Is sleeping also being dead?
Some spaces draw attention, as if they evoke something that’s about to happen. These are the places where we escape when we dream or die. The only thing that exists is time; we wait for the moment to arrive.
In Manhattan's Central Park, a film crew directed by William Greaves is shooting a screen test with various pairs of actors. It's a confrontation between a couple: he demands to know what's wrong, she challenges his sexual orientation. Cameras shoot the exchange, and another camera records Greaves and his crew. Sometimes we watch the crew discussing this scene, its language, and the process of making a movie. Is there such a thing as natural language? Are all things related to sex? The camera records distractions - a woman rides horseback past them; a garrulous homeless vet who sleeps in the park chats them up. What's the nature of making a movie?
A film essay that intertwines the director's gaze with that of her late mother. Beyond exploring mourning and absence as exclusively painful experiences, the film pays tribute to her mother through memories embodied by places and objects that evidence the traces of her existence. The filmmaker asks herself: What does she owe her mother for who she is and how she films? To what extent does her film belong to her?
Coming back during Winter, Alex Powell explores both the places and personal connections found in his hometown and how they've changed. “Guide to a Midwest Hometown” explores what makes the barren places at home feel sentimental and special, and the good and bad feelings that come when being back home. Inspired by "How To With John Wilson".
An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.
X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.
Made in Japan, Last Room is both fiction and documentary. The occupants of the love-hotels and capsule-hotels tell their own intimate, dreamlike stories, interspersed with journeys through the archipelago's landscapes. Soon, these personal stories resonate with a collective history: that of Gunkanjima, the abandoned ghost island of Nagasaki, and then that of Japan as a whole.
Mona is a 22 year old trans girl from a small village in France. She puts needles attached to peacock feathers in her skin, under bright lights, late at night. She bleeds, half naked, in front of small crowds of people. Sometimes they faint whilst watching her. Why would she do this? How did she learn to do it? And why would someone want to watch?
Tourists eating and taking photos. Tourists strolling and taking photos. Tourists bathing on the beach and taking more photos. Barcelona has become an overexploited photocall to the point of paroxysm, and this is what this film shows by turning the camera and pointing towards the visitors. A small gesture that, added to a powerful sound contrast and a caustic sense of humour, exposes without subterfuge a grotesque normality.
Terpsichore is a captivating exploration of dance as an art form, illuminating the passion, discipline, and vulnerability that transform movement into poetry. The documentary follows three distinct yet interconnected artists: Cece Trapani, an Irish dancer; Aurora Maur, a burlesque performer; and the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company (DCDC), a renowned contemporary dance ensemble. Through their stories, Terpsichore reveals the universal language of dance—one that transcends genre and speaks to the depths of human emotion. Intimate interviews and behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage offer a raw, unfiltered look at the artistry behind each performance, capturing the essence of dance as both personal expression and a bridge between artist and audience. More than a showcase of technique, Terpsichore delves into the soul of movement, celebrating its power to connect, inspire, and reveal the unspoken truths of the human spirit.
A homogeneous structure of wind and light across tree branches in the South region of Isère
A short experimental documentary that interrogates how the modernization of parks and playgrounds in Long Branch (a neighbourhood in South Etobicoke in Toronto, Canada) both reflects and contributes to the overall rise in the cost of living in the area by exploring children's relationships to the community spaces around them. The film includes footage from four local parks and playgrounds, personal archival materials, interviews with five South Etobicoke locals, and an art-based workshop at a local junior middle school.
Residents of the same street in Haarlem, and acquaintances and relatives of Kees Hin, together tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood, each in fifteen words.
An experimental half-documentary half-fiction about a young person’s routine of getting to sleep and waking up.
An interconnected look at tradition, colonialism, property, faith, and science, as seen through labor practices that link an endangered salamander, mass-produced apples, and the evolving fields of genomics and machine learning.
A documentary featuring 30 Argentinian women aged between 4 and 80, sharing their stories of resilience, strength, and unique perspectives on womanhood through performance art.
Here is an actor, one who has been asked to dwell in the perilous gap between text and image. In the voids where traces of the past have been erased by an unknown error, she begins to assemble her own script.
Across the installation's multiple channels, the camera circles a group of artists as they sit together in a field eating, licking, and squeezing ripe tomatoes. Throughout the ever-changing scene, kisses, whispers, and caresses are shared with a casual, gentle intimacy that reflects interconnectivity and abundance. These queer and desirous exchanges constitute a portrait of collectivity wherein individuals come together as distinct parts of a whole.
A short philosophical satire that wanders between the absurd and the profound. From a silent bed stare to a prophetic lentil, Cryptex explores the rituals of modern existentialism — one cup of coffee and one book at a time.
Lake gazes down at a still body of water from a birds-eye view, while a group of artists peacefully float in and out of the frame or work to stay at the surface. As they glide farther away and draw closer together, they reach out in collective queer and desirous exchanges — holding hands, drifting over and under their neighbors, making space, taking care of each other with a casual, gentle intimacy while they come together as individual parts of a whole. The video reflects on notions of togetherness and feminist theorist Silvia Federici’s call to “reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and our bodies.”
THE NIGHTMARE, documentary filmmaker Adam Gray sets out on a journey to understand this terrifying phenomenon. From the foggy shores of Newfoundland to the steaming jungles of Zanzibar we will see where the Nightmare has left its mark. Hear from those who have survived the experience, and the families of those that did not. Meet the scientists, psychologists, and folklorists on the front lines of the battle for understanding how something without material form can traumatize and even kill those that encounter it. THE NIGHTMARE is a fascinating exploration of a phenomenon that suggests that the only difference between hallucination and the supernatural...is belief.
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