Fragments of the House of Usher

Staged as a series of voiceover sessions, written with gloriously off-balanced precision and dipped in the color green, THE FUTURE TENSE unfolds as a poignant tale of tales, exploring the filmmakers’ own experiences in aging, parenting, mental illness, along with the brutal history that lies submerged beneath Ireland’s heavy, moist earth.

For 'Et les chiens se taisaient' Maldoror adapted a piece of theatre by the poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), about a rebel who becomes profoundly aware of his otherness when condemned to death. His existential dialogue with his mother reverberates around the African sculptures on display at the Musée de l'Homme, a Parisian museum full of colonial plunder whose director was the Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris.

A film essay that approaches cinema as a water current, revisiting a body of previous essay films through the recurring image of water—rivers, seas, tides, and flows—to explore cinema as a fluid space of memory, movement, and transformation.

An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality.

Formerly incarcerated writer Marvin Wade speaks personally about his 25 years in prison and the positive transformation he achieved in spite of, not because of, the criminal legal system around him.

In 2024, during an artistic residency at Periférne Centrá (Dúbravica, Slovakia), Cristian Estrella filmed the folkumentary „Medzi dolinami, medzi vŕški, po stopách budúceho zvuku Slovenska“ while producing the album "The Future Sound of Slovakia Vol.1" by Mira Tus Manos. But every film leaves scenes out. What doesn't fit due to time, rhythm, or because the main story needs to go elsewhere. "Medzi scénami, medzi hlasmi" is exactly those outtakes: already edited material that no one had seen, divided into two parts —SIDE A and SIDE B— where artists from Argentina, England, France, Catalonia, Amsterdam, New Zealand, and Slovakia speak not only about the project but also about their own artistic practices, personal stories, and internal maps.

This J.G. Ballard documentary assembles decades of interviews and archival material to paint a striking portrait of one of the most imaginative and provocative writers of the 20th century.

An philosophical film assembled from archival NASA footage exploring humanity’s search for meaning in the silence of space.

"Searching for the Perfect Gentleman — an Investigative Journey" is a documentary about the search of an African barber shop poster. The virtual journey takes the viewer to various African, European and Asian countries, in order to find the place where it was originally created, produced and sold. What seems easy in the beginning turns out to be a demanding process, yet an interesting experience in accessing information, communicating with people from totally different backgrounds and indulging in uncertainty, to celebrate the search itself — wherever it may lead. The film shows how boundaries between originality and reproduction merge, in a world where everything can be remixed and reprinted easily. Searching for the Perfect Gentleman tells a multi-layered story about trust, persistence and interconnectedness in a globalized world.

Tommy sets out to document walking. He meets a colorful cast of characters, attaches microphones to his feet, and contends with what it means to capture movement on film.

Alberto Van den Eynde's work investigates two conceptions of the image: as a capturer or rescuer of past moments and as a cause of the anguish implied by its recovery. The author's approach to his twelve-year-old self is articulated through a mosaic of vacation videos found in an old family camera. These memories form a touching, nostalgic, self-parody warp, the digital remnants of a new generational sensibility.

A long-hidden, personal doc about leaving a beloved house by the late, revered Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.

A film composed of images from prisons. Quotes from fiction films and documentaries as well as footage from surveillance cameras. A look at the new control technologies, at personal identification devices, electronic ankle bracelets, electronic tracking devices.

The film in a metaphorical form demonstrates a model of self-devouring in a closed spiritual system, it explores intermediate state between a human and a non-human: a subhuman deprived of a divine spark.

Two decades on from Sam Neill’s Cinema of Unease, Tim Wong’s essay film contemplates the prevailing image of a national cinema while privileging some of the images and image-makers displaced by the popular view of filmmaking in Aotearoa. Free to view at: lumiere.net.nz/films

"Nueve Sevillas" is a heterodox psycho-geographical profile of the new flamenco in Seville. Nine characters coexist with the great flamenco artists of today.

Technological advances and cultural development have disrupted the balance between humankind and other animals. Instead of looking at similarities, we focus on differences. Coexistence has been replaced by dominance. We have forgotten that we live in a house that does not belong only to us. However, the ties between humans and other inhabitants of the animal kingdom have not been irreversibly broken. In his visual essay, which is both intimate and philosophical, Alessandro Cattaneo focuses specifically on those things that connect us. The statements of thinkers and idyllic shots of interspecies interactions indicate that if we change the way in which we think about animals, it will be beneficial for the entire ecosystem.

Valtos is a story told from thirty years hence, in the last moments of its narrator, who awoke one day in 1987 'with the knowledge that I had been duplicated during the night, and that I was an inferior replica of myself'. There follows a relentless, epic, pursuit of an absconding phantom - his 'original' - which ends in catastrophe at Valtos, a place at once ethereal and terrifying.

A hole gapes in a house wall. A small flaw, something imperfect that we seldom consciously direct our attention to. Filmmaker Ondřej Vavrečka finds holes in every corner. His focus is on the imperfections of human existence. A hole can also mean an uncertain future, or an empty stomach. The gap that partners leave behind after a breakup. Ondřej Vavrečka does not only deal with visible holes. He looks at the incomplete from a philosophical perspective. He also lets a nuclear physicist, a theologian and an ethnologist have their say. He underscores their thoughts and theses with absurd everyday scenes: a woman with a chair on her head or an invisible skier. These scenes combine with interviews, sounds and stop-motion sequences to create a playful collage.

Since its publication 200 years ago, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has influenced vast swathes of popular culture. Adaptations have starred cinema legends from Boris Karloff to Robert De Niro – and even Alvin and the Chipmunks. From tales of science gone mad (Jurassic Park) to stories of understanding the other (ET, The Hulk, Arrival), traces of the story and its themes have spread across our media. With Frankenstein Re-membered, video artist and film historian Chris Gerrard collects these diverse fragments from the birth of cinema until the present day and in the tradition of Victor Frankenstein himself, attempts to stitch them back together into an adaptation of the original Shelley novel.