Eros and Thanatos (2024)

Begotten

Begotten is the creation myth brought to life, the story of no less than the violent death of God and the (re)birth of nature on a barren earth.

Time Piece

Dislocation in time, time signatures, time as a philosophical concept, and slavery to time are some of the themes touched upon in this 9-minute experimental film, which was written, directed, and produced by Jim Henson. Screened for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in May of 1965, "Time Piece" enjoyed an eighteen-month run at one Manhattan movie theater and was nominated for an Academy Award for Outstanding Short Subject.

Wide Open

After awakening in her basement, the protagonist finds herself cursed by an object, rendering her unable to blink. Haunted by a sinister silhouette creature that appears from various locations, she realizes her only chance of defeating it lies in mastering the ability to confront the creature without averting her gaze.

Cremaster 4

CREMASTER 4 (1994) adheres most closely to the project's biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system's onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion - three identical armored legs revolving around a central axis. Set on the Isle of Man, the film absorbs the island's folklore ...

Taxidermia

Set over three generations and beginning with a sexually frustrated orderly during WWII who relieves his tensions in the most outlandish, gross ways. The result of his liaison is a glutton who grows up to be a champion speed eater. He produces a child who becomes obsessed with taxidermy.

The Timekeepers of Eternity

In this mesmerizing experimental film, a Stephen King television movie is compressed and transformed through hypnotic black and white collage animation that meticulously reconstructs and reshapes its supernatural drama to an eerie and profound effect.

Rampo Noir

An anthology film consisting of four segments based on literary works by Edogawa Ranpo.

Witch's Cradle

The surrealist film shows repetitive imagery involving a string fashioned in a bizarre, almost spiderweb-like pattern over the hands of several individuals, most notably an unnamed young woman and an elderly gentleman. The film also shows a shadowy darkness and people filmed at odd angles, an exposed human heart, and other occult symbols and ritualistic imagery which evokes an unsettling and dream-like aura. Considered an unfinished film.

At Land

A woman washes up on a beach and embarks on a surreal journey, encountering others and fragmented versions of herself in a quest for identity.

Proyecciones del Limbo

Plot unavailable

The Seashell and the Clergyman

Obsessed with a general's wife, a clergyman has strange visions of death and lust, struggling against his own eroticism.

Lejano Interior

A "cinematic object" by Mariano Llinás, divided into 9 chapters, based on the poetry of Henri Michaux.

The Very Eye of Night

Dancers, shown in photographic negative, perform a series of ballet moves, solos, pas de deux, larger groupings. The dancers glide and rotate untroubled by gravity against a slowly changing starfield background. Their movements are accompanied by music scored for a small ensemble of woodwind and percussion.

Fear Itself

A girl haunted by traumatic events takes us on a mesmerising journey through 100 years of horror cinema to explore how filmmakers scare us – and why we let them.

Any Virgin Left Alive?

According to an English legend, Joan of Arc never died at the stake. Her eyes were seared with hot pokers and she was deflowered by an English stud. She was then sentenced to wander on the battlefields, like a vulture, on the look-out for life and searching for any virgins left alive.

The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda

At the court of the Yellow Emperor, the Majoon Traveler & Lady Firefly appear in the Hall of Unconscious Magnetism.

Ballet Mécanique

A pulsing, kaleidoscope of images set to an energetic soundtrack. This is a world in motion, dominated by mechanical and repetitive images, with a few moments of solitude in a garden.

The Empty Mirror

Adolf Hitler faces himself and must come to terms with his infamous career in an imaginary post-war subterranean bunker where he reviews historical films, dictates his memoirs and encounters Eva Braun, Josef Goebbels, Hermann Göring and Sigmund Freud.

Gadis Cantik di Bangku Taman

Vishnu met Mawar in a park while looking for inspiration for his writing material. Mawar turned out to be a next-door neighbor of Vishnu's boarding house. Vishnu soon found out that Mawar was physically abused by her boyfriend Rocky. Vishnu was very angry with himself for not being able to protect Mawar. Until one day Vishnu was desperate to protect Mawar from Rocky's cruelty.

