Mendota: Symphony of a Lake (2025)

1,2,3... Barcelona!

Tourists eating and taking photos. Tourists strolling and taking photos. Tourists bathing on the beach and taking more photos. Barcelona has become an overexploited photocall to the point of paroxysm, and this is what this film shows by turning the camera and pointing towards the visitors. A small gesture that, added to a powerful sound contrast and a caustic sense of humour, exposes without subterfuge a grotesque normality.

Winged Migration

This documentary follows various migratory bird species on their long journeys from their summer homes to the equator and back, covering thousands of miles and navigating by the stars. These arduous treks are crucial for survival, seeking hospitable climates and food sources. Birds face numerous challenges, including crossing oceans and evading predators, illness, and injury. Although migrations are undertaken as a community, birds disperse into family units once they reach their destinations, and every continent is affected by these migrations, hosting migratory bird species at least part of the year.

Dunderklumpen!

Dunderklumpen lives all alone in the mountains of Jämtland. One Midsummer's Eve when he feels very lonely he sets off on a journey to find friends.

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.

Man with a Movie Camera

A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.

Sound Spring

Unfolding in a series of eight vignettes, Sound Spring explores the history ofYellow Springs, Ohio over hundreds of years, as narrated by its residents incomical scenes: one interviewee rollerblades and reads the village's water meters, another stands on his head in a breakdancing freeze. The villagers describe American history-their ancestors' settlements after slavery, a friendship with Coretta Scott King, and Ohio's Trail of Tears- among other more personal details of village life. The wording of their recollections is imperfect, unsure-in fact they are all re-stagings of their previous audio interviews. Through performing their own previously recorded media, villagers uncover layers of time and storytelling.

One Crow Sorrow

A personal city symphony where an eco-anxious soul explores the intersections of natural and artificial. The filmmaker’s internal conflicts are reflected through the contradictions of early spring. This experimental short documentary invites the viewer to take the time and truly pay attention to one’s surroundings.

I Am Belfast

Belfast, it's a city that is changing, changing because the people are leaving? But one came back, a 10,000 year old woman who claims that she is the city itself.

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.”

Passersby

Six lives intersect in a city symphony of chance encounters.

IMG 0000

A frenetic found-footage documentary made entirely from “lost” unlabeled media on YouTube - weaving together nearly a thousand raw videos, each mistakenly or mindlessly uploaded under a generic filename (e.g., IMG 1326, IMG 5493…).

New York Portrait

Peter Hutton's New York trilogy. An act of urban archaeology, a chronicle of indelible impressions of the city.

Máxima

A multi-billion-dollar mining project is launched by the American Newmont Mining Corporation and lays claim to the land belonging to Preuvian highlander Máxima Acuña.

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?

Mirror of Holland

In this short film Bert Haanstra gives his vision - from the water – of a tranquil Holland. During filming he held the camera upside down and afterwards put the images ‘up right’ again in the film. By doing this, we see the ‘usual’ waterfront, but transformed by the rippling of the water. In this way Mirror of Holland became a modern looking experimental film. However this did not devalue the Dutch sentiment regarding waterfronts that are so trusted to so many.

Rambling 'Round Radio Row #5

The Happines Boys Billy Jones and Earnie Hare are invited to a party, but separate themselves from the rest of the guests, so they can not be urged to perform. However, they are watching the other guests from radio doing their stuff: song team Reece & Dunn, as well as the Funnyboners are singing, Smith Ballew and Frances Langford are exchanging love songs, Arthur Tracy tries his luck with a girl, just to find out that she prefers Bing Crosby and 4 orchestra leaders are trying to find out, who the best conductor is, by conducting a piece of recorded music....

It Is Not the Brazilian Homosexuals Who Are Perverse, But the Situation in Which They Live

Two queer Brazilians go skinny dipping in a lake where they talk about love, sex, colonialism and migration, on a pandemic summer afternoon in Berlin.

Eldest Among the Seven

Sampaloc Lake - the most prominent of the seven lakes of San Pablo City has provided shelter, employment and inspiration to its immediate community for countless decades. In return, the natural resource suffered from indiscriminate use of the residents themselves and the consequences of rapid urbanization. Recently, the local government have implemented a clearing of all residential structures within the legal easement of the dying lake to pave the way for a tourism master plan that endeavors to balance revenue and environmental protection. In the eve of the clearing operations, film maker Dennis Empalmado documented the final musings of the residents, advocates, and artists whose lives revolved around the 99 hectare crater lake.

