Weeds and Wildflowers (2023)

Elements of Nothing

For this film, Takashi Makino allowed himself to be inspired by the earth. In a never-ending stream of images, we recognize elements from the forest that he then reduces to an abstraction. The film came about as a classical composition in which the picture and the musical contribution of Jim O’Rourke link up seamlessly and lead the mood in turn. A sense of freedom is what predominates.

Touch Air

An homage to the influential practice and philosophy of artist Nasreen Mohamedi. The film incorporates Mohamedi’s personal notes and her unique singular vision, drawing upon the aesthetics of the bare line, and its metaphysical journey eliminating physical borders/barriers.

A Dying Tree

As the day ends for a worn-out office worker, he encounters the mysterious gaze of a chimpanzee, sparking a silent exchange that prompts him to make an irreversible decision.

Blinded

editing experiments with backdoor blinds, more dancing

Money, Fascism, and Some Sort of Acid

A collection of five short films tackling the military industrial complex, the rise of fascism, political polarization and various issues in modern society.

Go Forget Me

Robert Estragon has worked his way to the top of the food chain as a doctor in the city, but it has driven him to self-imposed delusion. Here, we listen as he sits and projects himself onto the mad world he observes. It all comes to a head when Willie Krapp, a young colleague, invades this world, hoping to teach Robert that it was wrong to let his own daughter die in the operating room.

Looking Back Before You Leap

A collection of memories from a tumultuous time at University.

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.

Rift

A girl disappears without a trace while playing hide and seek with her friend. The friend is asked to explain how it happened, but the adults around him find it hard to believe his story. With visual originality, the limits of existence are allowed to be stretched in a film that depicts the incomprehensible from a child’s perspective.

Algorithms of Beauty

In 1772, Englishwoman Mary Delany wrote to her niece: “I have found a new way of imitating flowers.” The imitation in question was the art form called decoupage, based on cut-outs and reshuffling of pictures. The charm and botanical precision of these works attracts attention of even today’s artists, among others by an anonymous programmer who is trying to invent a way of capturing the flowers’ vivacity in pictures. With this aim in mind, she has created an algorithm, which would combine science and beauty, similarly to Delaney’s efforts, whose illustrations it is meant to animate.

Hunting Confessions

"This project consists a visual fluidity of construction, harmony and thoughts taking colors and length from this body of autonomy. Different images between figuration and abstraction are created by meaning and phenomenon letting the decoupage revealing a piece of a strange underworld. I built it like a window opened to the fresh air of improvisation by familiar landscapes, those exact moments articulating a connection between light and movement."

Pico Sacro [The Holy Mountain]

In a leafy forest, a Galician sovereign who longs to attain wisdom meets a sorcerer, who tells him: “Go back to your country and study the Earth and the Stars in the sky; anywhere in the world reflects an image of it. You will ride on this arrow, which you must keep for a hundred years and a day. After this time, stick it in the widest valley of all those you possess, with the tip facing the sky. Then the Moon will come and, just as it exerts its action on the waters of the sea, it will act on the arrow, turning it into a holy mountain." - Legend about the Pico Sacro Inspired by Hokusai's views of Mount Fuji and Cézanne's paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, "Pico Sacro [The Holy Mountain]" aims to reveal the mystery and the magic that underlie reality.

She Is Here

In the dining room of the abandoned house a white, faded entity feeds on her pieces. Memories keep her here and time transforms her into something new.

Green Pink Caviar

Models are seen licking brightly colored candy on a sheet of glass. The video illustrates the moment where clarity becomes abstraction and beauty commingles with the grotesque.

Distant Nixa

The film choreographically covers the distance between two women and their mirroring selves, under Laurie Spiegel's soundscape and with the ambiance of VHS video. Their bodies, sometimes two and others four, are always connected with a rope, influenced by white noise retro interference, sound scratches and pauses. They approach each other until they connect and then finally completely disappear, nullifying the distance between them. The reverse movement of these similar bodies-idols aims to compose a dance of the two and the one, our close and more distant self and to reach to the void in between them.

The Garden Cadences

Jone is ready to fly. She finds herself at the beginning of something new, but before she moves on, there needs to be a closure. Jone is one of Mollies, the queer-feminist collective that had been living for a decade at a trailer park next to Ostkreuz, Berlin.

Reflection

As she keeps watching old home movies isolated in her hotel room, the screen becomes a mirror from which she tries to see herself. Levels of subjectivity, narrative, and reality entwine into a surrealist fever dream of scopophilic cinéma pur. The final layer of meaning is all of us watching the film on the screen-mirror in the theatre.

Shearing Animation

An abstract animated film inspired by the work of jazz musician Chico Hamilton.

