Self-defense (2021)

The Role of Chance

"The Role of Chance" ("La part du hasard") focuses exclusively on drawing and painting techniques used by the painter Henri Dimier. Shot over several weeks in the same artist's studio, the film shows works in their different phases, processes rarely explained or little known. It also addresses many practical issues (choice of paper, pigment grinding, reports drawings, put the tiles, cliches, etc) as well as broader questions of method and inspiration (use of space, the role of contours, power of suggestion perspectives, use of random processes). Patrick Bokanowski sought with this film to restore the spirit of this teaching, showing how to bend a note or sometimes revealing an essential mystery of creation.

Moments choisis des Histoire(s) du cinéma

A very personal look at the history of cinema directed, written and edited by Jean-Luc Godard in his Swiss residence in Rolle for ten years (1988-98); a monumental collage, constructed from film fragments, texts and quotations, photos and paintings, music and sound, and diverse readings; a critical, beautiful and melancholic vision of cinematographic art. (Abridged version of the original collection of eight short films).

By the Lake

Bokanowski returns to the complex - and mind-bending - optical array of pinholes, mirrors, prisms, and refractive substrates of his earlier film, La Plage to create the whimsical and playful Au bord du lac. The film is composed of mundane, everyday scenes of recreation and leisure on an idyllic, sunny day at a park that overlooks a lake - rowing a boat, playing a game of volleyball, rollerskating, bicycling, reading a newspaper, sunbathing, riding on horseback, or strolling on the promenade - shot through optical distortions to create fractured and knotted images that resemble embellished, gothic fairytale illustrations or appear to resolve into morphing, geometric patterns of fluid motion. Evoking the vibrant colors and sun-soaked palette of an invigorated Vincent van Gogh in Arles, Bokanowski transforms the quotidian into an infinitely mesmerizing dynamic kaleidoscope of shape-shifting textures and self-reconstituting objects of organic, abstract art.

Reflections of Nature

Reflections of Nature is an experimental short film, touching on the relationship man has with mother nature, and how they coexist in this ever changing modern world.

A Solar Dream

Behold the struggle between light and dark, the two principles that are at the very heart of the cinematic deed. A Solar Dream takes the seventh art’s ability to generate imaginary and phantasmagorical worlds to the limit, multiplied here by Michèle Bokanowski’s enveloping music. A precious plastic and sonic gem.

Solar Beats

Walking towards the fire. In a ceaseless stream of light, people, landscapes and objects lead us to mysterious regions. French filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski’s work is hard to classify - and all the richer for it. Together with his wife Michèle, whose musique concrète compositions form the basis of the sound design, Bokanowski offers a prolonged, dense and visually visceral experience of the kind that is rare in cinema today. Difficult to define and locate, its strangeness is quite unique.

Flammes

Memories split in the space.

L'indomptable

2018 short film by Patrick Bokanowski

Soar

Choreography of an imaginary journey.

The Dream Machine

A woman experiments with a Dreamachine, hoping to escape trouble. Within the light and dark of the machine, violent emotions awaken.

The Sacred Laptop

A man named Cukik trapped in a paradoxical dream about the man he is watching on his laptop. This madness was contagious even to the mysterious man in his dreams.

The Achalunés

Organic forms are beating and resorbing, reflections dance to the rhythm of Henk BADINGS 'music, circles of light flash like disturbing eyes, perpetual metamorphoses evoke a great living and throbbing organism.

Janapada

Rudra has come back one morning, has return to his friend Saruar's home. He had disappeared from home leaving no cue, a year ago. Saruar first came to know about Rudra's disappearance in Rudra's mother's call. Then he had gone to Rudra's home and saw how his agitated parents and elder brother were tracing out reasons of his desertion. Rudra do not answer any of these questions of Saruar now. He become immutable and eloquent. He only replies that he is tired and cinema experience Rudra's exhaustion from this world's journey in a non-narrative way. Rudra's consciousness become aware of a bigger crisis. Rudra just express interest to go to sleep for a while.

Breakfast

Relentlessly reworking ‘real’ images, using techniques borrowed from painting and animated film, Patrick Bokanowski is an author of stature, capable of creating an insane and cataclysmic universe of unquestionable beauty.

The Beach

Reworked and colored images of people playing at the seashore.

Living In a Daydream

A film about a person who is remembering the outside world when he is trapped in restrictions during the covid-19 outbreak.

Vers Syracuse

Dreamlike sea bathing and horse rides. Colors take the plunge, the horizon blazes, breaking waves pound endlessly. A strange journey through depths of sound and vision.

