6.3
A story of globalization filtered through the fever dream of a Mexican shaman, The Modern Jungle is also an intimate portrait of Zoque culture, commodity fetish, and the predicament of documentary.
7.3
Switzerland still carries out special flights, where passengers, dressed in diapers and helmets, are chained to their seats for 40 hours at worst. They are accompanied by police officers and immigration officials. The passengers are flown to their native countries, where they haven't set foot in in up to twenty years, and where their lives might be in danger. Children, wives and work are left behind in Switzerland. Near Geneva, in Frambois prison, live 25 illegal immigrants waiting for deportation. They are offered an opportunity to say goodbye to their families and return to their native countries on a regular flight, escorted by plain-clothes police officers. If they refuse this offer, the special flight is arranged fast and unexpectedly. The stories behind the locked cells are truly heartbreaking.
6.8
A record of the epistolary encounter between French artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire and Maxim Gvinjia, former Foreign Minister of the breakaway Caucasian state of Abkhazia, Letters to Max is both a chronicle of a developing friendship and an ingenious, unusual essay film about the inherently speculative nature of nationhood.
5.9
Based on the remains of never-completed Argentine features from the archives of the film museum in Buenos Aires. The film is, as it were, a parallel film history: an essay like a cinematographic Frankenstein, that blows new life into images that once seemed unsuccessful and pointless.
6
You’d never know this is your home away from home. The surveillance camera outside shows a drab reception area and an unremarkable street in Mexico City; inside, the lights flash, but the tables are empty. Yet preparations are soon underway and fixed categories cease to apply: stubble is removed, make-up applied and strands of hair are teased into place; the camera is trained not on the men themselves, but what they see in the mirror.
7.1
Zuhdi Al Adawi, a Palestinian artist imprisoned in the occupied territories, uses his art as his means of expression and is helped by the rest of the community and his own family to accomplish his artwork.
William Kentridge explores the making of a self-portrait as a way of coming to know oneself. He also welcomes the dancer Dada Masilo into his studio. As Kentridge attempts to draw his own figure with a brush attached to the tip of a long stick, his double watches the imperfect outcome from afar.
William Kentridge explores the optimism of making things—how, even in dire circumstances, there will be people who play, create, and sing. He enlists a local brass band to lead a jolly procession out of the studio and into Johannesburg. But will Kentridge’s two split parts come to an agreement?
William Kentridge investigates how memory connects to place. Using two large blank sheets of paper, the artist draws a fictional colonial landscape, like those he remembers hanging in his childhood dining room. Meanwhile, his doppelgänger draws what he remembers actually seeing in Johannesburg.
Small paper puppets and actors wearing masks endlessly dance in a fictional Soviet museum as William Kentridge documents the making of his 2022 installation Oh to Believe in Another World, made in response to Symphony No. 10 by the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
As William Kentridge explores metamorphosis, sounds are visualized through painting, a shadow turns into a sculpture, time morphs into a film strip, and an abstract blotch becomes an image. Meanwhile, the performers Joanna Dudley and Ann Masina act out a myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
William Kentridge recreates rehearsals for previous performance pieces. He reads a phonetic poem with performers Hamilton Dlamini, Mncedisi Shabangu, Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Mica Manganye. In contrast, they read John Chilembwe’s 1915 letter to the Nyasaland Times, arguing for equal standing in Malawi.
Remembering a story his father told him when he was a child, of Perseus killing his grandfather by accident, William Kentridge reflects on the inescapability of one’s destiny. He explores the story of the Cumana Sibyl, who revealed people’s fate inscribed on leaves that fell from a tree.
6.6
The Philippines is visited by an average of 20~28 strong typhoons and storms every year. It is the most storm-battered country in the world. Last year, Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), considered the strongest storm in history, struck the Philipines, leaving in its path apocalyptic devastation.
7.8
German musician Alexander Hacke explores Istanbul's rich music culture and attempts to create a portrait of Turkey through music genres. On this journey, he encounters a mosaic that covers countless genres from rock to arabesque, electronic to hip-hop.
7.2
The personal stories of the people from all around the world waiting for a decision in an asylum-seekers centre in one of most restrictive countries in the world, Switzerland.
7.2
With cameras in hand, directors Bill and Turner Ross return to their hometown of Sidney, Ohio—zip code 45365—for nine months. In this small town, the stories of a father and son, cops and criminals, officials and their electorate coalesce into a mosaic of faces, places, and events.
5.8
As a major storm strikes Texas in 1900, a mysterious televisual device is built and tested. Blake Williams’ experimental 3D sci-fi film immerses us in the aftermath of the Galveston disaster to fashion a haunting treatise on technology, cinema, and the medium’s future.
6.3
A portrait of Argentine director Gastón Solnicki's family over the course of the second half of the 20th century, Papirosen follows four generations still troubled by a war that’s never spoken of. The film juxtaposes different periods with their native image formats, along with landscapes, characters and international political events, as it focuses on a singular decade of a nouveau riche Argentine Jewish family, and the new generation’s introduction into familiar traumas and vitality.
6.2
A deceptively simple set-up: the director and his father watch a 1988 football match which the father refereed, their commentary accompanying the original television images in real time. A Bucharest derby between the country’s leading teams, Dinamo and Steaua, taking place in heavy snow, one year before the revolution that toppled Ceaușescu.
6.6
A film on exile, revolution, landscapes and memory, Anabasis brings forth the remarkable parallel stories of Adachi and May, one a filmmaker who gave up images, the other a young woman whose identity-less existence forbade keeping images of her own life. Fittingly returning the image to their lives, director Eric Baudelaire places Adachi and May’s revelatory voiceover reminiscences against warm, fragile Super-8mm footage of their split milieus, Tokyo and Beirut. Grounding their wide-ranging reflections in a solid yet complex reality, Anabasis provides a richly rewarding look at a fascinating, now nearly forgotten era (in politics and cinema), reminding us of film’s own ability to portray—and influence—its landscape.
6
A remote village in the Northwest of Russia. A mental asylum is located in an old wooden house. The place and its inhabitants seem to be untouched by civilization. In this pristine setting, no articulate human voice is heard, and pain is muted. The landscapes and buildings are not so much inhabited as lightly entwined and then passed through by their anonymous residents, like some creeping mist. Phantoms half stuck, half undone in a phantom world—lost persons from a lost society?
6.5
Documentary about director/artist Nicholas Ray and his time as a University professor