O TAXI SEM FACE

Plot unavailable

Veined

Andrew, a teacher, is attacked while leaving work in a failed mugging which results in him becoming critically injured. While he is bleeding out a Deity appears healing Andrew but this is at a cost.

Sea Roar

In a certain fishing village, a memorial service is held to burn abandoned boats, and old fishing boats that have finished their duty have a dream on the verge of death. Deep-sea fish galloping through the alleys, fishermen pulling long ropes, ghosts of screaming girls...

Occurrences of Questionable Significance

When forest animals invade our cities, the world is in disarray. Office vixen Fiona struggles with her banana phone addiction. Will she succumb to it? Temperamental bunny Barbara only gives her stag sugar daddy Nestor his special massage, after he dines her and plays the big spender. This obscure short film pinpoints postmodern tropes of consumerism, eroticism, and art with an homage to the theater stage and references to literature. This work uses a fantasy language and needs no subtitles.

"BUDKA" by George Alshevskij-Jones

Shot entirely on a webcam and guided by the Imperfect Cinema philosophy, this film captures the drunken drift of a man reaching for connection in a cold, indifferent city. What unfolds is either a dream, a dying vision, or both. Then — reality returns with a quiet whimper. Life moves on. Raw, lo-fi, and unapologetically rough, this is a meditation on how easily the world forgets. Meaning is left open; interpretation belongs to the viewer.

Afloat

'Afloat' is an experimental film that paints a portrait of Japanese performance artist: Ayumi Lanoire. The film opens as a telephone call between Ayumi and Person X, which meanders the audience through the various layers that make up her personas leading one to wonder whether she is in fact a myth or reality.

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.

Midríase

Is the eye the window of the soul? - Mydriasis is a movie that reflects about the early discoveries of queerness and its impact on the self perception of a person.

Signals - Timothy Connon and the Pier

Timothy Connor died during a spring break weekend in 1967, the victim of a car accident. 56 years later, his soul finally arrives at the pier. Signals is a poetic meditation on time, memory, and the persistence of desire. A journey between dimensions, where the fantastic intertwines with the intimate.

Something Walks in the Woods

A viral video shows a mysterious figure walking along the edge of the woods each day, and filmmaker Bill Howard sets out to spend a night there to find out exactly what it is.

Oxymoron Life...

The wanderer Rascal embarks on a psychotic and contradictory journey to break out of the ego bubble in which his self-loathing and isolation have inserted him in. After his metamorphosis, his soulmate, Paloma, makes him realize that life is as complicated as it is simple - and that all that's left to do is to live.

Flower of Flesh, Celestial Body

Plot unavailable

Trepidation

A man living alone comes face to face with an unholy presence that stalks his every move.

DAN

WHAT IS THE BEST FOR HIM? HIMSELF? THEM? HER? A twenty-year-old young man sees himself as someone who struggles in social life. One day, while looking in the mirror,he sees a change in himself, and from then on, everything started to change.

Luminous Void: Docudrama

A documentary like no other. Starting with the bizarre practices and fantasies of a group of filmmakers working under the label Experimental Film Society, it spins off into a manifesto of light and sound. This dazzling journey through a view of cinema as cosmic ritual and erotic delirium is also an idiosyncratic celebration of the medium itself. Rouzbeh Rashidi’s ornate visual style unleashes a parade of visionary scenes that redefine movie magic as a fevered hallucination.

Mictlán

Three souls wake up on a train that takes them to an unknown place.

Fine

After a period of time where her hearing begins to overtake her sight, Casandra searches for the cause of her problem, isolating herself from society. She starts having visions that remind her of the past and promise an apocalyptic future.

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?

CAT

The ideal comfortability of a kitten is taken away by a man impersonating as such. Refusing to stop until the owner gives full surrender.