Sinfonía de verano (Retrato de una ciudad)

The Island is a short film shot entirely on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast of Malaysia that became the largest and longest-operating refugee camp after the Vietnam War. The artist and his family were some of the 250,000 people who inhabited the tiny island between 1978 and 1991; it was once one of the most densely populated places in the world. After the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shuttered the camp in 1991, Pulau Bidong became overgrown by jungle, filled with crumbling monuments and relics. The film takes place in a dystopian future in which the last man on earth - having escaped forced repatriation to Vietnam - finds a United Nations scientists who has washed ashore after teh world’s last nuclear battle. By weaving together footage from Bidong’s past with a narrative set in its future, Nguyen questions the individual’s relationship to history, trauma, nationhood, and displacement.

Vertiginous documentary, shot in effective black-and-white, treats two painful histories. The first is a love story about a truck driver who, on his way from Johannesburg (South Africa) to Luderitz (Namibia), is haunted by thoughts of his girlfriend and their recently severed relationship. His memories are expressed in an often recurring scene, in which songs by Alec Empire, Macy Gray and Robert Schumann roughly tell the story. This small history is alternated with the tragic fate of the Namibian Heroro people, many thousands of whom died early last century in concentration camps that had been set up by the German colonisers near Luderitz. The depiction of this history is cruder and more poignant, with slanting frames, odd camera angles and a multi-layered sound sculpture. The dilapidated barracks and officers' quarters are the last remnants of the miscarried, so-called civilisation projects in Africa.

Shot at high noon in New York’s financial district, Wallstreet is much like a vertical tickertape, charting the existence of typical office workers. The film’s elongated shadows suggest these workers’ depersonalized, neuter, nearly uniform lives, which flow by without any solid or stable element that might provide definition.

The starting point of this film was a set of 35mm trailers acquired from various abandoned cinemas. This work reveals the veiled and forgotten images used by the commercial film industry.

Nature, gymnastic movements, a cat...

Glen Denny observed: "This film is not ocean, it is panther stalking jungle." Camera flows because it is free to move through space.

Fluidity of stone. Subatomic motion asserting a surface. Mind loop wandering. Visitation of sound matrix. Liquid solid. Nature transforms a planetary cycle. Relations of a timeless void.

Between 1652 and 1657, 58 girls were devoured by a wolf in the Essonne, France. Four centuries later, in the same place, young girls vanish.

An experimental and poetic portrait of a woman.

A documentary about an up-and-coming young rapper with big aspirations.

Es-pi'azione

Something takes us underground, where gods and monsters are active, amid the ruins of a world they move around with their innumerable hands. Inspired by Fritz Lang and Richard Wagner, Remains is a daydream.

Optically printed fragments of film I shot in the autumn months in Seattle. -JB This film was made in response to seeing some of Caryn Clines films. Caryn re introduced me to shooting my films outside. -JB

This film is depicts early lesbian sexuality, using reenacted scenes from the experience of a 12-year old girl as the platform for a meditation on forbidden desire, transgression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of identity formation. Raw adolescent memories counterpoint staged scenes, exploring mechanisms of power and submission.

The Greek island of Syros is visited by a series of unexpected guests. Immutable forms, outside of time, aloof observants to human conditions.

On the Various Nature of Things

This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."

Experimental short film playing with light and how it appears through reflections, lenses, and distortions

Experimental 8mm film.

The rare short film presents a curious dialogue between filmmaker Julio Bressane and actor Grande Otelo, where, in a mixture of decorated and improvised text, we discover a little manifesto to the Brazilian experimental cinema. Also called "Belair's last film," Chinese Viola reveals the first partnership between photographer Walter Carvalho and Bressane.