Once Faithful (2024)

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.

OASIS

The stress, pressure, and fast pace that we experience daily make us overlook our well-being. We live immersed in a constant fleetingness that wreaks havoc on our way of life. Oasis is a critique of the overwhelming mass society that consumes us and emphasizes the need to stop, to find calm: an oasis in the midst of the desert.

Dreaming Dogs

A pack of strays – seven dogs and one woman live in the shadows of Moscow. Hidden from the totalitarian authorities, two species share their existence on the verge of disappearance. They are straying in constant restlessness through a savage landscape where the city is cracking. Shot from the animal’s point of view, patterns of mutual dependence and taming begin to blur.

INFRASTRATA

Amongst the contemplative static shots of decaying architecture weaves an abstract narrative unveiling the life-cycle of a higher perception, too large to perceive. Shot at various sites across south-east England, INFRASTRATA is a study on the concept of super-organisms, and the relationship between structure and nature.

Panoramas

In 1829 the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt attempted a russian-siberian expedition. Humboldt travelled to obtain a clear view of nature, people and life in this immense country. 2019 naturalists and humanists attempted a transdisciplinary expedition on the trails of Humboldt. To capture the events various cameras were taken along. A non-chronological narration.

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.

British Sounds

Jean-Luc Godard brings his firebrand political cinema to the UK, exploring the revolutionary signals in late '60s British society. Constructed as a montage of various disconnected political acts (in line with Godard's then appropriation of Soviet director Dziga Vertov's agitprop techniques), it combines a diverse range of footage, from students discussing The Beatles to the production line at the MG factory in Oxfordshire, burnished with onscreen political sloganeering.

Trials and Initiation

Here is an actor, one who has been asked to dwell in the perilous gap between text and image. In the voids where traces of the past have been erased by an unknown error, she begins to assemble her own script.

Maalbeek

Sabine is looking for a missing image: a day that has left its mark forever and that everyone remembers but her. But maybe this absence is what allows her to move on with her life?

The Forgotten

An exploration of memory after death.

The Grass Dwellers

Juan Méndez Bernal leaves his house on the 9th of april of 1936 to fight in the imminent Spanish Civil War. 83 years later, his body is still one of the Grass Dwellers. The only thing that he leaves from those years on the front is a collection of 28 letters in his own writing.

Tides

Filmed at Masonboro Island, an undeveloped barrier island in southeastern North Carolina, “Tides” contemplates the liminal space between the modern technological world and that more ecological dimension we label as “nature” or “the environment.”

THÁI BẢO HUỲNH KHANG

A trans Vietnamese woman's deadname being repeated over and over again.

Canale grande

A young woman is fed up with the usual consumer's television and begins to make her own television, or more correctly, closevision. She is now a reporter who wanders around Berlin with her camera and 'telecasting apparatus' on her back. Her livingroom has been transformed into a studio and here the different programs are assembled and aired: statements, interviews, realistic and phantastic programs.

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.

Logistics

Logistics or Logistics Art Project is an experimental art film. At 51,420 minutes (857 hours or 35 days and 17 hours), it is the longest movie ever made. A 37 day-long road movie in the true sense of the meaning. The work is about Time and Consumption. It brings to the fore what is often forgotten in our digital, ostensibly fast-paced world: the slow, physical freight transportation that underpins our economic reality.

3STIGIA

A young film director invites a friend to his home to propose him to participate in his next short film, a free adaptation of the painting: The Passage of the Styx Lagoon.

1/2 Man

A visual documentary of Einstürzende Neubauten, the German underground band, by Japanese cult director Sogo Ishii, made during their 1985 tour of Japan. The band makes an elaborate and remarkably choreographed appearance in the ruins of an old ironworks which was scheduled for demolition; footage of same was incorporated into the movie and a brief appearance on stage.

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?

Time to Change

Angolan director and screenwriter Pocas Pascoal reminds us that it’s time for a change, proposing through this film a look at colonialism, capitalism, and their impact on global biodiversity. We observe that the destruction of the ecosystem goes back a long way and is already underway through land exploitation, big game hunting, and the exploitation of man by man.

Empire

Filmed by Jonas Mekas from the 44th floor of the Time-Life Building, “Empire” explores the passage of time without the use of characters or a traditional narrative. The film, that consists of one stationary shot of the Empire State Building, was made from standard 1,200-foot rolls of 16mm film with a more than eight-hour runtime.

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.

Black River

An observational documentary, shot on high-contrast black and white 16mm film, about a largely undeveloped river in southeastern North Carolina that is home to the oldest trees east of the Rocky Mountains.

Winter Portrait

A misty afternoon returns a Mapuche couple to their wedding video. In their civil ceremony, they are noted as one of only two couples married in the indigenous language of Mapudungun.

27 Shots of a Late Heartbreak

A young Catholic filmmaker narrates a past heartbreak which he's leaving behind through images from late 2024, during Christmas and New Year's Holidays.

13 figures de Sarah Beauchesne au 71, rue Blanche

Plot unavailable

A Common Sequence

An interconnected look at tradition, colonialism, property, faith, and science, as seen through labor practices that link an endangered salamander, mass-produced apples, and the evolving fields of genomics and machine learning.

USSR (1917-1991)

Experimental short film that explores the rise and decline of the Soviet Union, from the revolutionary spark of 1917 to the challenges and sacrifices endured during World War II, until its dissolution in 1991.

24

Plot unavailable

Happy Life

In this anxious and hectic time, Happy Life explores those unusual outlets that soothe the turmoil of the body and mind. In a meditative journey through these analgesic places, this documentary essay paints a portrait of a society in seek of meaning and relief.

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.

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.

Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time

How's it all gonna end? This experience takes us on a journey to the end of time, trillions of years into the future, to discover what the fate of our planet and our universe may ultimately be. We start in 2019 and travel exponentially through time, witnessing the future of Earth, the death of the sun, the end of all stars, proton decay, zombie galaxies, possible future civilizations, exploding black holes, the effects of dark energy, alternate universes, the final fate of the cosmos - to name a few.

Ten Lives of a Cat: A Film about Chris Marker

Ten years after the death of iconic French filmmaker, Chris Marker. A filmmaker, hoping to rediscover that unique sensibility against the uncertainty of the new century, returns to the places synonymous with those incomparable and unforgettable films-- From the cat cemetery of Sans Soleil, to the mausoleum of The Last Bolshevik; The caves of Level Five to the rooftops of The Case of the Grinning Cat. A biographical portrait of one of the 20th century's greatest and most misunderstood filmmakers.

A Little Love

Through interspersed conversation and prose, this experimental documentary follows a poet and a neuroscientist as they explore the definition of love, what it means, and why it matters.

Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait

Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material and unpublished notebooks, the film weaves a complex and personal portrait of Margaret’s life, from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to the potential Margaret envisaged for film as a poetic medium.

Mother of the World

Six million tons, suspended by the slightest gesture. Mother of the World presents a series of brief vignettes of Cairo just prior to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. These fragmented scenes choreograph class structure and foreign influence into an intimate, poetic view of a nation about to change.