Black Box Investigations (2023)

The Last House on Dead End Street

After being released from prison, a young gangster with a chip on his shoulder decides to punish society by making snuff films.

Echo

A reframing of the classic tale of Narcissus, the director draws on snippets of conversation with a trusted friend to muse on gender and identity. Just as shimmers are difficult to grasp as knowable entities, so does the concept of a gendered self feel unknowable except through reflection. Is it Narcissus that Echo truly longs for, or simply the Knowing he possesses when gazing upon himself?

Revelation To The Disembodied

Fragments of a collective post-human dream construct a world that straddles hyper-technological, ecological, and mythological dimensions.

Death Hunt

Yukon Territory, Canada, November 1931. Albert Johnson, a trapper who lives alone in the mountains, buys a dog almost dead after a brutal dogfight, a good deed that will put him in trouble.

Generation

A brief journey through the human experience as seen by the eyes of an Artificial Intelligence.

Ghosts at the Window

Lights away from the glass.

Kalamazoo

A Montreal man imagines a mermaid in place of the writer whose picture appears on a novel.

Blow-Up

A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. But in the course of a single day he unknowingly captures a death on film.

Elevator to the Gallows

A self-assured businessman murders his employer, the husband of his mistress, which unintentionally provokes an ill-fated chain of events.

Bowling for Columbine

This is not a film about gun control. It is a film about the fearful heart and soul of the United States, and the 280 million Americans lucky enough to have the right to a constitutionally protected Uzi. From a look at the Columbine High School security camera tapes to the home of Oscar-winning NRA President Charlton Heston, from a young man who makes homemade napalm with The Anarchist's Cookbook to the murder of a six-year-old girl by another six-year-old. Bowling for Columbine is a journey through the US, through our past, hoping to discover why our pursuit of happiness is so riddled with violence.

Sweet Movie

The winner of the Miss World Virginity contest marries, escapes from her masochistic husband and ends up involved in a world of debauchery.

Inland Empire

An actress’s perception of reality becomes increasingly distorted as she finds herself falling for her co-star in a remake of an unfinished Polish production that was supposedly cursed.

Away from Her

Fiona and Grant have been married for nearly 50 years. They have to face the fact that Fiona’s absent-mindedness is a symptom of Alzheimer’s disease. She must go to a specialized nursing home, where she slowly forgets Grant and turns her affection to Aubrey, another patient in the home.

Mothlight

Seemingly at random, the wings and other bits of moths and insects move rapidly across the screen. Most are brown or sepia; up close, we can see patterns within wings, similar to the veins in a leaf. Sometimes the images look like paper cutouts, like Matisse. Green objects occasionally appear. Most wings are translucent. The technique makes them appear to be stuck directly to the film.

Eye Myth

After the title, a white screen gives way to a series of frames suggestive of abstract art, usually with one or two colors dominating and rapid change in the images. Two figures emerge from this jungle of color: the first, a shirtless man, appears twice, coming into focus, then disappearing behind the bursts and patterns of color, then reappearing; the second figure appears later, in the right foreground. This figure suggests someone older, someone of substance. The myth? Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

The Sounds of 7am

This short film follows an intoxicated character's journey through the mystery, beauty and eeriness of his environment.

February 14, 1992

With some amount of irony, filmmaker Joe Biglin strings together 7 shorts about himself and things that trigger his OCD.

the flowers and sorrow he gave me

Inspired by moments of the Brazilian writer Gabriel Yared’s life and mixing storytelling and poetic declamations by the author himself, the film presents us the love overgrowing between two young man, Alex and Luís, their comfortable couple routine, and explores which limits that love can support when, like dry flowers, it faces the hard and cold earth of deceptions and expectation breaches, with the city of Macapá, in ther Northern Brazilian State of Amapá, as background.

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets

Conditions have been better for the nameless protagonist: his grandmother is a shoplifter and his war criminal father and sister have an unhealthy, intimate relationship with the family rabbit.

The Morning Schedule

Two college buddies try to understand a young woman's suicide through her Super-8 films and clips from their summer trips together.

Pig-Chicken Suicide

Pig Chicken Suicide is a veritable assault on the senses, mixing violent images of animal slaughter, racial strife, and surrealism to tell the story of two Koreans living in Japan whose love is destroyed due to overwhelming racial discrimination. In explicit abattoir photos and much symbolism, Matsui tells about the struggles of ethnic Koreans in Japan. A butcher's love affair and his relationship with the animals he kills frame the story.

From the Notebook of...

"From the Notebook of..." was shot in Florence and takes as its point of departure Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and Paul Valéry's essay on da Vinci's process. These two elements suggest an implicit comparison between the treatment of space in Renaissance art and the moving image. The film marks a critical development in the artist's work in that he repeatedly employs a series of rapid pans and upward tilts along the city's buildings or facades, often integrating glimpses of his own face. As Beavers notes in his writing on the film, the camera movements are tied to the filmmakers' presence and suggests his investigative gaze.

The Flaming Forest

Based on a James Oliver Curwood yarn, the outsized Northwest Mountie adventure The Flaming Forest stars Antonio Moreno as RCMP sergeant David Carrigan.

New York Portrait

Peter Hutton's New York trilogy. An act of urban archaeology, a chronicle of indelible impressions of the city.

Natsu ni umareru

A filmmaker plays with diary-docu and fiction as his camera joins his ventures into a phone dating club. Bored to death, hormones running, and desperately wanting to talk to someone his own age (preferably a girl), he walks into a local phone dating club. Can he hook up with someone? Borrowing the form of a diary-movie, the director unfurls an unpredictable and imaginative look into his own persona. 8mm experimental film by Murakami Kenji, the film that made his name.

The Giverny Document (Single Channel)

Filmed on location in Harlem and in Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, this multi-textured cinematic poem meditates on the bodily integrity and creative virtuosity of black women.