Experiments of Colour and Substance (2024)

The Sunlit Night

An aspiring painter meets eccentric locals and a fellow New Yorker while working on a barn in Norway.

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.

New York Stories

Get ready for a wildly diverse, star-studded trilogy about life in the big city. One of the most-talked about films in years, New York Stories features the creative collaboration of three of America's most popular directors, Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and Woody Allen.

Ground Control

A journey to an unknown star, a children's theatre play, an untalented writer and the fear of becoming the worst version of oneself. A mixture of live-action footage and animated scenes. A stream of (un)conscious stereotypes.

Yo, Diablo

Joey works as a waiter for a hedonistic community of summer holiday makers in a small Mediterranean paradise. It is unclear if their exaggerated behaviors are due to the fact that the summer is coming to an end or if its just the last of their summers.

October Is Yours

A man in distress.

The Science of Sleep

A man entranced by his dreams and imagination is lovestruck with a French woman and feels he can show her his world.

Notes on a Scandal

A veteran high school teacher befriends a younger art teacher, who is having an affair with one of her 15-year-old students. However, her intentions with this new "friend" also go well beyond platonic friendship.

Blow-Up

A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. But in the course of a single day he unknowingly captures a death on film.

Le Divorce

While visiting her sister in Paris, a young woman finds romance and learns her brother-in-law is a philanderer.

Bye Bye Analog World

Plot unavailable

The Free Fall

Sara wakes from a coma to a life she doesn't remember; a fragile, slippery reality that spirals into a nightmare where nothing is as it seems.

Synchronic

Two New Orleans paramedics' lives are ripped apart after encountering a series of horrific deaths linked to a designer drug with bizarre, otherworldly effects.

Escargots

An adaptation of a children's poem called Chanson des escargots qui vont à l'enterrement by Jacques Prévert, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Filmed in Paris, France and Los Angeles, California.

Caravaggio's Shadow

The Catholic Church secretly investigates Caravaggio as the Pope weighs whether to grant him clemency for killing a rival.

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.

Cormorant

A 16mm experimental short film loosely following a cormorant as it attempts to dry its wings.

Roots

Haunted by an inner conflict, a driven artist, along with her gentle and emphatic daughter, returns to her childhood home to finally make peace with herself and her past. Once there, however, she loses herself in a long-forgotten world.

Ophelia

Plot unavailable

Seance of the Past

A person spends most of their life mourning the things they have lost, unable to move on. They frequent a silent but helpful medium and embark on a spiritual journey where they linger among their past lives.

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.

Lonesome Cowboys

Five lonesome cowboys get all hot and bothered at home on the range after confronting Ramona Alvarez and her nurse.

The Holy Mountain

The Alchemist assembles together a group of people from all walks of life to represent the planets in the solar system. The occult adept's intention is to put his recruits through strange mystical rites and divest them of their worldly baggage before embarking on a trip to Lotus Island. There they ascend the Holy Mountain to displace the immortal gods who secretly rule the universe.

The Truth About the Imaginary Passion of an Unknown

A very personal interpretation, to say the least, of the passion of the Christ According to St. John.

Hannah and Her Sisters

Between two Thanksgivings, Hannah's husband falls in love with her sister Lee, while her hypochondriac ex-husband rekindles his relationship with her sister Holly.

The Baby of Mâcon

Set halfway through the 17th century, a church play is performed for the benefit of the young aristocrat Cosimo. In the play, a grotesque old woman gives birth to a beautiful baby boy. The child's older sister is quick to exploit the situation, selling blessings from the baby, and even claiming she's the true mother by virgin birth. However, when she attempts to seduce the bishop's son, the Church exacts a terrible revenge.

A White Butterfly on a Bus

She plays an actress. He works as a filmmaker. We are making a film in Xining, Qinghai, China. She says that this is the furthest place that she's ever been from home. As days go by and under the pressure from the production, we start to wander on the border of life and fiction.

