Reflections of a society (2021)

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.

Guisado on Sunset

Missed connection regret at that one late-night spot—the kind you keep playing back in your head but not quite ever remembering right, until it starts to look like something else.

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.

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.

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.

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.

genesis

In 7 episodes, a subject traverses through various phases of existence. He fully explores different facets of the human condition— a calm birth, a stifled growth, an outrage against injustice, a cumulation of scars, and the return to innocence.

Tree

Structural study of a tree. Light, water and air coax it out of the soil in a manner foregrounding time’s relativity to different forms of life on Earth. Made the day my brother got his fork-lift license.

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.

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.

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?

13 figures de Sarah Beauchesne au 71, rue Blanche

Plot unavailable

Fair Use Vol 1. (All This Trouble)

A compilation of TV news about black culture.

Jo

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lake

Lake gazes down at a still body of water from a birds-eye view, while a group of artists peacefully float in and out of the frame or work to stay at the surface. As they glide farther away and draw closer together, they reach out in collective queer and desirous exchanges — holding hands, drifting over and under their neighbors, making space, taking care of each other with a casual, gentle intimacy while they come together as individual parts of a whole. The video reflects on notions of togetherness and feminist theorist Silvia Federici’s call to “reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and our bodies.”

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 Asian Ghost Story

A cinematic and conceptually inventive film that explores the haunting memories of Asia’s late 20th-century modernization through the large-scale export of wigs during the Cold War. Yet, in every wig resides a ghost from the imperial past.

Empire of My Melodious Mind

Be. Belonging. Words on vintage flash cards shuffle past in a stream-of-consciousness that shows the mind working, assigning labels and names to things through love and language. In the space of a moment, perception embarks on an epic journey of tongues, through Cantonese and English sounds and Ektachrome memories that form the characters and identity of this American-born Asian filmmaker.

One

Collected as part of the Fluxfilm Anthology (a multi-reel compendium of 37 short films assembled by Fluxus founder and central operator George Maciunas), One captures the lifespan of a single match recorded at 2,000 frames per second using a 16mm high-speed camera. The frame rate is then decelerated to the standard 24fps for presentation. The film emphasizes each gesture, sway and flare of flame as the small pinewood carrier ignites across the landscape of the filmstrip and screen, signalling the drama and poetics of this ”minor” event before the fire is extinguished. One also stands as an unassuming beacon, immortalizing on film the essence of some of Ono’s early concerns as an artist. At the slightest touch of fire, they burst into flame. Strike everywhere. Strike often.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

The Garages

The closed microcosm of garage co-ops, where the socio-economic environment has blended with personal space, provides a step back in time. Men are still boys, but their tinkering is both the trade and hobby of individual entrepreneurs, since self-exploitation as leisure time activity is a time capsule where neoliberalism has enclosed the postindustrial proletariat. Inventors, geniuses, crazy scientists, and men with golden hands - you will find them in garages.

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.

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.

Animot

The experimental documentary filmed at rescue centres in Prague and Vlašim refuses the anthropocentric perspective and views the world through the eyes of wounded animals. The term Animot was taken over from Jacque Derrida. While the French philosopher and deconstructivist uses the term to refer to everything animalistic and non-human, the film, on the other hand, uses intimate details to point out the proximity between human beings and animals. They are connected by their vulnerability, helplessness and mortality.

IMÁGENES CAPITALES

Two friends dreaming.

The Noise of Time

In the town of Xoco, the spirit of an old villager awakens in search of its lost home. Along its journey, the ghost discovers that the town still celebrates its most important festivities, but also learns that the construction of a new commercial complex called Mítikah will threaten the existence of both the traditions and the town itself.

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.

Tomatoes

Across the installation's multiple channels, the camera circles a group of artists as they sit together in a field eating, licking, and squeezing ripe tomatoes. Throughout the ever-changing scene, kisses, whispers, and caresses are shared with a casual, gentle intimacy that reflects interconnectivity and abundance. These queer and desirous exchanges constitute a portrait of collectivity wherein individuals come together as distinct parts of a whole.

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.

A Field of Sheep

A field full of sheep is observed through the camera, preserving that moment in time forever.

Born In Summer

A filmmaker plays with diary-docu and fiction as his camera joins his ventures into a phone dating club. Bored to death, hormones running, and desperately wanting to talk to someone his own age (preferably a girl), he walks into a local phone dating club. Can he hook up with someone? Borrowing the form of a diary-movie, the director unfurls an unpredictable and imaginative look into his own persona. 8mm experimental film by Murakami Kenji, the film that made his name.

The Mermaid

A trip that the author makes to a distant beach trying to find the place where his grandfather made a painting years ago.

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.

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.

When The Blues Goes Marching In

A young man narrated the details of his dream from last night to his father about the celebration of demonstration, anger, and graduation.

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.

Chang Gyeong

"Emotional memories that had formed the ambiguous boundaries between reality and fantasy began to divide exactly in two, and at the same time there was no emotion left on either side of reality and fantasy." Chang Gyeong is the name of a palace in central Seoul - a palace that was turned into a zoo by the occupying Japanese.