EGGspression

Egglantine loves salt on her eggs. Eggbert prefers pepper. Who blinks first in this playful Easter ritual?

Resonances

"Resonances" is an abstract journey that invites diverse interpretations. For some, it’s the tale of an ant that delved too deep, for others, a puppet seeking freedom. The narrative evolves with the viewer, offering no single path but rather a multitude of meanings. Free and autonomous, "Resonances" challenges you to explore with your mind and question with your soul. Only through personal reflection will the answers reveal themselves, making the experience uniquely yours.

The Artist and His Canvas

An experimental film revolving around how an artist perceives a man and a woman.

Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait

Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material and unpublished notebooks, the film weaves a complex and personal portrait of Margaret’s life, from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to the potential Margaret envisaged for film as a poetic medium.

Rosewater

A solitary man struggles to cultivate beauty in a desolate urban world. Lonely and dislocated, he drifts in and out of a dream state envisioning the promise of regeneration. ROSEWATER tells a story of hope sustained through perseverance, ritual and, ultimately, revelation.

Dreaming Dogs

A pack of strays – seven dogs and one woman live in the shadows of Moscow. Hidden from the totalitarian authorities, two species share their existence on the verge of disappearance. They are straying in constant restlessness through a savage landscape where the city is cracking. Shot from the animal’s point of view, patterns of mutual dependence and taming begin to blur.

Jeff

A phone sex operator loses her grip on reality, caught in a hypnotic relationship with a caller making disturbing confessions.

The Pleasure in Pain

A short film that follows key figures of the London kink scene on an exploration into BDSM and the notorious fetish event Klub Verboten. The film touches upon themes of psychology, trauma, LGBTQ+ rights and black representation.

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?

Death Is The Bridge

An experimental meditation on the pervasive nature of transience.

Trials and Initiation

Here is an actor, one who has been asked to dwell in the perilous gap between text and image. In the voids where traces of the past have been erased by an unknown error, she begins to assemble her own script.

I’d like that corner seat over there

An omnibus film based on Kim Oki's album Hip Hop Retreat. Twenty characters share the same table at different times, in different emotional states, each with their own story. Shot in one day, edited in one day.

Flaming Creatures

Filmmaker and artist Jack Smith described his own film as a “comedy set in a haunted movie studio.” Flaming Creatures begins humorously enough with several men and women, mostly of indeterminate gender, vamping it up in front of the camera and participating in a mock advertisement for an indelible, heart-shaped brand of lipstick. However, things take a dark, nightmarish turn when a transvestite chases, catches and begins molesting a woman. Soon, all of the titular “creatures” participate in a (mostly clothed) orgy that causes a massive earthquake. After the creatures are killed in the resulting chaos, a vampire dressed like an old Hollywood starlet rises from her coffin to resurrect the dead. All ends happily enough when the now undead creatures dance with each other, even though another orgy and earthquake loom over the end title card.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

In Manhattan's Central Park, a film crew directed by William Greaves is shooting a screen test with various pairs of actors. It's a confrontation between a couple: he demands to know what's wrong, she challenges his sexual orientation. Cameras shoot the exchange, and another camera records Greaves and his crew. Sometimes we watch the crew discussing this scene, its language, and the process of making a movie. Is there such a thing as natural language? Are all things related to sex? The camera records distractions - a woman rides horseback past them; a garrulous homeless vet who sleeps in the park chats them up. What's the nature of making a movie?

Twin City Twist

A silent dance documenting a brief visit to Minneapolis in the fall of 2022. A reflection on the sleeping city's tumultuous recent history through a recollected interaction and a plea for continued disturbance. Twin City Twist was shot on Kodak Tri-X reversal super 8 film with kaleidoscopic lenses. The film was scanned and edited digitally.

Animot

The experimental documentary filmed at rescue centres in Prague and Vlašim refuses the anthropocentric perspective and views the world through the eyes of wounded animals. The term Animot was taken over from Jacque Derrida. While the French philosopher and deconstructivist uses the term to refer to everything animalistic and non-human, the film, on the other hand, uses intimate details to point out the proximity between human beings and animals. They are connected by their vulnerability, helplessness and mortality.

Paint Showers

Cosmos of paint unleash a storm of color.

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.

INFRASTRATA

Amongst the contemplative static shots of decaying architecture weaves an abstract narrative unveiling the life-cycle of a higher perception, too large to perceive. Shot at various sites across south-east England, INFRASTRATA is a study on the concept of super-organisms, and the relationship between structure and nature.

Red Flower

Military legacy drives twin brothers in 2047 India. Their paths divide when one receives a classified assignment, while rejection leads his brother to join opposing forces