The Fatal Telephone

A boy who finished school and spends time at home, between routine and sleep, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic.

Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.

Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive

A taxi driver, a young girl and a backpacker simultaneously experience a wonderful journey in Tokyo, where they find connections to their own homes in Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia.Throughout their journey, they run into the same Japanese woman named Akiko. Meanwhile, a writer in Paris recalls her encounter with Akiko in Tokyo.

Somewhere between dream, life, and death, a girl sees HERself confronted with HER images of two important people in HER life and HERself.

Time-Consciousness offers four mutually contradictory versions of a series of events. The constant factors are a middle-aged poet with a gammy leg, a prostitute who may or may not be dead, and the woman’s humble room (which may or may not be tidy), where the poet does his writing. Asking "What did happen at 9:20 that evening?," the film underlines the unreliability of memory and the impossibility of objectivity.

A meditation on freedom and technological approaches to manifest destiny.

A young man experiences his last few minutes of singular consciousness while examining a wild falcon he has studied for months.

"River ice sets the scene for Judy Garland's international cri de coeur. It's hard to understate the amount of anxiety created by a Vice President who usurped authority for eight years to start wars and wreck the economy and then sidled off to Wyoming to be a retired 'hero of the right.' Impunity is not just the stuff of autocratic dictatorships in the third world. The American form of impunity is going to get us all killed."

This is the only feature directed by the famed French painter and sculptor Martial Raysse. In keeping with the revolutionary spirit of the time, the movie has no plot to speak of and appears to have been largely made up on the spot. We follow the cat man into a bizarre fantasy universe presented in negative exposure that reverses color values (black is white and vice versa) and written words. The cat man steals a car and then picks up a young girl he promises to take to “Heaven.” Heaven turns out to be a country chateau inhabited by several more animal mask wearing weirdoes...

Engel und Puppe is the first film by Italian filmmaker and writer Ellis Donda. Screened at Oberhausen in 1975, Engel und Puppe is a political adaptation of some lines from Rilke's Duino Elegies, featuring the French poet Jacqueline Risset and a young Rossella Or (soon to become an avant-garde theatre actress).

A Japanese salaryman finds his body transforming into a weapon through sheer rage after his son is kidnapped by a gang of violent thugs.

A bereaved epileptic ditches her pills and follows a mysterious woman to the outskirts of her town, where she slips back into the fearsome yet ecstatic throes of the seizure.

In Razor Blades, Paul SHARITS consciously challenges our eyes, ears and minds to withstand a barrage of high powered and often contradictory stimuli. In a careful juxtaposition and fusion of these elements on different parts of our being, usually occurring simultaneously, we feel at times hypnotised and re-educated by some potent and mysterious force.

The Focus is the film about easy death on the Mediterranean sun.

An old man, cut off from his future and his past, brings a young taxi driver into his game. The two meet Karkalou, a crazy prostitute, whom the former once loved madly and the latter will soon love.

Miguel, a debutant director, and his young team live a series of tribulations during the shootings of their first film, which unrolls between Lisbon, Venice, Paris and Madrid.

In the final days of the American Civil War, an emigre Hungarian military officer attempts to map the situation of the enemy. Many veterans of the 1848 War of Independence in Hungary fought on the northern side. Experienced Fiala, Boldogh who struggles with homesickness and the reckless Vereczky all experience their enforced emigration in different ways and news of impending peace elicits different reactions from them all.

In the nineteenth century, a French adventurer sets off to establish a kingdom in the inhospitable South of Chile, uniting the feared Mapuche under him. The response of the Chilean army is devastating.