Foreign Surface (2024)

Electroma

Two robots embark on a quest to become human.

Fragment of Seeking

A young man desperately seeks out the fleeting image of a female companion, and though he never quite catches her, he discovers much more through the surreal explorations of his own sexuality. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

Revelation To The Disembodied

Fragments of a collective post-human dream construct a world that straddles hyper-technological, ecological, and mythological dimensions.

Six Hundred Seconds

Six Hundred Seconds explores an impassive response to this question through an experimental short film.

Endless

A lonesome man at the threshold of death finds himself trapped in a place called the Endless.

The Begotten Cycle

Themes of death, rebirth and mythology combine in this compilation of subversive and surreal experimental US films.

Crushing

Images of a young boy performing in his room in front of the camera to his sexchat audience intertwines with images of masked-men cruising in the darkness. The piece focuses on the psychological and physical suffering of the protagonist.

Light From the Tower

A costume designer is sent to the Catskills for an interactive theatre piece set in the 1920s. When she arrives things seem dark, strange and off. She soon realizes she is part of a student film.

The Scary Movie

Martina and Sonja, cross-dress in vampire capes and werewolf claws, re-enacting familiar horror tropes. A corresponding soundtrack of stock screams and "scary" music suggests that the girls' toying with gender roles and power dynamics may have dire consequences.

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.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion

Seele orders an all-out attack on NERV, aiming to destroy the Evas before Gendo can trigger Third Impact and Instrumentality under his control.

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.

Santa sangre

A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his mother - the leader of a strange religious cult - and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name.

The Shining: Forwards and Backwards

An experimental film comprised of Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING played forwards and backwards at the same time on the same screen, creating bizarre juxtapositions and startling synchronicities

REW

A man is trapped in a loop somewhere between life and death. Based on Bardo, a Buddhist term for an intermediate state between death and rebirth. This film combines elements of art house, avant-garde, surrealism, and experimental horror.

The Window

A drifter spends the night in an abandoned house and encounters a Window of Consciousness. This award-winning film combines elements of art house, avant-garde, surrealism, and experimental horror.

Sink

An experimental horror film told entirely from above the bathroom sink.

Enys Men

A wildlife volunteer on an uninhabited island off the British coast descends into a terrifying madness that challenges her grip on reality and pushes her into a living nightmare.

River of Fundament

Visionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elements of performance, sculpture, and opera, reconstructing Mailer’s hypersexual story of Egyptian gods and the seven stages of reincarnation, alongside the rise and fall of the American car industry.

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.

Cremaster 2

CREMASTER 2 (1999) is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1 ...

Black Mask

A father must face his dark past when his gifted daughter has visions of a young girl reborn from her deceased mother. This award-winning metaphysical thriller combines elements of art house, avant-garde, surrealism, and experimental horror.

Lost Footage

How would a found footage film look if the footage was never found? This conceptual art experiment questions the very nature of film and cinema while serving as an ironic tribute to the found footage horror pop culture. The found footage format provides the narrative justification for such a film to exist: the non-existence exists because the footage existed yet it was lost and never found.

Chimera

Lost in the woods, a panicked Griff desperately tries to find his way home, but as he moves deeper into the depths of the woods he faces more nauseating uncertainties. Bewildered and disoriented, he must leave the woods.

Dead Flies And Starless Skies

In this short experimental film, three friends are waiting for their train to arrive.

Shaye & Kiki

A bizarre mix of early Tod Hayne's and Phyllis Diller!

Building No. 7

A short by Steven Soderbergh described as “intense sci-fi homage to Godard.”

Possibly in Michigan

A musical horror story about two young women who are stalked through a shopping mall by a cannibal. He follows them home, and here the victims become the aggressors.

The Empty

My representation of emptiness and what it is to be alone without humans or sociality.

FIN

In a remote and seemingly peaceful province of Ilaya, there lived two teenagers who explore their lives as the world around them grows darker.

Moonlight People

Two young men and two girls on a moonlit night confess to each other in their strange fantasies and loves that go beyond the usual standards.. The impetus to making the film was the book of the same name by the Russian religious philosopher Vasily Rozanov, who died 100 years ago. His treatise was devoted to the study of sexuality and its denial in Christianity. The film was made in the style of experimental films of the 1920s with a non-linear narration full of strange surrealistic images. He is black and white and devoid of dialogue. Filmed on film 16 mm of firm "Svema", released in the USSR. This added to his exoticism. The image was put to the music of Alexander Scriabin “The Poem of Ecstasy” (1907).