Chantal Akerman: Her First Look Behind the Camera (2023)

Skagit

Four friends leave Seattle for a weekend in a remote, rain-soaked corner of Washington State's rustic Skagit Valley. The foreboding October landscape begins to warp their minds, plunging each of them into alternate realities where they must grapple with personal demons, sexual tensions, and a sinister natural world as they claw their way back to sanity.

Magic Conch Shell

Estranged lovers reconnect through the power of the Magic Conch Shell.

Flower of Flesh, Celestial Body

Plot unavailable

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.

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.

Prelúdio

Plot unavailable

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.

Subsurface

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

Cheers,

A bartender takes on the physical form of her imagined alter egos.

De Novo, Perdição

Plot unavailable

Bosco

Three filmmakers bring back images of the forest. They are reworked and destructured with the means of the photochemical laboratory. BOSCO is a visual breakthrough punctuated by a contrasted and hypnotic black and white.

Static

A man dreams about his wife while stuck in an unknown place.

Guaret

Pedro is Mallorcan, born to a mother from Burgos and a father from Mallorca. Due to his distant relationship with his father, Pedro doesn't fully master Mallorcan as a language. He turns to the works of Damià Huguet to remember his father, as only his poems can fill the void left by his death. The poet's words transport Pedro to his childhood and his roots, even though many of the words are unknown to him, despite them belonging to his language. This becomes the driving force behind the protagonist's search for his own identity, his origins, what it means to be a man, father-son relationships, collective identity, and "mallorquinness". Pedro constantly questions the emotions stirred by Huguet's poetry, and, most importantly, who he is and where he belongs.

The Mermaid

A trip that the author makes to a distant beach trying to find the place where his grandfather made a painting years ago.

(NULL)

An unknown girl breaks out of her daily grind by undergoing an intense audio-visual trip.

3STIGIA

Plot unavailable

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.

The Forgotten

An exploration of memory after death.

Denial

Erin. He thinks he's in 4th period math. Oh he's wrong

February 14, 1992

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

Heartstorm

A young woman goes on a cathartic journey through memory and imagination inspired by the performers at an open mic.

Wild House

Laura, 16, is held hostage by her father who believes she is possessed because she is pregnant.

Triumph and Ruins

History as immersion and dispersion in the fragments of the past, a visionary journey accompanied by the voice of Patty Pravo. Presented at the Taormina Festival '97.