Filmmakers use archival footage and animation to explore the culture surrounding nuclear weapons, the fascination they inspire and the perverse appeal they still exert.
Experimental short film on the excitement and rush of a day trip
Documentary by Portuguese Silvino Santos, about the Amazon, its flora, fauna, its inhabitants and among other wonderful images from the beginning of the 20th century with alternating close-up shots of caimans, jaguars and tropical flora with footage of Indigenous rituals--including some of the earliest known moving images of the Indigenous Witoto people--and longer sequences showcasing the region’s extractive industries: rubber, the Brazil nut, timber, fishing, even the egret feathers that were a staple of women’s fashion at the time.
A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.
"[Hutton’s] latest urban film, New York Portrait, Chapter III, takes on a unique tone in relation to Hutton’s ongoing exploration of rural landscape. The very fact that Hutton is dealing with older footage, with archives of memory more than immediacy, gives it a different texture than his earlier New York films. Hutton always found the presence of nature in the city, not only in his many shots of sky and vegetation, but also in the geometry and texture of the city itself, which seemed to project an independence from the human." (Tom Gunning)
In his New York City landscape, Cohen finds inspiration in disturbance. Looking to life for rhythm and to architecture for state of mind, he locates simple mysteries. Just Hold Still is comprised of an interconnected series of short works and collaborations that explore the gray area between documentary, narrative, and experimental genres.
Time to Remove Superman It is fragmentarily a story of death and it can also be connected to the opposite - birth. When I did research for this work, what was really interesting was an article read that 'We came from dirt and we go back to dirt' is everywhere in all religions and philosophies of all cultures. And I found that sentence and thought over different things and I reached it was meant to be only that way. Regardless of primitive or modern society, religions or philosophies couldn't help but think human body is rotten away and it is cremated and made dirt. We know the process but we haven't seen that. I thought it would be meaningful if I made that out to show. We've watched a mummy disappearing in a movie using CG but I thought I could visually display a message that things we cherished or in which knowledge was contained were made dirt or on the other way, they had been dirt before they came to us.
Rapidly changing images of natural objects, scenery, animals, plants, and people flicker, flash, tumble, and cascade across the screen.
One of the major works by South Korean feminist film collective Kaidu Club, this short is a dynamic, idiosyncratic, and mosaic-like portrait of Korean life, culture, and people who dream of a unified North and South.
Shot on 16mm and featuring a soundtrack by Toshiya Tsunoda, Luke Fowler's film pays tribute to the French master’s impressionistic approach to light and nature (notably his Mont Sainte-Victoire series) through his own resplendant glimpses of landscapes and people in Southern France.
A documentary from Erkki Karu, one of the earliest pioneers of Finnish cinema: This government-produced propaganda film introduces the nature, sports, military, agriculture and capital of Finland.
This cine-portrait of New York City uses digital effects to turn the countless riders of the subway system into living, breathing paintings.
In the Mojave Desert, fields of solar panels follow the sun’s daily journey in perfect synchronicity.
100% comprised of found footage, this is a meditation on the filmmaker's relationship with herself, others, and how she is perceived by both parties. Showing the filmmaker at various stages of her life, this short seeks to visualize the embarrassing ordeal of being known when you're at your most vulnerable.
Film historians, and survivors from the nearly 30-year struggle to bring sound to motion pictures take the audience from the early failed attempts by scientists and inventors, to the triumph of the talkies.
The Displaced View traces a personal search for identity and pride, within the unique and suppressed history of the Japanese in Canada. Through an examination of the emotional and cultural links between the women of one family, the processes of the construction of memory and the re-construction of history, are revealed. Utilizing an innovative combination of experimental, dramatic and documentary forms, the film emerges as a deeply moving and compassionate love letter. Just as the official history of the Japanese Canadians has been thrown into question, so does the film’s fictionalized narrative, question documentary as truth.
Rainer Kohlberger applied various algorithms to extract the noise from a vast number of action films and used this to reduce the dramaturgy of the narrative to its essence. keep that dream burning oscillates between maximum abstraction and pure blur. Within the blurriness, objects form and disappear. The surface allows the space to be conceived.
Jean-Claude Rousseau's Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre is not only his first medium-length film, but a chance to discover this filmmaker whom Jean-Marie Straub has called, along with Frans Van de Staak and Peter Nestler, the greatest working in Europe. With this newly restored print there is also a possibility to discover the relationship between Rousseau's art of filming and Jan Vermeer's famous painting. As Prosper Hillairet wrote in 1988, four years after Rousseau had finished Jeune femme ... (for the first time as we know today): «Without adopting the usual systematic spirit and form of cinéma structurel, Rousseau presents us with simple images and leaves it at that. Keeps the image in hand. A minimalist and ascetic expression of cinema: a shot that lasts.»
Found footage anti-war film comprising film documents of the Austro-Hungarian and Italian army on the Alpine front, and from first generation picture material by war-film pioneer Luca Comerio.
Two friends walk and draw circles. It is what it is, idizwadidiz, c’est ce que c’est, seskecé. Nice weather.