Once Faithful (2024)

Slaughter (Besmel)

"Slaughter" is an experimental short film that delves into the archival and historical footage of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, depicting a symbolic narrative surrounding the ritualistic act of animal sacrifice, known as "Besmel." It serves as an allegorical representation of a nation's sacrifice amidst the backdrop of political transformations.

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.

Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever

In this documentary, wealthy entrepreneur Bryan Johnson puts his body and fortune on the line to defy aging and extend his life beyond all known limits.

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.

Fox & Penguin

How do German couples communicate in private? What are they arguing about? Is the way to a man’s heart really through his stomach? This docu-fictional hybrid production discusses such questions with the help of authentic interview snippets that were edited under the staged plot. We get an insight into the life of an animal couple, who experience typical everyday situations on behalf of us humans. At first, our fox is emotionally contained, while the penguin lady may get wild as hell. With a wink, the filmmakers hold up a mirror to the audience in the cinema.

Vibrant Matter

A silent city symphony, projected from gorgeous black and white 16mm film. Materia vibrante lets the resonating frequencies of the urban environment create the inaudible hum that keeps the engines of society running, absent of the inhabitants running around like little ants toiling away.

Memory

Memory is a collaboration with musician Noah Lennox (Panda Bear), exploring the relationship between a musician and filmmaker and their personal reflection on memories. From Super 8 home movies and entirely handmade, this film explores familiar memories, the present moment combined with past experiences and how it all seems to evade from our present memory.

A Letter For Raoul Ruiz

Benjamín trips to the south of Chile with his family and shots a visual letter to deceased filmmaker Raúl Ruiz.

Fair Use Vol 1. (All This Trouble)

A compilation of TV news about black culture.

From Dust to Light

Filmed In the heart of the mountainous villages of Greece and North Macedonia, the documentary follows a group of conservators of antiquities and works of art on their journey, with the goal of preserving Byzantine iconography. The dialogue between them and the hagiographers of the past comes to life.

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?

Jo

Jo; or The Act of Riding a Bike is Zefier's third film.

Where Is Amy Pressman

In 2007, a teen girl from a posh L.A. suburb must deal with the grizzly murder of her family while trapped in the company of their killers.

Próxima Parada

Experimental documentary that poetically exposes the reality of public transport in the city of Curitiba.

The Psychedelic Experience

Experimental movie, where a man comes home and experiences LSD. His kaleidoscopic visions follow, with readings inspired by the Tibethan Book of the Dead.

The Garden Cadences

Jone is ready to fly. She finds herself at the beginning of something new, but before she moves on, there needs to be a closure. Jone is one of Mollies, the queer-feminist collective that had been living for a decade at a trailer park next to Ostkreuz, Berlin.

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.

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.

Looking Back Before You Leap

A collection of memories from a tumultuous time at University.

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.

Inspection 01

A closeup examination of a tree in the morning light.

New Life

"Bagong Buhay" is a short experimental film that dispels the common belief that packing up and moving to a new place will magically improve one's quality of life. The film challenges this presumption by portraying two contrasting ways of life through objects and locations, encouraging viewers to think critically about the complexities of what makes a better life. In the Philippines, it's believed that relocating to a new area will bring about positive changes in one's existence. True satisfaction is a complex and multifaceted notion, and "Bagong Buhay" encourages us to ponder that relocating to a new place is not a surefire way to attain it.

And there was evening and there was morning. The first day

With the lack of personal video archive, Youhanna (the filmmaker) creates false memories using lost home videotapes shot between the 1990s and 2000s in Europe, Africa, and Asia, with the help of an Artificial intelligence programme, until a real, personal video archive surfaces, transporting him into the past to relive one more memory with his late mother.

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.

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.

Fotofinish 2

Documentary filmed on the occasion of the “2003, Odyssey in Space Zero” operation inside the Spazio Zero Theater in Rome. The document, filmed between 21 October and 30 November 2003, recounts the representation of Fotofinish not as a single and continuous work, but as the evolution over time of the moods and movements of the actors who, replica after replica, have developed an awareness of the space and arrived at the joy of staging.

No Norte da Saudade

Kalú Kariú, a trans artist and poet from northern Brazil, reflects on how “saudade”, an untranslatable feeling of profound nostalgic longing, becomes a powerful source of creation. After eight years away from his roots, Kalú invites us into a space where memory, distance and identity intertwine, and art is born from absence.

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.

Under the Weight of a Waking Dream

‘Under the Weight of a Waking Dream’ is Zefier's debut swan song to the ending year. Comprised of poetry and endless enumerations is a diaristic film chronicling the lessons and contradictions found throughout the human experience.

The Pleasure in Pain

A short film that follows key figures of the London kink scene on an exploration into BDSM and the notorious fetish event Klub Verboten. The film touches upon themes of psychology, trauma, LGBTQ+ rights and black representation.

memory file 01

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Mother of Fog

In what could be considered a follow up to Al Qasimi’s 2020 work Mother of Fire, she once again invokes the figure of the jinn (spirits in Islamic mythology) to explore the ghosts of British imperialism in the UAE. As its spectre lingers on the horizon, two teenage girls seek to liberate a pirate damned to spend purgatory on a site now being developed into a hotel. Originally commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present, Al Qasimi entangles historical narratives with contemporary notions of piracy. In examining how it has been historically and culturally represented, new perspectives of old mythographies come into focus. (Myriam Mouflih)

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.

Interlude 01

First part of a series of interludes between other projects based purely in experimentation with data moshing, glitching and in general, breaking and corrupting the digital image.

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.