Once Faithful (2024)

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.

Grid

A ritual of grids, reflections and chasms; a complete state of entropy; a space that devours itself; a vertigo that destroys the gravity of the Earth; a trap that captures us inside the voids of the screen of light: «That blank arena wherein converge at once the hundred spaces» (Hollis Frampton).

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?

Here We Are

A housekeeper received a film made by her daughter. It's a film that combines found footages of Thailand during the Cold War with the present days images of Bangkok. Through these images she tells a story of the house owner and her own story of coming to the capital.

Basin of Souls

Rua de Santa Catarina, a street that was formerly home to dozens of local businesses and hundreds of Porto residents, now sees a crowd of tourists attracted by the cheap, disposable amenities that are popping up everywhere at once. Gentrification has decontextualized Portuguese culture, rendering the landscape uncanny. The Basin Woman, a symbol of the female workers of the historic Bolhão Market, is chased down by seagulls in the midst of this transcendent chaos.

The We Should Game

Fame driven Ken Dean becomes the subject of a documentary when he attempts to start a pornography company. Following the failure of the company, Ken uses his father's religious music to start a Christian rock band but finds himself trapped in a gay conversion cult.

Papercut

A young woman rediscovers a letter from an old friend, forcing her to reconcile with the past.

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.

Giri Chit

GIRI CHIT tells a tale of the subtle trace of irreconcilable worlds. A worker driving a mobile sweeper in hypnotic circles across an already immaculate surface. The high drama of cosplay aficionados clamoring to be seen. A cast of thousands toiling hundreds of feet above the street. Giri translates as ‘duty’ in Japanese, but the concept is in fact far more complicated. Giri is a sort of interpersonal political capital that informs careers, family relations, and much more. Its presence and flow is palpable in Japan, where this film was shot. A “giri chit” then may be a hypothetical voucher for this intangible flow (with a tip of the cap to Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland”). Selected Screenings and Awards: DaVinci Film Festival (Best Experimental Film), Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Dallas Videofest, ICDOCS Film Festival, NewFilmmakers at Anthology Film Archives, Oxford Film Festival, Director’s Lounge Berlin

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?

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.

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.

Twin City Twist

A silent dance documenting a brief visit to Minneapolis in the fall of 2022. A reflection on the sleeping city's tumultuous recent history through a recollected interaction and a plea for continued disturbance. An entry in an ongoing video and film series, Twin City Twist was shot on Kodak Tri-X reversal super 8 film with kaleidoscopic lenses. The film was scanned and edited digitally.

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.

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.

Metropia

Plot unavailable

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.

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.

A Breath Of Summer

Feel the rush of the breathtakingly beautiful National Parks of California with one deep breath of the summer air.

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.

Nostalgia for the Lake

A vision from Limbo, where the canoeist of the eternal lake floats in his boat, between sleep and wakefulness. When he sleeps, he dreams of the everyday of a parallel time. when he wakes up, the same song haunts him again and again. his boat, “ara” (time, in guarani) travels through time like a shooting star.

Banheiro dos Campeões

A map explores cruising spots in Natal/RN, where there are always champions in the bathrooms.

Apathy, Limbo & Nothingness

A teenager reflects on his current life situation, as he smokes a cigarette. He expresses concerns about the way he lives, has lived and will live. Past, present and future.

Englouties

In the heart of Saint-Malo, there's a gigantic area, covering 1/3 of the city, off-limits to the public. It's a part of the commercial port that's mainly accessible via an architecturally unusual footbridge that limits access. An inaccessible place that will be the first to disappear beneath the waves in a few years' time. Only strange sounds reach us from afar: whirring, construction noise, sirens wailing... This parallel world is bustling day and night. But it's in the depths of the night that unfamiliar sounds and lights arouse the most fantasies.

Otro sol

Otro Sol is a group of real and invented characters trapped in a film. It is also a purgatory of retired thieves that takes place on the coast of the Atacama Desert. The film is circular and seeks to invent and verify the myth of Alberto Cándia, a Chilean international thief who stole the Cathedral of Cadiz in Andalucia in the late 1980s.

HRV

Plot unavailable

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.

Guaret

Pedro is Mallorcan, born to a mother from Burgos and a father from Mallorca. Due to his distant relationship with his father, Pedro doesn't fully master Mallorcan as a language. He turns to the works of Damià Huguet to remember his father, as only his poems can fill the void left by his death. The poet's words transport Pedro to his childhood and his roots, even though many of the words are unknown to him, despite them belonging to his language. This becomes the driving force behind the protagonist's search for his own identity, his origins, what it means to be a man, father-son relationships, collective identity, and "mallorquinness". Pedro constantly questions the emotions stirred by Huguet's poetry, and, most importantly, who he is and where he belongs.

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.

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.

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.

Harmonies

Japanese two female singer-songwriters, Kazumi Nikaido (also known as Nika Soup) and Saya Source (of Tenniscoats, Maher Shalal Hash Baz). Nika is known for her chameleon-like ability to transform her voice, while Saya has a melancholic and straightforward singing style. Both have distinct voices that can be identified immediately, but when they sing in unison, they create melodies that are truly sublime. They have released charming album IPIYA (2005) features playful pop songs reminiscent of nursery rhymes, repetitive mantra-like tracks. The two went back and forth from their homes in Hiroshima and Tokyo to create beautifully diverse songs for this record. This is the documentary of "how" and "why" and also "where" they had made the very original music. Many interviews, rehearsals, free sessions, live performances are included. There is a childlike innocence to this documentary, and offers a peak into the unique world of how they make music.

Pico Sacro [The Holy Mountain]

In a leafy forest, a Galician sovereign who longs to attain wisdom meets a sorcerer, who tells him: “Go back to your country and study the Earth and the Stars in the sky; anywhere in the world reflects an image of it. You will ride on this arrow, which you must keep for a hundred years and a day. After this time, stick it in the widest valley of all those you possess, with the tip facing the sky. Then the Moon will come and, just as it exerts its action on the waters of the sea, it will act on the arrow, turning it into a holy mountain." - Legend about the Pico Sacro Inspired by Hokusai's views of Mount Fuji and Cézanne's paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, "Pico Sacro [The Holy Mountain]" aims to reveal the mystery and the magic that underlie reality.

Death in Vegas

The life, death, and resurrection of Elvis Presley, as he is transformed from man into product. Composed primarily of an illustrated biography filmed with a microscope camera.

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.

24

Plot unavailable

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.

unbroken rhythms

a poem. trees. fragments of fritz. love—and nothing besides!

Oat Boy

Folk portraiture, images of children in suburbia.

PRESENCE

Presence narrates the journey of Thati, a woman determined to overcome her anxiety attacks through surfing. She finds refuge in the waves, where the surfboard becomes her ally and personal therapy.