Your Brain
How does your brain create your reality? Are you in control, or is your brain controlling you? Discover the surprising answers based on the latest research in this eye-opening journey into the human brain with neuroscientist Heather Berlin. Your brain – for centuries a black box – is slowly giving up its secrets to modern neuroscience, shedding light on big questions that go to the very heart of who you are.
ULLA
A slice-of-life documentary following Ulla, a blind woman adjusting to life after eye removal surgery. With the help of her guide dog, Laina, she navigates Helsinki while pursuing a prosthetic eye and a deeper understanding of photography.
Interlinked
Haunted by the scars of childhood bullying, JJ is a young man trying to outrun the anger and isolation that have followed him into adulthood. Pushing his body to its limits and navigating the pressures of city life, he begins to find unexpected peace in Layla a connection that offers warmth, intimacy, and the possibility of healing. But as memories begin to blur with the present, the fragile stability JJ has built starts to fracture. Moments repeat, emotions spiral, and the line between past and reality grows increasingly uncertain. Through a fragmented journey of rage, vulnerability, and longing, JJ is forced to confront the parts of himself he has spent years trying to bury. As the story unfolds, the truth behind JJ’s experience slowly emerges revealing a devastating portrait of trauma, perception, and the fragile ways the mind protects itself when pain goes unheard.
Other Worlds
The secrets about unlocking the mysteries of consciousness by plant-drugs. The related chances and risks involved in this shamanism. While filming Blueberry, the Secret Experience, Jan Kounen met the Shipibo healers of the Peruvian Amazon and discovered their sacred plant: Ayahuasca, the spirit vine. Deeply affected by this experience, he decided to return to Peru to shoot a documentary on the plant and the medicinal rites of the shamans. To this end, he filmed the natives but also met neurologists, philosophers, artists, and chemists working on this subject. He notably interviewed Jean Giraud, the illustrator of Blueberry, and Kary Mullis, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. More than a traditional documentary, the film is an invitation to travel, a half-open door to another world or another perception of reality. The secrets about unlocking the mysteries of consciousness by plant-drugs. The related chances and risks involved in this shamanism.
Exhibiting Avery
Dismissed by those around her, a young woman begins performing as a living statue, finding strange power in stillness, until she reclaims the spotlight on her own terms.
Death Perception
A group of film students are methodically killed off by a mysterious slasher, but as the film plays out through their individual perspectives, we learn more about the darkly comedic truth behind the murders.
Seeing Through the Darkness
The film follows five people who lost their sight in armed conflicts, gathering fragments of their present-day lives. Through an enveloping sound composition, veiled archival material, footage shot by the protagonists themselves, and a sensitive visual approach, the film explores memory, perception, and our relationship to the visible. Steering away from spectacle, it invites us to hear what often goes unheard, and to feel differently. In an age saturated with images, this documentary offers a sensory experience where listening becomes a gesture of resistance and human reconnection.
Aquarium
Architecture of Infinity
How can structures, which take up defined, rigid portions of space, make us feel transcendence? How can chapels turn into places of introspection? How can walls grant boundless freedom? Driven by intense childhood impressions, director Christoph Schaub visits extraordinary churches, both ancient and futuristic, and discovers works of art that take him up to the skies and all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. With the help of architects Peter Zumthor, Peter Märkli, and Álvaro Siza Vieira, artists James Turrell and Cristina Iglesias, and drummer Sergé “Jojo” Mayer, he tries to make sense of the world and decipher our spiritual experiences using the seemingly abstract concepts of light, time, rhythm, sound, and shape. The superb cinematography turns this contemplative search into a multi-sensory experience.
Vert 910
Was ist Zeit? - Das ewige Rätsel
From prehistoric times to our technologically accelerated present, this exciting and entertaining journey through time explores the thousands of ways in which mankind has perceived, measured and passed time over the course of its history.
Melbhattan
Melbhattan. Melbhattan is part homage, part pastiche of the opening sequence of Woody Allen's seminal 1979 film Manhattan. Melbhattan features more than sixty black and white tableaux of Melbourne each composed to mimic images in Allen's film.
Conversation with Myself
Alan Watts talks about our perception of the world, and how we derive metaphysics from it. Watts recorded this video in 1971 as a pilot for a public television series in the United States.
The Lens
A young cameraman's plan to sabotage his boss leads him to question his own perception, and through this, he learns to see the world through a wider and clearer lens.
Krasny
A person with inverted spectrum colour blindness would see the whole spectrum of colours in exact reverse: all the colour contrasts and relationships would remain the same, and the condition would be in principle undetectable, unlike "normal' colour blindness. Various extreme philosophical conclusions have been drawn from this, such as the ideas that each of us must live in our own private sensory world, and we can never express the qualities of this sensory world to another person..
Light Body Corpuscles
First we see indefinable sparks dancing frantically before our eyes. Then, gradually, these abstract sparks reveal themselves to be bits of skin moving through rays of light. Eventually, the shape of a human body emerges. Its feet, stuck to the ground, are not visible. We only see a torso of indeterminate gender, its arms and head moving frantically, repeating the same single pattern, again and again, until...
Kill The Shah
A man is trapped in the same moment, reliving his death again and again. Only at the end does he realize who is really in control.
HANDGUN
A 'cowboy' is wandering the way cowboys do, until a bystander stops him and critiques his authenticity.
Here are some Images
“Here are some Images” is an short film exploring the interplay between internal and external images, using hand-processed 16mm footage and musings on perception and memory.
When I Close My Eyes I See Everything
A Sunday walk in a forest turns into a poetic journey on perception.