Chantal Akerman: Her First Look Behind the Camera (1967)

154

The prototype [TEST TYPE • 154] is a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence, which is capable of autonomously acquiring notions from its surroundings and - eventually - developing autonomy of thought. Given the nearly human nature of its learning capabilities, the laboratory that programmed it hires a kindergarten teacher, asking him to instruct the machine as if it were a newborn child. The learning process - which spans 7 days - becomes increasingly insidious in the long run, posing a peculiar yet crucial problem: can there be a form of autonomous thinking that excludes emotions?

Tyngsboro

During his visit to a graveyard, a young man is suddenly projected into a dream-like realm. Empty and removed from time, the familiar landscape forces him to confront certain pains when blood suddenly effuses from his hands.

FLES

A young man sits at a local restaurant with his friend: but he isn't paying attention to her as she speaks. This film visualizes his chaotic state of mind and how he uses mindfulness practice to tune back into the conversation. Mindfulness is being able to sit with and observe your thoughts. Being mindful improves focus and mental health. FLES is SELF spelt backwards.

Black Box Investigations

Cracking open the human-camera body.

FASCISM(s): A Film in Six Parts

Six sequences about Fascism and its segments throughout history.

Onorios

Two individuals get stuck in a reoccurring loop of dreams, strung together by the presence of a rotary phone, they must scramble for their survival to move through each layer of the dreamscape.

DHET!

The night takes a strange turn in Dhaka as a ride-sharing motorcyclist tries to reach his next passenger in time.

Anhell69

A funeral car cruises the streets of Medellín, while a young director tells the story of his past in this violent and conservative city. He remembers the pre-production of his first film, a Class-B movie with ghosts. The young queer scene of Medellín is casted for the film, but the main protagonist dies of a heroin overdose at the age of 21, just like many friends of the director. Anhell69 explores the dreams, doubts and fears of an annihilated generation, and the struggle to carry on making cinema.

Processing...

A man attempts to operate a mysterious device, but with each attempt comes a new set of problems.

Proyecciones del Limbo

Plot unavailable

Memoirs of a Strangler of Blondes

First film by Julio Bressane shot in exile, "Memoirs" is a film about a man who repeatedly kills the same type of woman in same places, the same way. Filmed on the streets of London.

By Winds and Tides

Exploring the conscious, the unconscious and the self, By Winds and Tides takes a deep experimental dive into the birth of an idea—how it takes shape, how it is released. An allegorical quest, the film combines images and words into a singular sigh.

House

Hoping to find a sense of connection to her late mother, Gorgeous takes a trip with her friends to visit her aunt's ancestral house in the countryside. The girls soon discover that there is more to the old house than meets the eye.

THE GREY COLLAR

The owner of a dangerous music venue discusses and showcases his work in a news report from a culturally dystopian future.

Red Autumn

A Experimental Docu-Drama about the Red Army Faction's formation, and events leading up to their imprisonment and death, from 1970 to 1977.

Heavy is the Head

Heavy is the Head is a short experimental film that navigates the journey of a Black boy coming of age in America. The story is an exploration of identity and the expectations that weigh on a boy learning to navigate a world that often sees him before he truly sees himself.

Acoustic Ocean

Acoustic Ocean is an artistic exploration of the sonic ecology of marine life in the North Atlantic. Located on the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway, the video centers on the performance of a marine-biologist diver who is using a life-size model of a submersible equipped with all sorts of hydrophones and recording devices. In this science-fictional quest, her task is to sense the submarine space for acoustic and bioluminescent forms of expression.

Preface to a History

A couple, Vlad and Sophy, navigate their relationship as well as their own struggles with mental health in the context of a highly connected, politically uncertain modern world while on a trip to a remote Canadian island in this avant-garde feature film. PREFACE TO A HISTORY, created with a tiny crew of four people, represents an experiment in using minimalist tools to create an overwhelming aesthetic experience in service of a simple, but specifically contemporary, story about two people attempting to navigate a fraying relationship amid all the anxieties and external pressures of modern adulthood in a technologically-interconnected and politically unstable era.

