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.
An experimental meditation on Times Square's marquees and iconic advertising that captures the concurrently seedy and dazzling aspects of New York's Great White Way.
Two unemployed friends have a fresh idea: they want to stage Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' in Grand Theft Auto. But even in a virtual world, reality intrudes in a wild and trippy film shot entirely inside the ultra-violent video game.
For an exhibition, that in the end never took place, the Pompidou Museum asked the filmmaker to reply, in pictures, to the question: WHERE ARE YOU AT, LEOS CARAX? He attempts an answer - full of questions. About himself and "his" world: I DON’T KNOW, BUT IF I DID, I’D REPLY THAT . . . —Leos Carax
Staged as a series of voiceover sessions, written with gloriously off-balanced precision and dipped in the color green, THE FUTURE TENSE unfolds as a poignant tale of tales, exploring the filmmakers’ own experiences in aging, parenting, mental illness, along with the brutal history that lies submerged beneath Ireland’s heavy, moist earth.
Peter Tscherkassky condenses the long history of railways in the movies into a rousing blast for the senses in a heartfelt tribute to another legend of experimental cinema Kurt Kren.
With Taiwan remaining in the grip of martial law in 1982, a group of filmmakers from that country set out to establish a cultural identity through cinema and to share it with the world. This engaging documentary looks at the movement's legacy.
The story of a friendship spanning generations and boundaries: a Hungarian soldier escapes to the West in the ’50s. The son of a U.S. soldier runs to the East in the ’90s. Their paths cross in Bogotá, Colombia, and they become friends by sharing memories of the same land but of very different times.
Fragment 53 is a feature-length documentary film on war considered in its necessary and universal dimension, faced both as an actual and archetypical event.
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.
Her ex-wife won’t meet her. Her daughter rejects her. Her mother still calls her “son.” As Marianna transitions from male to female, she is abandoned by her loved ones, alone in a world unwilling to accept her true self. This multi-award-winning documentary is an intensely sympathetic and powerful account of one individual’s struggle to gain acceptance—even in the midst of profound physical hardship.
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.
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.
Phases of Matter follows living and inanimate residents of a teaching hospital in Istanbul, moving from the operating room to the morgue, between life and other states, the real and the virtual.
What does it mean to be awake in a world that seems satisfied to be asleep? Kris and Michal push their experiences of life and love to a breaking point as they restlessly roam the city streets in search of answers, adrift in the euphoria and uncertainty of youth.
The time of exposure is the life span of an object in frame. In this regard, no photo is just a two-dimensional graphic composition - it always has the third, temporal dimension. A photo is a time carrier, the vessel of memory... But whose memory? Of the Face or the Thing or the Landscape which are still on the photo? Of the photographer?
Documentary about director/artist Nicholas Ray and his time as a University professor
If history is written by the victors, where does that leave those who were never allowed to be part of the game? A collective of queer athletes enters the Olympic Stadium in Athens and sets out to honour those who were excluded from standing on the winners’ podium. They meet Amanda Reiter, a trans* marathon runner who has to struggle with the prejudices of sports organisers, and Annet Negesa, a 800m runner who was urged by the international sports federations to undergo hormone-altering surgery. Together they create a radical poetic utopia far from the rigid gender rules found in competitive sports.
Produced out of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, Laura Huertas Millán's quietly masterful La Libertad follows a group of matriarchal weavers in Mexico, formally mimicking the examination of an object through subtle shifts in scale and space.
Artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire spent four years interacting with the pupils of a film class, at a secondary school in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. Keeping himself on the sidelines, he gives way to the children to express their thoughts and dreams. Their remarks are intuitive, inquisitive, yet passionate and surprisingly mature, concerning rocky and complicated issues, ranging from racism, immigration, and identity, all the way to the possibilities of film as a medium. As time flows almost unnoticed, it is evident that these children have not only become the co-directors of this film but also the heroes of their own lives.
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.
Simon Liu's eerie, entrancing portrait of contemporary Hong Kong tracks a series of strange disruptions to the city's urban infrastructure. Deceptively tranquil 16mm images of everyday life are accompanied by muffled music cues, ominous radio transmissions, and intimations of an impending hazardous event that may never arrive.