In 1791, in Haiti, Dutty Boukman presided over a Vodou ritual in Bois-Caïman that led to the creation of the first Black republic. Since then, rituals of transformation and artistic expression have been at the core of a thriving culture as the country faces oppression, poverty, and natural disasters. "Kite Zo A” (Leave the Bones) is a sensorial film about rituals in Haiti, from ancient to modern, made in collaboration with poets, dancers, musicians, fishermen, daredevil rollerbladers, and Vodou priests, set to poetry by Haitian author Wood-Jerry Gabriel.

Hercules travels by bicycle from Krefeld on the Lower Rhine to Olympus, the throne of ancient deities. The Hercules myth, as a primal myth of male power, is questioned through biographical reflections and the staging of mythological echoes. The dramaturgical structure of the hero's journey disintegrates in a multi-material perspective into questions about male identity, ideals and remorse.

Autopsie d'une Chambre

Twenty-four images of a camera running in the woods, a moonlight and a cemetery through improvised gestures, mechanical abstraction and saturated colors

A moving account of the experiences of men exonerated after years, and sometimes decades, in prison following newly found DNA evidence.

In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the last name of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years. Institute Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses Lumière, Le Cinema! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures. The result is not only a glorious re(telling) of the genesis of cinema but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.

A fascinating exploration of the literary — The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, by English playwright William Shakespeare (1604) — and lyrical — Othello, by Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi (1887) — myth of Othello, the desperately tragic story of a Moorish general in the army of the Venetian Republic whose absurd jealousy poisons his love for his wife Desdemona.

A short film on breathing and quiet afternoons.

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.

In 1999, 11-year-old Nisha Platzer lost her older brother, Josh, to suicide. Twenty years later, her search for a specialized medical treatment leads her to the door of someone who was once exceptionally close to Josh. And so it is that she finally has the chance to truly know her brother through his chosen family. Captured over five years in which synchronicities continually manifested, Platzer’s documentation of these encounters gently asserts that both grieving and healing are meant to be communal experiences.

The war on drugs has been going on for more than three decades. Today, nearly 500,000 Americans are imprisoned on drug charges. In 1980 the number was 50,000. Last year $40 billion in taxpayer dollars were spent in fighting the war on drugs. As a result of the incarceration obsession, the United States operates the largest prison system on the planet. Today, 89 percent of police departments have paramilitary units, and 46 percent have been trained by active duty armed forces. The most common use of paramilitary units is serving drug-related search warrants, which usually involve no-knock entries into private homes.