Subsurface

Trapped and alone, a young man must confront the pain he's ignored when he finds himself face-to-face with consequence.

No Norte da Saudade

Kalú Kariú, a trans artist and poet from northern Brazil, reflects on how “saudade”, an untranslatable feeling of profound nostalgic longing, becomes a powerful source of creation. After eight years away from his roots, Kalú invites us into a space where memory, distance and identity intertwine, and art is born from absence.

Scenic Jogging

Woman chasing projected images of typical screensavers such as idyllic meadows and mountainscapes. These images are embellished by design programs to be more attractive to appeal to our primal desire to be outside rather than in front of a computer or in ugly urban landscapes. Even if she were to ever catch up her object of desire, she will find it never existed in the first place, and she has been chasing the unattainable.

A Paw Over Dark

A washed up actor performs night after night in a grimy theater to a nearly empty audience. However, everything changes when a clueless dog jumps on stage.

Demi-Goddesses

The second essay about still dominant dark aspects of our modern society. It is conceived as a surreal anti-patriarchal thought experiment and raises important questions about gender, power, and social change, prompting us to reflect on how historical patterns of discrimination and oppression might be either repeated or overcome in a reversed gendered world. It challenges the viewer to confront their own assumptions and biases, and to consider the possibilities of a more equitable society.

Trapallada (Saudade)

Plot unavailable

THÁI BẢO HUỲNH KHANG

A trans Vietnamese woman's deadname being repeated over and over again.

It's a Mind Game

In a dimly lit room, two boys engage in an intense chess match. As tension rises and strategies unfold, the game becomes a battleground of wits and wills, leading to an unexpected climax that goes beyond the boundaries of the board.

BEDTIME STORY

Plot unavailable

Alternate Earth

Plot unavailable

Introspection

Stephen, a blackbird, comes upon an abandoned mirror in a garden. Upon gazing his reflection for the very first time, Stephen begins to search within. Should Stephen return to his flock, or set out on an adventure to try and find his own way in life?

A Gaping Wound, A Grinning Mouth

A surreal horror film following an obsessive actress who finds herself trapped within a cursed theatrical production where she is forced to choose between her career and her life.

SIN PIEDAD

Under the relentless sun, a killer stalks through the mountains, where the innocence of a young couple becomes prey. With no shadows to hide their fate, the hunt is a macabre game in broad daylight, where fear is not hidden in the darkness, but burns with the rawness of the unperturbed noon.

bird5.mp4

The nature of bird and man.

Self Portraits or: How to talk endearingly to possible victims

Quinn is a grade school teacher who is exploited by a group of memoryless individuals who reeducate his long-term partner Amy.

Dilution

Dilution is an experimental short film that explores the transit between resistance and (di)ssolution, between holding and releasing and a path towards obsessive repetition. They are layers, exposed pores, matter that oscillates between remaining or disappearing. The sound is not a background, but a puncture: friction, tearing, water that drags what still persists. A sensorial testimony of what refuses to vanish completely.

STRATA INCOGNITA

STRATA INCOGNITA, is a trans-scalar and trans-temporal journey across the geographies that articulate soil as an agro-industrial infrastructure, but also as an ecosystem and a somatic archive of crimes, memories and myths.

Is It A Plaisir

'Is it a plaisir' is an experimental short film that explores femininity and the body as a sharp territory, crossed by the tension between desire and imposition. Through symbolic, sound and visual saturation, the film acts from pleasure (plaisir), revealing a liberation that emerges in the midst of excess, where intensity and lightness, dark and light, intertwine, collide and converge.

Copy/Paste

A man contemplates whether or not it is possible to do something unique.

The Tuba Thieves

A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.

Caterpillar

A half-hour experimental film that shows Fukui moving towards cyberpunk imagery in a manner similar to Tsukamoto, featuring industrial locations, a malfunctioning cyborg/android and a hulking metallic ‘caterpillar’ that stalks characters.