Cinema Exercises

The Iranian filmmaker Narges Kalhor, daughter of a former advisor of Ahmadinejad's, has been living in exile in Germany for four years. When she hears that the fellow Iranian rapper Shahin Najafi, who is also living in exile in Germany, faces death threats and has to hide because of one of his songs, she doesn't hesitate and has to find him. On her search she encounters fear everywhere. Narges Kalhor has to face her inconvenient memories of suppression, hatred and anger for her past in Iran.

Carnet de identidad

Part lyrical document, part farce, Animals Under Anaesthesia: Speculations On the Dreamlife of Beasts explores the imaginary unconscious minds of animals. Images of sex, death and the natural world are made manifest in the murky and disquieting dreams of a dog, a cat, a pig and a rabbit.

Portrait of The Church of the SubGenius in scratch, which means high speed cutting, media manipulation. Contains clips from the Arise, the Church's own film about itself (recrutment video), the SubGenius MTV productions, and TV interviews with sacred scribe Rev. Ivan Stang, intercut with a barrage of weird clips from movies and television.

16mm film by Paul Clipson, and music by Sarah Davachi. Filmed in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Brisbane, Krakow, Sidney, Portland, Napa, Oakland and San Francisco.

Maniac Summer consists of images and sounds recorded in Paris in the summer of 2009. It is a sprawling triptych without a beginning or end and with no specific subject or topic. The camera is positioned in front of a window and left running. It observes movements, registers noises coming from the street or nearby park, captures Chantal Akerman going about her business in her apartment: smoking, working, talking on the telephone. Fragments from the artist’s everyday life are featured in the installation’s central video, while the adjoining panels are more symbolically charged; in them, various images from the former have been isolated, modified and repeated. These abstract afterimages act as a kind of memory, looking back to the images in the installation’s centrepiece as so many shadows of its reality.

A song of love to the city of Genoa. The film wanders the streets of the city center and explore the beautiful cemetery and then climb the hills which offer an amazing view over the old town crossed by a highway and port.

Documentary about a slaughterhouse in Quito, where hundreds of people and entire families work everyday. The smell of the place is warm and penetrating, the noise is intense, everything is red. Would that much effort and death have an ulterior purpose?

"This is taking a Super 8mm camera around with me wherever I go and I'm very interested in windows at this time of travel, and I'm trying to make a variety of different statements about the concept of window." - S.B.

Chantal Akerman reads a script detailing the woes that befell her on the day she thought about "The Future of Cinema". The camera continuously rotates 360 degrees around her apartment as she rereads the script at an exponentially increasing speed. At its heart, an homage to Godard.

A completely new story based on existing footage from the series Columbo.

Multi-faceted artist Phil Niblock captures a brief moment of an interstellar communication by the Arkestra in their prime. Black turns white in a so-called negative post-process, while Niblock's camera focuses on microscopic details of hands, bodies and instruments. A brilliant tribute to the Sun King by another brilliant supra-planetary sovereign. (Eye of Sound)

The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.

A fantasia of post-indoctrination, immigration, and iconography. A pageant of wanderers and searchers: Mormon missionaries, a pioneer, polygamists, scouts, hunters, church-goers, and an aspiring prophet walk and walk and walk. A pilgrimage of memory, history, ancestry, and place.

Experimental short made by Olivier Assayas for Fondation of Contemporary Art and starring Maggie Cheung.

The film consists of three sequences shot by a fixed camera: the first shows the balcony of a hospital with patients (soundtrack from the film "Vivre sa vie" by Jean-Luc Godard), the second is a scraped wall and the third is a crossroad with pedestrians and cars (sound taken from the film "The Time-Machine " by George Pal).

The short film is a montage of sped up clips of The Ringling Brothers Circus in action set to a musical track. The film is separated into four segments, each segment which focuses on different acts within the circus. The later segments often incorporate clips from earlier segments, mostly as background to the featured acts. The speed of the clips match the tempo of the soundtrack music.

Photographic and sound story, through the encounter of characters with their stories of a time without end.

A vehicle of consciousness navigates the vertiginous labyrinths of San Francisco. ROMAN CHARIOT was filmed over several months with a spy camera mounted on filmmaker David Sherman's son's baby carriage.

An experimental ethnographic documentary that criticizes the colonizer view of anthropology.