Best Friends Read the Same Books

Shot on 16mm, as part of the commercial shorts collection for the 53th Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival.

In pre-WWII Vancouver, second-generation Japanese immigrants had it tough. Daily, they faced discrimination, hatred and injustice at the hands of their Caucasian counterparts. But one thing made their lives worth living: baseball. They may be the underdogs, but the Vancouver Asahi baseball team have a sense of fair play and smart tactics that set them apart from the brute force of their opponents. Under the guidance of new team captain Reggie Kasahara, can they be able to rise above all the negativity to win the tournament? This film is based on the true story of Vancouver Asahi, the Japanese-Canadian baseball team that was inducted into The Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003.

Paul Snider is a narcissistic, small time hustler who fancies himself a ladies man. His life changes when he meets Dorothy Stratten working behind the counter of a Dairy Queen. Under his guidance Dorothy grows to fame as a Playboy Playmate. But when Dorothy begins pursuing an acting career, the jealous Paul finds himself elbowed out of the picture by more famous men.

Michael has a routine. Every day at noon, he heads to his favorite local park where he sits and enjoys the sun on the same bench. However, this time is slightly different, he is greeted by a mysterious woman who soon seems to know everything about him. However, he doesn't recall ever meeting her.

Each day after work, Carlos, a language school teacher, frequents the heady surroundings of his local cruising ground. One evening he encounters a teenage boy from his class named Toni, and the two engage in a brief sexual tryst. As the relationship between teacher and student begins to develop, some dark truths emerge about the young man and his mysterious group of friends.

How Brief is a disappearing act set over the course of one night in 1961 when a restless woman returns to her childhood home for the last time, loosely inspired by the music and disappearance of singer-songwriter Connie Converse.

A journey into a mind of an artist with creative crisis.

The young hero seems the essence of maleness, yet he's troubled by vaguely feminine objects. Soon his masculine and feminine selves are intercut, as each of his identities appears to look and gesture at the other. The film, at once melancholy and transcendent, consists of a shimmering, nearly plotless evocation of gender identity in flux through haunting, densely interlaced images.

Structured in nine tableaux each a study of a simple action or situation involving a lone, naked figure, the blind Eros, searching for fulfilment, for self. The objects he touches - books, paintings - can be seen as icons of the creative spirit; there is also a motor cycle and film equipment. In succeeding scenes he appears to try on identities offered by institutional doctrines of religion and social traditions of (overt) masculinity. Much of the film was constructed in-camera with a small amount of editing afterwards. An innovation was the use of in-camera fade-outs as phrase markers, not as terminal points, within a single set-up or shot.

Psyche 1947, made while a student at USC, shows Markopoulos’ developing style and his sensuous use of colour and composition. Shot in the Hollywood hills, the film was inspired by an unfinished novella by Pierre Louÿs. - Tate Modern

Markopoulos called Lysis “a study in stream-of-consciousness poetry of a lost, wandering, homosexual soul” and felt that the film foreshadowed The Illiac Passion.

Based on Plato's dialogue Charmides.

An experimental film that lifts the veil on the world of African American drag racing.

To forget about the end of a relationship, a woman fantasizes about an ideal one. Fantasy and reality begin to melt into one another, but the past finds a way to rear its head again. Films used: Notorious (1946) Gaslight (1944)

Second short film by Andrea Campos, about a teenager who tries to combat her mother's compulsive alcoholism with the help of her stepfather. Kind of experimental.

What does the energy harnessed through orgasm have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dušan Makavejev has the answers (or the questions). His surreal documentary-fiction collision begins as an investigation into the life and work of controversial psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich and then explodes into a free-form narrative of a beautiful young Slavic girl’s sexual liberation.

An obsessive Vine star goes down a road of surreal imagery, as his obsession with the application develops into murder.

After losing his innocence, his best friend, and the love of his adolescence, this coming-of-age gangster drama follows Harman in an hour of his night within a new life of violence.

Eve is a precocious nine year-old girl with a wild imagination growing up in a traditional Chinese immigrant family in Vancouver where Confucian doctrines, superstitious obsessions and divine visions abound. When Buddhism and Catholicism are thrown into the mix, life for Eve and her 11-year-old prim and authoritative sister, Karena, escalates into a fantasia of catastrophe, sainthood and cultural confusion. The journey of a young girl and her sister striving to grow up in world where childhood is lonely and the world is full of wonder.

This psychedelic horror short inspired by vintage cinema follows a raped girl's descent into derangement and makes the audience feel as claustrophobic as the character.