Äskhult - The Eternal Place (2022)

The Green Fog

A tribute to a fascinating film shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, and to the city of San Francisco, California, where the magic was created; but also a challenge: how to pay homage to a masterpiece without using its footage; how to do it simply by gathering images from various sources, all of them haunted by the curse of a mysterious green fog that seems to cause irrepressible vertigo…

Terra incognita

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The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography

Every image in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography comes from gay erotic videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism. The video provides a glimpse of young men responding to the pressures of an unfamiliar world, one in which money, power and sex are now connected.

Todo Todo Teros

Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.

The Water Map

The Water Map is an essayistic journey through the ethnography and landscapes of the Region of Murcia. These places are in the process of disappearing due to the increasing and abundant agricultural exploitation. Water has marked the territory and the culture of the area, and with its disappearance, the memories of four characters fade away.

The Future Tense

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.

Um Documentário Brasileiro

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Long Live Hunting!

This documentary essay introduces a peculiar trio of men united by their passion for hunting. Each of them conceives of hunting in his own way, luring the viewer to an exotic safari, to an antlered trophy collection or to a sitting in the woods.

The March on Rome

The fascinating story of the rise to power of dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) in Italy in 1922 and how fascism marked the fate of the entire world in the dark years to come.

Parallel Lives

Born June 8, 1964, Frank Matter films four "twins", born the same day as him, but in other latitudes. Interweaving their life stories with rich archival material, the filmmaker links these Parallel Lives with elements from his own biography, to compose a fascinating fresco where intimate trajectories are part of the advent of the global village.

Everyday Maneuver

Everyday Maneuver is a video that presents the viewer with an unrealistic scenery. Shot from a drone, it shows a city at daytime, but there isn't a single human being in it. What seems disconnected from everyday life, and as artificial as a landscape created with computer graphics, is in fact a recording that was made during one of the annual "Wanan Air Raid Drills" that have been implemented in Taiwan since 1978.

Visions of Europe

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

In the Intense Now

A personal essay which analyses and compares images of the political upheavals of the 1960s. From the military coup in Brazil to China's Cultural Revolution, from the student uprisings in Paris to the end of the Prague Spring.

EMPATHY (a digital love letter)

EMPATHY (a digital love letter) is a short essay documentary, a heartbreaking comedy about a break-up, an attempt to concretize emotion and evoke empathy from a writer’s approach. After getting her heart crushed in a relationship, a woman writes a letter to the man she loves for a simple reason—to evoke his empathy towards her. Knowing the premise of human emotions, the woman starts her letter with her own life stories, follows with a blunt confession of affection, and ends with a cursing when she can’t handle the emotions anymore.

Dust of America

A dream walk through the United States of America; a meditation on the thoughts and ideals of its inhabitants, as they are exposed in their silent but eloquent home movies.

Arcadia

A provocative and poetic exploration of how the British people have seen their own land through more than a century of cinema. A hallucinated journey of immense beauty and brutality. A kaleidoscopic essay on how magic and madness have linked human beings to nature since the beginning of time.

Vowellet - An Essay by Sarah Vowell

This Pixar documentary short follows Sarah Vowell, who plays herself as the title character, on why she is a superhero in her own way. (This short piece is included on the 2-Disc DVD for "The Incredibles", which was released in 2005.

D is for Division

1940. On the border between Latvia and the USSR, a woman is killed in front of her house as she tried to protect her son from the liberating attack of the Soviets. Almost 80 years later, the archive photo bearing witness to this news item and representing a collateral victim of the European Union’s founding conflict forms the starting point for a journey undertaken by Davis Sīmanis. He navigates from one side to the other of this border, which today represents another separation, one that is geographical but also cultural: between Europe and Russia.

Visit, or Memories and Confessions

A long-hidden, personal doc about leaving a beloved house by the late, revered Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.

The So-Called Caryatids

Commissioned by French television, this is a short documentary on the neo-classical statues found throughout Paris, predominantly on the walls of buildings, holding up windows, roofs etc.

On Memory

Musing on the nature of memory, Don Hertzfeldt recounts stories about a kiss from The King, a floating child in a backyard and a giant foot.

And the Dogs Were Silent

For 'Et les chiens se taisaient' Maldoror adapted a piece of theatre by the poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), about a rebel who becomes profoundly aware of his otherness when condemned to death. His existential dialogue with his mother reverberates around the African sculptures on display at the Musée de l'Homme, a Parisian museum full of colonial plunder whose director was the Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris.

L'affaire Valérie

A film-maker travels through mountain villages and along the shores of Alpine lakes to investigate the disappearance of Valérie 20 years earlier. She allegedly murdered a Canadian tourist before disappearing without a trace. At least that is how the narrator, who was passing through the region at the time, remembers the story. Over the course of the interviews, the elusive Valérie seems to disappear a second time, literally engulfed by the Alpine landscape, magnificently captured on film by François Caillat. A haunting, imposing landscape, where chasms and precipices become metaphors, characters in a work of fiction that the camera turns into a documentary. A film in the form of an essay in which the director takes his work on memory to its highest degree of abstraction.

Non-Stop

Province of Ciudad Real, Spain, December 29, 1990. During the annual march to the Herrera de la Mancha prison, held in support of the members of the terrorist gang ETA imprisoned there, the Basque rock band Negu Gorriak holds a concert, which is recorded, edited on video and turned into a tool of vindication. Decades later, a film crew tries to elaborate a personal essay around this event and its meaning.

Fear Itself

A girl haunted by traumatic events takes us on a mesmerising journey through 100 years of horror cinema to explore how filmmakers scare us – and why we let them.

Night and Fog in Zona

Korean film critic Jeong Sung-il’s camera explores the work of Wang Bing, a Chinese director who won international fame with his film Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks. Jeong’s attempt to pry into Wang’s filmmaking secrets leads to the question: “What is film?”

Heimat Is a Space in Time

Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a country, of a century.

RES CREATA - Humans and other animals

Technological advances and cultural development have disrupted the balance between humankind and other animals. Instead of looking at similarities, we focus on differences. Coexistence has been replaced by dominance. We have forgotten that we live in a house that does not belong only to us. However, the ties between humans and other inhabitants of the animal kingdom have not been irreversibly broken. In his visual essay, which is both intimate and philosophical, Alessandro Cattaneo focuses specifically on those things that connect us. The statements of thinkers and idyllic shots of interspecies interactions indicate that if we change the way in which we think about animals, it will be beneficial for the entire ecosystem.

Vampir Cuadecuc

An atmospheric essay, which is an alternative version of Count Dracula, a film directed by Jess Franco in 1970; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality.