Martina and Sonja, cross-dress in vampire capes and werewolf claws, re-enacting familiar horror tropes. A corresponding soundtrack of stock screams and "scary" music suggests that the girls' toying with gender roles and power dynamics may have dire consequences.
Filmed during summer 2019, Jesus Is King brings Kanye West’s famed Sunday Service to life in the Roden Crater, visionary artist James Turrell’s never-before-seen installation in Arizona’s Painted Desert. This one-of-a-kind experience features songs arranged by West in the gospel tradition along with new music from his forthcoming album.
A teenage skateboarder becomes suspected of being connected with a security guard who suffered a brutal death in a skate park called "Paranoid Park".
Chronicles the powerful friendship between two young Black teenagers navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida.
A triple exposure on EXR 50D 16mm film: two layers shot in summer, and the third captured on the cusp of winter. A collection of statues fading in and out of consciousness, around the Weissensee lake in northeast Berlin, where the filmmaker lives.
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.
Born in 1981, Roman was a brilliant young man, promised a bright future but he died crushed by a car in 2015. His friend Eugenia could not accept this disappearance and decided to create an “intelligent” chabot. Feeding it all his texts, the software learned to speak like him thanks to an artificial intelligence.
Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.
Hoping to find a sense of connection to her late mother, Gorgeous takes a trip with her friends to visit her aunt's ancestral house in the countryside. The girls soon discover that there is more to the old house than meets the eye.
A seagull, a dog, a child, a call to prayer; Looking through a window, the corridor of a train, the wall of a medina; Everyday life is momentarily paused through the eyes of a stranger in an unknown land.
Canceled short film.
An experimental short film about sensory seeking behaviour in childhood. Filmed on VHS.
The wind carries an aspiring healer into a chaotic, virulent parallel world. Paralyzed by a familiar universe that is gradually becoming distorted, she discovers she has the power to stop time.
“Belladonna Museum” is a short film that portrays a personal experience of a transgender woman in a tragic love relationship: it is a visual poetry that reinterprets iconic paintings from surrealism and post-impressionism to address themes such as emotional dependence, loneliness, objectification, the attachment and the abuse both emotional and physical.
Made entirely as stopmotion, this experimental short compiled over 900 images of pure strangeness, with frightening visuals and disturbing sounds.
American cartoons are the starting point for Martin Arnold's new work. Sequences of short films form the basis of a process of fragmentation, deconstruction, dismantling and repetition. Arnold uses fun, family entertainment to create films with open-ended possibilities for association. His pieces, such as Hydra (2013), Charon (2013), Nix (2013) and Self Control (2011), feature characters whose anatomy is no longer recognizable as such, but rather resemble puppets, remotely controlled from the outside. Trembling hands, dancing tongues, blinking eyes and snoring mouths move like ghosts against an abyss-like deep black background, in which bodily elements constantly disappear, only to reappear once more.
Memory is a collaboration with musician Noah Lennox (Panda Bear), exploring the relationship between a musician and filmmaker and their personal reflection on memories. From Super 8 home movies and entirely handmade, this film explores familiar memories, the present moment combined with past experiences and how it all seems to evade from our present memory.
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.