Dark Water: The Murder of Shani Warren

Twenty-six-year-old Shani Warren was found drowned in Taplow Lake, Buckinghamshire, with her hands tied and feet bound together in 1987. Revealing how it took a forensic breakthrough to solve the 35-year mystery of the death of The Lady in the Lake.

Broadway by Light

An experimental meditation on Times Square's marquees and iconic advertising that captures the concurrently seedy and dazzling aspects of New York's Great White Way.

Transmission

An audio-visual experience through the perspective of an iPhone depicting a harmonious city during the day quickly descend into technological madness as night falls.

Gorges du Verdon: Les défis du plus grand canyon d'Europe

Plot unavailable

Symphony of a City

An impressionistic short film celebrating Stockholm’s rhythms of life, blending images of its streets, waterways, people, and architecture into a visual “symphony.” Winner of the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Short Subject, One-Reel in 1949 — the first Swedish film ever to receive an Oscar.

Ånga om sommaren

A trip on the Swedish lake Mälaren by a 115-year-old steamboat. The journey between Stockholm and Mariefred takes 3,5 hours. The steamboat Mariefred was manufactured over a hundred years ago and is one of the last steam-powered vessels on the lake. The steam whistle sounds when Maja, as she is called in Mariefred, steers into the bay towards the small town. A fanfare for the summer!

Der Vierwaldstättersee: Blaues Juwel der Schweiz

Plot unavailable

Celles et Ceux

Originally, a small village: Celles in the Occitanie region, 10 kilometers from Lodève, was to be swallowed up by the waters of Lac du Salagou when it was created in 1969. At the time, its inhabitants were expropriated but ultimately surprised, the village has never been submerged. Inhabited for more than 50 years now, the children of this bruised village are fighting to bring their little town back to life. The mayor of Celles, Joëlle Goudard, and the municipal councilors mobilized several years ago to revive the village. But what is the project that proposes to welcome new inhabitants? Will this dream come true?

The Hart of London

"The Hart of London" is an endlessly layered tour de force. It explores life and death, the sense of place and personal displacement, and the intricate aesthetics of representation. It is a personal and spiritual film, marked inevitably by Chambers’s knowledge that he had leukemia. The late American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage said of Hart, "If I named the five greatest films [ever made], this has got to be one of them." Even this high praise falls short of hyperbole. The Hart of London is at the centre of Chambers’s extraordinary achievement.

Eden Lake

When a young couple goes to a remote wooded lake for a romantic getaway, their quiet weekend is shattered by an aggressive group of local kids. Rowdiness quickly turns to rage as the teens terrorize the couple in unimaginable ways, and a weekend outing becomes a bloody battle for survival.

Nell

In a remote woodland cabin, a small town doctor discovers Nell — a beautiful young hermit woman with many secrets.

Tale of the Land

After witnessing her parents' death, May develops a condition that knocks her unconscious on land, forcing her to live in a lake house as she fights to reclaim her life.

The Last House on the Left

When athletic teen Mari Collingwood opts to hang out with her friend Paige in town rather than spend an evening in with her parents vacationing at the family's remote lake house, it marks the beginning of a night no one is going to forget.

Reno: A City Symphony Film

Two friends travel around the city of Reno, Nevada, and go skating at a nearby parking garage.

Zombie Lake

In a small village, somewhere in France, German soldiers, killed and thrown into the lake by the Resistance during WWII, come back.

The Device

Abby and Rebecca reunite to spread their mother's ashes at the family lake house, and uncover the nefarious object that divided them years earlier.

Mean Creek

Teenagers living in small-town Oregon take a boat trip for a birthday celebration. When they get an idea to play a mean trick on the town bully, it suddenly goes too far. Soon they're forced to deal with the unexpected consequences of their actions.

Funny Games

Two psychotic young men take a mother, father, and son hostage in their vacation cabin and force them to play sadistic "games" with one another for their own amusement.

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood

Tina Shepard, a telekinetic teenage girl, accidentally unchains Jason from his watery grave, allowing him to go on another killing spree in the area.

Cabin Fever

A group of five college graduates rent a cabin in the woods and begin to fall victim to a horrifying flesh-eating virus, which attracts the unwanted attention of the homicidal locals.

Leave Her to Heaven

A socialite marries a prominent novelist, which spurs a violent, obsessive, and dangerous jealousy in her.

Lake Placid 2

Man-eating crocodiles return to the lake as two males and one aggressive female crocodile, which is protecting her nest, wreak havoc on the locals.

Lake Dead

Three sisters and a group of their friends take a trip to the home of the recently deceased grandfather -- who died a particularly grisly death -- to learn more about the promise of an inheritance, only to encounter a family of psychos who have taken up residence in the old man's cabin.