Alexfilm

Turmoil of unsheltered childhood: The dwelling as self.

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.

'Hibiscus' highlights the city's hidden beauty and the warmth of its people that may go by unnoticed on a daily basis but are beautiful reminders to appreciate.

Emerging from a period of withdrawal, a social recluse or ‘hikikomori’ relates her inner experiences against the backdrop of an illuminated and restless urban environment that never sleeps.

This independent film follows the actions and inner thoughts of four unusual individuals as they go about their lives in Tokyo, occasionally meeting up with one another. Their thoughts tend to focus on questions of death, existence, and the conflict of society against the individual. All of the action is performed silently, with narration dubbed over.

The film is a study of nature and significance of the hands in cinema. Besides review of movements and actions, which creates an independent story, it reveals interactions and interdependence of cinematic traditions of various authors, countries and periods

Between a man and his lover lies a wall, between the man and the country he loves lies another wall. Can a one-sided dialouge breaks the walls and expresses the man’s feelings and sentiments? Or does the lover or the country wants the wall to be broken in the first place? This short was inspired by Amy Len’s dance choreography “Wall” and colloborated with Loh Bok Lai. The dance was originally choreographed for a performance in Japan Dance Wave Fukuoka ‘06 - Asian Contemporary Dance Now and later made into an experimental video combining elements of an actor and monologue. The video footages were also used for the dance piece itself in KL.

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.

Culled from four rolls of Super-8 film shot while the maker was a development worker in a small South American village, Daumë is at its center a film about ritual, power, and play. Daumë is both ethnography and critique; it is an interrogation into how to represent a place that can't be represented.

Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.

Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.

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.

An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.

“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread. Shifting the focus from character to interior, Ben Russell and Rhyne Piggott mine the landscape of a beige-carpeted ranch style house for new insights into the architecture of suburban alienation.” - Anne Reecer, Cinematexas

An experimental film about life on earth as a cosmic experiment and the curiosity and naivete of reaching out to alien life.

A personal, subjective journey into the mind of Greta Thunberg, before realizing her calling as a climate activist. While struggling with mental health issues and bullying because of her Aspergers, she also grapples with the sense of impending doom due to the climate crisis. These same struggles and fears drive her to make change and become the person she is today.

Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times, each with a different set of bizarre and challenging rules.

Documentary on the interdependence of the world of the living and the dead, and 'the infernal influence on the thoughts and actions of living people.

Routine imprisoned Eva in an automatism that was ingrained in her spirit. Dromomania will perhaps be the expression that best illustrates her condition. She feels absent, and her frivolous glance catalogs each one of the small details of the journey that imprisons her every day. Her apathetic state is interrupted when she crosses an object outside the street and Eva is forced to finally face her demons.

Mostly dark, rejecting images which are repeated. A stone wall, the chamber of a revolver which is, at first not recognizable, a close-up of a cactus. The duration of the takes emphasises the photographic character of the pictures, simultaneously with a crackling, brutal sound. (Hans Scheugl)