Catartis - Conservare il futuro

Documentary about the not-likely-legendary Portuguese art group from the 1980's.

Shot in Southern England over the course of six weeks by a crew of three American filmmakers, CircleSpeak offers a nuanced look at the passions and beliefs of the people immersed in the crop circle phenomenon during the season of 2001. This feature-length documentary presents interviews with serious “researchers”, self-proclaimed “hoaxers”, local farmers and villagers who are all, in one way or another, involved in this strange and compelling summer spectacle taking place year after year.

Ilya Kabakov is considered one of the most important contemporary artists worldwide. Born and raised in the Ukraine in the period between Stalin and Gorbatschow he left the country in the 80s. In his Installations and his numerous paintings Kabakov creates a world of its own, which leaves the heaviness of socialist and post-socialist life far behind. The film links Ilya Kabakovs artistic spaces with insights into Russian everyday life, which itself sometimes appears like an installation by the artist.

Thomas Hirschhorn, one of the few Swiss artists of world renown, often touches on social wounds with his provocative works. In 2013, Hirschhorn built a monument for Italian philosopher and communist Antonio Gramsci in a public housing project in the Bronx. The contentious artist collaborated with neighborhood residents whose everyday life is impacted by poverty, unemployment and crime. Conflicts and misunderstandings are bound to arise as Hirschhorn’s absolute devotion to art is confronted with the resident’s lack of prospects and fatalistic outlooks. The «Gramsci Monument» becomes a summer-long experiment where diverse worlds collide: blacks and whites, the art elite and street kids, party people and poets, politicians and philosophers. A nuanced film about art, politics and passion.

Rafael França: obra como testamento

In 1983, Franz Paludetto acquired Rivara Castle at the foot of the Italian Alps. A century earlier, artists from all over Europe had gathered here to establish the Rivara School of Painting. We witness the story of Italy during the latter half of the 20th century.

On the occasion of the fourty years anniversary of François Mitterand's election, a look back to the relationship between the President and artists, from admiration to manipulation.

How does a dying working class town end up betting its future on art? With 80% of its downtown buildings closed, North Adams, Massachusetts united blue-collar locals with art world luminaries to transform economic failure into America's largest center for contemporary art, MASS MoCA. A film by North Adams native Nancy Kelly, DOWNSIDE UP is about the tentative, dangerous notion of hope in a city widely viewed as hopeless.

This film documents Kutlug Ataman's artistic production in a retrospective approach and elucidates his works with his own words and with commentaries by curators, art institution directors, art historians and critics who are familiar with his production through close collaboration, to witness the construction of an impressive artistic production spanning 15 years. The film also includes the excerpts from the artworks and the installation footages of their realization.

Maurício Dias & Walter Riedweg often say the streets are their studio. From the observation of them and of those who populate them there arise installations about encounters, identity and territoriality. The Brazilian-born Dias met the Swiss Riedweg in 1993. Together they learned that they could boost one another’s ideas. “This marriage became Mau Wal,” says Dias. In this documentary, they present their works and the many characters behind them: people who make day-to-day living in the big cities. Street vendors at a Northeast Brazilian fair in São Paulo, illegal immigrants in their quest for the European dream, street kids and their memories. In stories or in the role it plays, the human element is always a centerpiece to the duo’s work.

Marepe, an artist from Bahia, produces art with anything he comes across in the town he lives in, Santo Antônio de Jesus. Packs of cigarettes, coconut palms, walls, and memories taken from the streets, go into putting together a personal archeology for this young artist.

William Kentridge and Marlene Dumas – two of the most celebrated names in international contemporary art – come face to face in a series of frank, witty and intense discussions about their work and practice. The film follows them from the gentle ambience of a dinner conversation, to their studios – where we are given insight into the way that each artist works – to some of their finished works and installations. What emerges is how very differently these two highly successful South African artists approach image making. Dumas’ method is deeply intuitive – she often works on the floor as though embracing her paintings, pouring and dabbing paint to produce her remarkable portraits. Kentridge is intensely systematic, alternating gestural mark making with the repetitive action of drawing-filming-erasing for his animated films.

In 1988, art student Damien Hirst and a group of like-minded associates mounted an exhibition in a building in the East End of London. Entitled Freeze, it was a huge critical and commercial success, propelling Hirst and the group into the spotlight of the avant-garde. More than five years later, Hirst exhibits to international acclaim and is regularly derided in the tabloid press. This portrait of Hirst, which resumes the Omnibus season, is presented as a drug-induced nightmare after Hirst has been put to sleep by a sinister dentist, played by Donald Pleasence. In between interviews with fellow Freeze artists including Angus Fairhurst , Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin , Hirst is seen preparing Mother and Child Divided, his work for last year's Venice Blennale. The piece consists of a cow and a calf, each sawn in half, pickled in formaldehyde and exhibited in four tanks.

North Star: Mark di Suvero is a 1977 documentary film about Mark di Suvero that was produced by François de Menil and Barbara Rose. Born in 1933, di Suvero has become one of the most recognized sculptors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. From about 1975 to 1977, fairly early in di Suvero's long career, filmmaker de Menil and art historian Rose produced this film, which was characterized at the time as "a tribute to the extraordinary work and life of the innovative American sculptor of monumental but delicate constructions." The film shows di Suvero making and installing several of his very large sculptures, and incorporates informal interviews of di Suvero, his mother, and others involved in his career and life at that time. From 1971 to 1975 di Suvero, an American, lived in a self-imposed exile in France in protest of US involvement in war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and the filming spans the end of his exile and his return to New York.

Featuring collectors, dealers, auctioneers and a rich range of artists, including market darlings George Condo, Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, this documentary examines the role of art and artistic passion in today’s money-driven, consumer-based society.

Documentation of Lygia Pape’s 1968 performance Divisor - reactivated in the city of Villeurbanne (France) in October 2014. Commissioned by Institut d'Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne / Rhône-Alpes.

An account of the many tribulations that Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, known for his subversive art and political activism, endured between 2008 and 2011, from his rise to world fame via the Internet to his highly publicized arrest due to his frequent and daring confrontations with the Chinese authorities.

Follows Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar as he finds his artistic voice and develops the socially critical perspective of his work.

I am sitting in a room is a sound art piece by American composer and sound artist Alvin Lucier composed in 1969. The first performance of the work was in 1970 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In collaboration with his partner Mary Lucier. The piece features Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room while re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Due to the room's particular size and geometry, certain resonant frequencies are emphasized while others are attenuated. Eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the characteristic resonance of the room.

Benutzt und gesteuert – Künstler im Netz der CIA