Tim's Vermeer
Tim Jenison, a Texas based inventor, attempts to solve one of the greatest mysteries in all art: How did Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer manage to paint so photo-realistically 150 years before the invention of photography? Spanning a decade, Jenison's adventure takes him to Holland, on a pilgrimage to the North coast of Yorkshire to meet artista David Hockney, and eventually even to Buckingham Palace. The epic research project Jenison embarques on is as extraordinary as what he discovers.
The Most Beautiful
Young women at a precision optics factory in wartime Japan push to exceed production quotas, enduring illness, injury, and personal hardship to “serve the country.” Led by Tsuru Watanabe, they fight fatigue and setbacks to keep their line moving—even when duty collides with grief.
Analogue Natives
This experimental documentary circulates around interviews with four veterans who worked all their lives in analogue (=celluloid) film laboratories and animation studios in Mumbai, and who all lost their businesses and jobs around 2012–14, when the Hindi film industry went through a drastic shift to digital production. They reflect on the loss of their craftsmanship, but also on the philosophies of their handmade film practice versus readymade digital solutions. While the film drifts into various related and unrelated scenarios, shot on the streets of Mumbai, we learn about the art of living and working under precarious conditions in India and survival strategies in one of the most crowded and commercial cities in the world. Finally everything results in a futile collage of nostalgia and memories, mashed up with the absurd aesthetics of AI slop. An expanded multi-genre documentary within the constraints of the so-called Masala Formula, popularly known from Indian cinema.
Reason for Seeing: Correspondence I
When she realizes that her grandmother, the woman who raised her, is losing her sight, the director decides to explore the bond that unites them through the episodes of non-vision that these three generations share, the memories of the past, the misunderstandings and the new memories they seek to have in common.
La Ermita del Socorro
Take Five
Early experimental film from Zbigniew Rybczynski that broke new ground in the use of pixelation, optical printing, animation and other compositional film devices. Beautiful jazz score and color usage.
Heavy-Light
An abstract animated film in which colored, richly textured light moves in a black, three-dimensional space. The pictures and the electronic score are unified in a strict structure made of three main sections which progressively develop three subsections. The film may look like it was made using computers or video to the unaware, but it is purely the result of animation and much optical printing. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with iotaCenter and National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007.