Looking Back Before You Leap (2023)

Metropia

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Peace and Silence

Leevi Pienihäkkinen’s tight experimental short documentary Peace and Silence dives into the Helsinki night, exploring the darkened city with fresh eyes. The familiar spots of the city centre flash in the images, but something is different. The everyday becomes weird, details vanish, lights shine taking over everything around them. Humans remain anonymous and faceless, silhouettes against the backdrop of the dark city.

¿Por qué la gallina cruzó el camino?

A hen questions the meaning of her life on a farm.

Notes on Vanishing

Moving image artist Lily Alexandre forces herself to ask an unspeakable question: should trans people make ourselves disappear?

Alternate Earth

A scientific expedition travels to an alternative Earth in hope of finding a new home for humanity, which has destroyed its own planet. But is it even possible to escape old patterns?

Late Anthropocene

Hand processed expired Kodak 7291, Camera: Beaulieu R16, Lens: Angenieux 12-120mm with +3 Diopter, Polarising filter for the clouds. Hand processed in C-41 chem using a Lomo UPB-1A tank. Still haven't mastered removal of the rem-jet anti-halation layer (thats all the white 'static' on the film). The film expired about 40 years ago.

Tree

Structural study of a tree. Light, water and air coax it out of the soil in a manner foregrounding time’s relativity to different forms of life on Earth. Made the day my brother got his fork-lift license.

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.

The Balcony Movie

Composed from the conversations that the director holds with people passing by in the street under his Warsaw apartment, each story in 'The Balcony Movie' is unique and deals with the way we try to cope with life as individuals. All together, they create a self-portrait of contemporary human life, and the passers-by present a composite picture of today's world.

At the End of Nothing at All

Every morning, Marcel confides in his tape recorder. It is from his reflections on life that this film takes us into the wake of his story.

The Great Learning

At Tsinghua University's campus, four people are standing at the intersection of their lives. Among them, there are those who just passed the college entrance examination, the first-generation of post-00 college students who entered their favorite universities with twists and turns , some are leaving their ivory towers, PhD graduates facing difficult choices and some have returned from the United States to enter Tsinghua University. Young teachers are full of "viewing the sky" ideal but face challenges, there are old academicians who still stand behind lectern after their retirement. The film tells the life ideals of the four Tsinghua people and the eternal youth that belongs to this university behind them.

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.

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In The Pines

This work re-examines the relationship between the elements that make up the quality of space, namely: "subject" and "object", "organic" and "mechanical", "reality" and "representation", "wholeness" and "partiality", " determinacy” and “indeterminacy”, “visibility” and “invisibility”, “natural” and “non-natural”.

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.

My Bestest Friends

A group of final-year media students experience their last 238 days together, expressing how they feel before having to say goodbye.

Mother of Fog

In what could be considered a follow up to Al Qasimi’s 2020 work Mother of Fire, she once again invokes the figure of the jinn (spirits in Islamic mythology) to explore the ghosts of British imperialism in the UAE. As its spectre lingers on the horizon, two teenage girls seek to liberate a pirate damned to spend purgatory on a site now being developed into a hotel. Originally commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present, Al Qasimi entangles historical narratives with contemporary notions of piracy. In examining how it has been historically and culturally represented, new perspectives of old mythographies come into focus. (Myriam Mouflih)

Dreamed to sea

A monster that lives in the darkest part of the sea, a dreamlike representation of the journey towards the depths of something that one wants to avoid and that is finally faced.

Aileen Wuornos : Mind of a Monster

Serial killer Aileen Wuornos writes down her darkest secrets for her best friend while on Florida's death row; now, for the first time, those secrets are revealed in detail.

Where Is Amy Pressman

In 2007, a teen girl from a posh L.A. suburb must deal with the grizzly murder of her family while trapped in the company of their killers.

A Common Sequence

An interconnected look at tradition, colonialism, property, faith, and science, as seen through labor practices that link an endangered salamander, mass-produced apples, and the evolving fields of genomics and machine learning.

Awaken

A documentary film exploring humanity's relationship with technology and with the natural world. Shot over a 5-year period in more than 30 countries, the film pioneers new timelapse, time-dilation, underwater, and aerial cinematography techniques to give audiences new eyes with which to see our world.

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.

The Psychedelic Experience

Experimental movie, where a man comes home and experiences LSD. His kaleidoscopic visions follow, with readings inspired by the Tibethan Book of the Dead.

FASCISM(s): A Film in Six Parts

Six sequences about Fascism and its segments throughout history.

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.

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.

In Ictu Oculi

A good feast in the countryside.

Happy Life

In this anxious and hectic time, Happy Life explores those unusual outlets that soothe the turmoil of the body and mind. In a meditative journey through these analgesic places, this documentary essay paints a portrait of a society in seek of meaning and relief.

Lake

Lake gazes down at a still body of water from a birds-eye view, while a group of artists peacefully float in and out of the frame or work to stay at the surface. As they glide farther away and draw closer together, they reach out in collective queer and desirous exchanges — holding hands, drifting over and under their neighbors, making space, taking care of each other with a casual, gentle intimacy while they come together as individual parts of a whole. The video reflects on notions of togetherness and feminist theorist Silvia Federici’s call to “reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and our bodies.”

Tides

Filmed at Masonboro Island, an undeveloped barrier island in southeastern North Carolina, “Tides” contemplates the liminal space between the modern technological world and that more ecological dimension we label as “nature” or “the environment.”

The Noise of Time

In the town of Xoco, the spirit of an old villager awakens in search of its lost home. Along its journey, the ghost discovers that the town still celebrates its most important festivities, but also learns that the construction of a new commercial complex called Mítikah will threaten the existence of both the traditions and the town itself.

Feet in Water, Head on Fire

Date palms imported and cultivated decades ago flourish in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. A cacophony of voices from across generations reflect on the shifting landscape of the region; some remember the first few acres that were planted, while others enjoy the luxuries of new golf courses. Feet in Water, Head on Fire is a sensorially vibrant 16mm experience that takes us on a journey of past, present, and future. Director Terra Long hand-processed the footage utilizing leftover dates and native plants intertwining the environment into the fabric of the film. Through complex and nuanced scenes, non-sync interviews blossom into a wonderfully gentle but memorable portrait of a community in flux.

SECULAR | Aa'La'Ma'Ni

How is secularism depicted in films? The term "Aa'La'Ma'Ni" means worldly in Arabic. It's significant in the Middle East, where secularism is controversial since the majority often link secularism with atheism and anti-religious sentiment. SECULAR | Aa'La'Ma'Ni, a documentary based on academic research, explores the depiction of secularism in Middle Eastern cinema and TV channels. Filmmakers and regional producers openly discuss religion, sectarianism, authorities, minorities, and industry challenges.

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.

The Sea Recalls

In 2016, Aekaphong’s uncle was murdered in his house alongside his wife. A year later, Aekaphong returns to his hometown to investigate the man’s past and come to terms with his absence.

Liberation Diaries

The end of World War II brings Europe a new political system, reshapes national and personal identities. Three women from Milan, Paris and Berlin report on the days of liberation in their diaries. Their personal stories expand the historical picture and make LIBERATION DIARIES a chronicle of female self-empowerment, resistance and resilience.

Fotofinish 2

Documentary filmed on the occasion of the “2003, Odyssey in Space Zero” operation inside the Spazio Zero Theater in Rome. The document, filmed between 21 October and 30 November 2003, recounts the representation of Fotofinish not as a single and continuous work, but as the evolution over time of the moods and movements of the actors who, replica after replica, have developed an awareness of the space and arrived at the joy of staging.