Emotional Landscapes (2024)

40 Days to Learn Film

For just forty days, filmmaker and writer Mark Cousins embarks on a peculiar journey in order to explore topics as the passion for cinema and certain aspects related to making films as style, ideas, emotions and practicalities; an ambitious exploration of the universal language of cinema by analyzing pieces of work that cross every artistic and cultural boundaries.

Non-Stop

Province of Ciudad Real, Spain, December 29, 1990. During the annual march to the Herrera de la Mancha prison, held in support of the members of the terrorist gang ETA imprisoned there, the Basque rock band Negu Gorriak holds a concert, which is recorded, edited on video and turned into a tool of vindication. Decades later, a film crew tries to elaborate a personal essay around this event and its meaning.

Tourist;Drifter

An experimental coming-of-age odyssey through someone's troubled mind, going from country to country, landscape to landscape, growing up in the process. A documentary, travelogue, vlog, dream and self-portrait. A reflection on life, death and history.

July Dust

“Poussières de Juillet”, produced in 1967 by Hachemi El-Chérif, is taken from a poem by Kateb Yacine. "We made a film on the return of the ashes of Emir Abdelkader, to Algeria. It was the opportunity to make a film on the ancestors with M'hamed Issiakhem. He designed glass plates on the basis of my texts. Then we had actors collaborate. It was a film which cost us a total of 300 dinars, proof that we could do work for television without too much money. We won two first international prizes at the Belgrade festival. We left the original of the film with the Egyptians in Alexandria and they lost it. We kept a copy but over time I wonder what happened to it, because there is no not even had a screening, they say it still exists, but I don't know in what state." Kateb Yacine, July 28, 1986, interview with Arlette Casas.

Kyklop

The short film poem KYKLOP is dedicated to a mechanical eye as an autonomous being. Round wheels and targets similar to him seem to arouse the interest of this main character. The atmosphere is thundery, thunderous. It reminds of the cyclopean thunder demons from the "Theogony" of the ancient Greek poet Hesiod. KYKLOP (2023) is another autonomous part of the film cycle by Telemach Wiesinger and Alexander Grebtschenko that began with TURBULENCE (2022) and its pairs of mechanical wings.

Electroma

Two robots embark on a quest to become human.

Hale

Narrative revolves around an individual confined within the constraints of their existing reality, yearning to break free into a dream world—only to realize that the dream world had been their prison all along.

Visions of Europe

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

The Image Book

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.

Barbara

Previously lost exploitation film which chronicles the sexual journey of a teenager who introduces her own family to the liberated ways of the free love rebellion.

Leda + Swans

“Leda + Swans” depicts an infernal, mythic birth of cinema, dredging the violence and horror from Wallace McCutcheon’s comic short film “Photographing a Female Crook” (1904). Leda, who may or may not be a falsely accused young woman, is brought in for a mugshot by two officers. She first attempts to avoid the camera’s gaze, and, when overpowered and manhandled, contorts her face to ruin the photograph. However, her small rebellion proves futile; she was already being recorded, objectified, mapped, and co-opted by the Godhead of the director. As her body and image are repurposed and transmuted ad infinitum, the filmic universe also explodes into a supernova. What is born out of this suffering and manipulation is another example of our sublime medium and modern muse. She will not be last the Leda, and she may not even be the first. Who is the guilty party here? Is beauty a chimera in traditional cinema? Has the ephemeral cinema of the attractions and distractions era gone anywhere?

EGGspression

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

She Sings

When Aziza finally shares a recurring dream, it’s what she leaves unsaid that reveals her fractured sense of self. Aziza’s dream – in which she must sing a song – takes her on a journey through the post-industrial hills of the American Rust Belt, the eternal fields of Egypt, and the most repressed parts of her mind.

Kino Kopf

Born from steel and glass Kino Kopf is created by two inventors. They are assembled by their mother, a nurturing artist, and their Father a greedy entrepreneur. Kino Kopf is the first of its kind a sentient humanoid VHS camera. They are given a life by their mother but presented to the world by their father. Kino Kopf is the next big sensation and spurs a technological revolution. They are soon forgotten and alone as new models surpass them. Kino Kopf is left alone to contemplate if they ever had a soul, as visions of an electric cowboy dance through their dreams.

Once There Was Everything

Kogonada looks at how the motif of doors reverberates through Robert Bresson's work.

The Brown Bunny

Bud Clay races motorcycles in the 250cc Formula II class of road racing. After a race in New Hampshire, he has five days to get to his next race in California. During his road trip, he is haunted by memories of the last time he saw Daisy, his true love.

Lysreisen

"Lysreisen" is an experimental art film, a visual ode to tunnel lights. Its ethereal beauty and abstract visuals create a poetic journey, exploring the transformative dance of light with a captivating and artistic touch.

Don't Work (1968-2018)

A year in the life of Elsa Michaud and Gabriel Gauthier, students of Fine Arts in Paris, lovers in troubled times, overwhelmed by maddening verbal and auditory stimuli, witnesses of a globalized violence more visible than ever in a chaotic digital era, in which the slow execution of simple gestures in a silent performance is an act of resistance.

Todo Todo Teros

Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.

Dr Tscharniblues

Bern, 1979: a tower block called Tscharnergut. A group of friends get together to make a film about their experiences growing up in suburban Switzerland.

Cambalhota

A girl mixes fiction with reality while writing a letter to her grandmother.

The Universe

In a last-ditch effort to save earth, a man sacrifices himself and is forced to relive a series of suppressed memories that become smeared by the detonation of a stellar bomb. This paranormal explosion of thoughts begin to blur the lines between reality and fiction; the only way out is forward.

ZAPPER!

In a surreal universe where bananas fire laser beams and soup cans are used as grenades, a wacky cast of gangsters are thrown into a deadly game to battle it out over a mystical longboard in this trippy take on the Tarantino crime genre.

Site Unseen

A collaboration between Kadet Kuhne & Alba G. Corral.

Taikonaut

A creature is born from the cosmos. In his journey through the void he searches for what it means to be human. Marching he soon finds himself chased by the chaos that comes along with finding a safe home-ground.