Goya's Gaze (2024)

AS AN EARTHQUAKE

On February 6, 2023, an earthquake on the border of Turkey and Syria claims more than 55,000 lives. On this day, I am in an oncology center, 6 days since having my tumor removed, and in the afternoon my partner ends our relationships. Blending memory and theory, this autofiction documentary unfolds the relationships between love(s) and catastrophes.

99 days

Two instants separated by 99 days conflict with each other.

Those Who Wander

What are they? What do they seek? When all the lights go out, they will wander. And you will never see them.

What Humans See as Blood, Jaguars See as Chicha

In the rural desert of Bolivia, where the most important presence is the wind moving between papa flowers and animals, the people who harvest the land, those who built the ancient artifacts and sacred objects and the musicians who play moseñada – songs linked to the first products of the harvest – on the streets of the city have one point in common: labor. With a successful inclusion of stories of enchanted lakes, legends that pass from mouth to mouth – or from orality to audiovisual, in this case – and give a fantastic aura to those lands, Luciana Decker Orozco not only manages to capture life without oscillations . field, but resorts to the incessant movement of images and sound accompaniment to define a sensory and transcendental experience for the viewer.

Origins of consciousness

Experimental meditation on land, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. Shot in the Okanagan and West Kootenays. Original music by Jack Brintnell.

An Ordinary Texas Homicide

An experiment in video and sound collage by John Ledingham and Liam McCarrell. Inspired by the novel "Libra" by Don DeLillo.

He Who Dances Passes

A being from the beyond returns to Chile in 2019, embodied in a worker who dreams of social upheaval. Viral videos intertwine with fiction to narrate the experiences of a polarized country that wanders between drama and absurdity, illusion and failure.

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.

Darwin's Darlings

Standing near the reptile section in a zoo we can learn a lot about the animals on both sides of the separating glass.

Once Faithful

Days slip away in a former baptist church haunted by its past

Super Sauber

A dream where obsession for German as a second language mixes up with an obsession for neatness and cleanliness as a distinctive feature of the national culture in question seen from the perspective of a foreigner. The dream is not a nightmare only because the set it is dreamt into is the seashore of the mare nostrum, where the dreaming subject is perfectly at home. A homeland which she, in turn, in her more secret thus naïf dreams would dream of being cleaner and tidier as in the reality, especially in front of such beauty of nature. As is right and proper.

Vibrant Matter

A silent city symphony, projected from gorgeous black and white 16mm film. Materia vibrante lets the resonating frequencies of the urban environment create the inaudible hum that keeps the engines of society running, absent of the inhabitants running around like little ants toiling away.

Junior War

In Junior War, a throng of highschoolers congregate at night for a party in the woods sometime in the year 2000. A band plays, the kids get drunk, the boys and girls tepidly flirt, and groups deploy into cars for the purpose of destroying mailboxes, tee-peeing houses, breaking lawn ornaments, and sparring with the police. The film is composed entirely of footage Trecartin took during his senior year of high school in exurban Ohio; as such, it baits the viewer with genealogical significance.

Frammenti di una Festa Furiosa

Furio’s Furious Fragments & Friends - Furio Jesi (1941 Turin -1980 Genoa), enfant prodige moving between a plethora of disciplines – egyptology, history of religions, German philology, literary criticism - passed away prematurely, not without leaving bright fragments which throw light on mechanisms beneath many socio-cultural practices, for instance regarding cultural belonging, the functions of myth in modern society. He saw kind of “mythological machines” at work underneath our cultural production of meanings, historically determined, departing from a void, something that is still in culture but as residue, a missing link to an alleged authentic experience nowadays compromised up to the point to became just rhetoric, a byword, which is in no way neutral, but a tool, a macchina, for maintaining the status quo and serving the power apparatus. As in the case of holidays, celebrations and festivals.

One Minute Reharsal

Actors Isabella Lafin and Rafael Grendene reharsing a scene from the movie Marriage Story (2019).

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.

Good Morning, Mr. Orwell

In his book "1984", George Orwell saw the television of the future as a control instrument in the hands of Big Brother. Right at the start of the much-anticipated Orwellian year, Paik and Co. were keen to demonstrate satellite TV's ability to serve positive ends-- Namely, the intercontinental exchange of culture, combining both highbrow and entertainment elements. A live broadcast shared between WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, linked up with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea, reached a worldwide audience of over 10 or even 25 million (including the later repeat transmissions).

á-B-C-D-é-F-G-H-CH-í-JONESTOWN

A children's film about the largest mass suicide of the 20th century reconstructs the 1978 event. The Reverend Jim Jones forced nearly a thousand followers of his People's Temple sect to drink poison in the settlement of Jonestown, Guyana, South America. A third of them were children. Jan Bušta gives sadists, voyeurs, and necrophiliacs one minute to leave the cinema. His self-reflective documentary, which is the result of ten years of time-lapse filming, does not depict dramatic scenes. To the sound of an audio recording from that fateful day, we see a collage of child ghosts preaching about escaping the corruption of the world.

Giri Chit

GIRI CHIT tells a tale of the subtle trace of irreconcilable worlds. A worker driving a mobile sweeper in hypnotic circles across an already immaculate surface. The high drama of cosplay aficionados clamoring to be seen. A cast of thousands toiling hundreds of feet above the street. Giri translates as ‘duty’ in Japanese, but the concept is in fact far more complicated. Giri is a sort of interpersonal political capital that informs careers, family relations, and much more. Its presence and flow is palpable in Japan, where this film was shot. A “giri chit” then may be a hypothetical voucher for this intangible flow (with a tip of the cap to Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland”). Selected Screenings and Awards: DaVinci Film Festival (Best Experimental Film), Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Dallas Videofest, ICDOCS Film Festival, NewFilmmakers at Anthology Film Archives, Oxford Film Festival, Director’s Lounge Berlin

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.

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.

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.

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?