Donosti 2730
A youngster writes a letter to his grandmother about his last trip to Donosti (Spain). This city inspires him to ponder about the language of cinema, time, cities, and sharing memories with our loved ones.
Locations: Looking for Rusty James
A personal meditation on Rumble Fish, the legendary film directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1983; the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, where it was shot; and its impact on the life of several people from Chile, Argentina and Uruguay related to film industry.
Disposable love
In home-movies shot in the ‘90s by her father, the filmmaker discovers in these inherited images powerful fictions of the Argentinian middle class and the country’s recent history.
This is Not a Game
Angela Su’s fictional artist Rosie Leavers is the last remaining person to upload her consciousness to a video game. Contemplating during a pandemic year which also saw people’s resistance movements in many parts of the world, the work pinpoints the uncanny affinities between gaming and warfare strategies. They have mutually informed the infrastructure of both worlds since time immemorial when diplomatic conflicts played out on the battlefield of the 64 squares of a chess board to flight simulation technologies which were adapted to shape gaming experiences as we know it now. When the conflict is between the state and its people, she speculates that gaming strategies empower civilians in resistance movements to counter imperialism through its own operative logic. But once we upload our consciousness, are we able to return to the sensibilities and political motivation that inspired the revolution to begin with?
Visions of Europe
Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.
Electric Eye
An experimental short film, shot during the COVID-19 pandemic, made by one person. Using recorded scenes and archival footage, the short presents an unorthodox narrative to explore the themes of self-identification, identity, gender expression and androgyny.
Nostalgia for the Future
Guided by the evocative narration of Charlotte Rampling, Nostalgia for the Future is a descent into the labyrinthine world of Chris Marker, the “best-known author of unknown films,” who spent a lifetime concealing himself behind a veil of pseudonyms and images of cats. Moving through a constellation of personal documents and film fragments, an archivist attempts to decode the man through the material traces he left behind. By repurposing and recontextualizing Marker’s own body of work, the film treats his images as “time machines,” transforming the archive into a landscape of living memory. Nostalgia for the Future is a meditation on memory, identity, and the power our past images hold over the futures we imagine.
Dr Tscharniblues
Bern, 1979: a tower block called Tscharnergut. A group of friends get together to make a film about their experiences growing up in suburban Switzerland.
Exergo
Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists.
Taube Feuer
With noise-canceling headphones, they communicate with an inaudible counterpart. Decoupled, they move around the room and meet their surroundings. Intimate stories and needs are discussed. The personal blends into a shared portrait.
Ante Meridiem
Ante Meridiem is a sensory journey through the first hours of dawn. Kind but vehement, he explores the dichotomy between silence and bustle, patience and haste, taking both to their ultimate consequences.
Brute Force
Brute Force explores how our knowledge-making practices affect the world. Drawing on quantum theory and geology, the film exposes the intrinsic omissions, distortions, and ecological impacts of image production and data extraction. From the interference patterns of neutrons to data centres and salt lakes, the film captures how our world's complexity collides with the simplified rationalities of the digital age.
Hands Up!
The reunion of a group of former medical students results in a flood of bitter memories.
The Imperial Lullaby
The armies of Fascist Italy conquered Addis Ababa, capital of Abyssinia, in May 1936, thus culminating the African colonial adventure of the ruthless dictator Benito Mussolini, by then lord of Libya, Eritrea and Somalia; a bloody and tragic story told through the naive drawings of Pietro Dall'Igna, an Italian schoolboy born in 1925.
Lynch/Oz
Victor Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is one of David Lynch’s most enduring obsessions. This documentary goes over the rainbow to explore this Technicolor through-line in Lynch’s work.
Mission to Mongo
First, I wanted to make a kind of reflexively impoverished Busby Berkeley extravaganza. Second, I was interested in juxtaposing two cultural artifacts–which could be schematized as East/West, socialism/capitalism, propaganda/entertainment, as well as image/sound–and see how they reverberated. In other words, I wanted to make an essay out of things, as well as a communist musical. But the question arose–what was the ideology of such film play? Is MISSION TO MONGO aestheticized politics or political art? –J. H.
Cinematic Melancholy
A film essay in which multiple female characters, drawn from different films, slowly overlap and connect through a shared state of melancholy.
Ars
With ghostly eyes looking through the winter landscapes of the plains and villages of Ain, where the sanctified priest the Curé of Ars once lived, Jacques Demy tried to understand this fighter for communal spirituality and his daily torments of mysticism.
Clear Skies, Light Breeze
Clear Skies, Light Breeze, is a 2013 visual essay by Tati expert Stéphane Goudet about the debut of Monsieur Hulot