Pecker

A Baltimore teenager who picks up a second-hand camera starts snapping his way to stardom, soon turning into a nationwide sensation, with a fateful choice between his life and his art.

Rift

Daniela (24) is a ghost in pain. Her life ended suddenly and painfully, leaving her friend and roommate, Mónica (22) alone in their shared apartment in Santiago, Chile. Daniela feels her frustration grow within her, as she fears that her time in limbo will never end.

Rainbow's Writing

Alex (a young journalist) seeks to quit his job writing tabloid articles and instead pursue a writing career fuelled by his use of LSD on the other side of the world.

Cashback

After a painful breakup, Ben develops insomnia. To kill time, he starts working the late night shift at the local supermarket, where his artistic imagination runs wild.

Factory Girl

In the mid-1960s, wealthy debutant Edie Sedgwick meets artist Andy Warhol. She joins Warhol's famous Factory and becomes his muse. Although she seems to have it all, Edie cannot have the love she craves from Andy, and she has an affair with a charismatic musician, who pushes her to seek independence from the artist and the milieu.

Ghosts at the Window

Lights away from the glass. "Ghosts at the Window" is an experimental short film about the texture and plasticity of the image, mixing the camera's digital capture with a natural space modified by the device. Shot on a Motorolla g22

Big Bang Love, Juvenile A

An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility. More an exercise in style than storytelling, the story follows two detectives trying to uncover the case. Homosexual tension and explosive violence drives the story which delivers some weird and fascinating visuals.

Cochlea

Plot unavailable

Echo

A reframing of the classic tale of Narcissus, the director draws on snippets of conversation with a trusted friend to muse on gender and identity. Just as shimmers are difficult to grasp as knowable entities, so does the concept of a gendered self feel unknowable except through reflection. Is it Narcissus that Echo truly longs for, or simply the Knowing he possesses when gazing upon himself?

Venus

Maurice is an aging veteran actor who becomes taken with Jessie, the grandniece of his closest friend. When Maurice tries to soften the petulant and provincial young girl with the benefit of his wisdom and London culture, their give-and-take surprises both Maurice and Jessie as they discover what they don't know about themselves.

Apple Pie

Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes thought-provoking connections between life on Earth and the cosmos, and, ultimately, art and science. Structured around the ten most significant celestial bodies of the Milky Way, Apple Pie’s inquiry begins with the furthest point in our solar system, Pluto, as a lens back towards our home planet and the ‘mechanisms by which certain aspects of scientific knowledge are digested, appropriated and subsequently manifest within the general human complex’. Christopher Francis Schiel’s dry, functional narration brings a network of ideas about our existence into focus, while Hamilton’s visual tableaux, as an extension of his multifaceted practice, veer imaginatively between psychedelic imagery and performance art.

Shaye & Kiki

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

Henry John and the Little Bug

Dinner time in a remote home of a prairie family turns nightmarish when a band of blood spattered outlaws break through the front door in search of food, horses, and women. Nothing is as it seems in this constantly twisting genre bender.

Tempus

Plot unavailable

tVision

Plot unavailable

Thunderstruck

Flashing lights explode across an apartment as images of a naked woman in bed flicker in and out. Light paintings and projections illuminate a space of confrontation and an assault on the senses.

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.

The death of the minotavr

The death of the minotavr talks about the concept of the heroine's journey. Suffering, horror and exhaustion lead the protagonist to a process of transformation, abyss and expiation, because only murdering to minotaur and everything he represents is possible to return to life. From the female gaze, it shows the depth of the emotional wounds caused by domestic violence; the same one that the surrealist Dora Maar lived and that ask why, as a society, instead of killing the minotaur, we blindly continue to send him women only to be devoured and ask them why they simply did not fight, why they did not try get out of the labyrinth.

Détester

A satirical short art film that parodies how pretentious modern art is. Made by film students at F21 Upper-secondary school

Six Degrees of Separation

The story of a young, gay, black, con artist who, posing as the son of Sidney Poitier, cunningly maneuvers his way into the lives of a white, upper-class New York family.