Aniquilação

An experiment on language and its inability to contain reality, "Aniquilação" is a collage made with sounds, images and words. From a continuous pulse, noises and sound traces form a cadence that merges with landscapes and details of a world full of things, colors, phenomena and creatures. The language is represented by scraps of word-search magazines, of which words, crosswords and riddles insist on defining and conceptualizing the things, sounds and images, which creates a gradual saturation that leads to the complete abstraction of everything. Concept, images and editing by Xavier Braun, soundtrack and sound design by Victor Rodrigues – as QORPO. Brasil, 2021

Un rêve

Experimental film by Patrick Bokanowski.

Une visite au musée

Plot unavailable

Homemade

Homemade is the cinematic and profoundly intimate five-year journey with decorated Force Reconnaissance Marine, Adam Sorensen, and his wife, Victoria, as they navigate marriage and the effects of Post Traumatic Stress, Traumatic Brain Injury, and addiction.

Abbott and Costello in the Movies

See America's funniest comedy team in rare movie trailers, hilarious highlights, belly-busting bloopers, and scenes from their starring feature films, all the way from first (Buck privates) to last (Dance With Me Henry). After early success in burlesque and radio, they made their movie debut with supporting roles in One Night in the Tropics and got top billing in their very next film, becoming the nation's #1 boxoffice draw of the '40s. The Andrews Sisters, Dick Powell, Shemp Howard, Martha Raye, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Dorsey, Lucille Ball and Marjorie Main co-star in films like In the Navy, Rio Rita, In Society, Little Giant, and Mexican Hayride. They also go to Hollywood and Venus (not Mars), and meet Frankenstein's Monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man, Boris Karloff, the Invisible Man, Captain Kidd, Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Keystone Kops, and the Mummy.

1 jaar oorlog in Oekraïne met een Vlaming aan het front

Plot unavailable

The Sharpness of the Scissors

As if filling out the profile for a dating app, the director dissects his story and builds a log of desire. He converges images of his childhood in a hairdressing salon in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, the codes of cruising in the late 90s, and the daily life of the throuple he was part of for 7 years.

Mikhaïl Gorbatchev, l'homme qui a changé le monde

Plot unavailable

Carmina

Carmina, a 20-year-old girl, hopes to have a night like any other in the city, which unexpectedly turns into an introspective, cathartic journey into her turbulent past when she accepts an invitation from a man much older than herself to visit his apartment. This direct film experiment captures an overwhelming real-life patriarchal dynamic.

Sister J

Lim Jaechun, who worked as a factory worker for 30 years and was suddenly laid off, spent 10 years in a tent as a sit-in. Director Lee Soojung calls her ‘sister J’. 10 years into the fight for reinstatement, Jaechun now writes, plays guitar, and sings while living in a tent. She says her personality has changed after 7 years of being laid-off from “originally timid” to being very lively. Sister J deals with a struggle for reinstatement, but it is actually a film about a single person, as stated in the title. This documentary brings artistic vitality to the ‘4,464 days’ Sister J spends on the site, with lines and music driven from the forms of the play into the cinema.

Sasang: The Town on Sand

This is a film about workers, a film about the poor who were dragged out of homes and about his father. Director Park films his father who has lived as a laborer all his life, his weakened body, and nine years of time flowing over it. Park brings an impartial view of his father’s life. His father does not try to impart a particular value in front of the camera. What remains is to wonder where this cruel reality comes from.

Song Hae 1927

Song Hae 1927 is a documentary about the character all Koreans know. Song Hae is the oldest active celebrity at 94 and the longest-running host of the ‘National Singing Contest.’ He has been a singer, comedian, actor, and radio DJ, but never a star. Song Hae 1927 shows a backstage face we’ve never seen. His closed eyes and serious look seem like a good place to hide sadness and pain. Song Hae is a man of few words. To the death of his wife, he only said, ‘I wish I had had a chance to say goodbye to him.’

Good Light, Good Air

The title Good Light, Good Air is oddly paradoxical. Keenly working at the point where his artistic identity and persistent attention on modern Korean history meet, director Im in this film focused on where the history of oppression and struggle intersect between Gwangju and Buenos Aires. In both cities, a great number of people who fought against the dictatorship were slaughtered and disappeared. The people of both societies still live with that trauma. When the testimonies of the victims of the two cities cross over, the film gives us chills as the eerie history of the two is very similar. Through Good Light, Good Air, director Im asks us how we will remember the past from where we stand right now.

Why Planes Vanish: The Hunt for MH370

Initially technology fails to track a Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 when it mysteriously disappears. Can new evidence help locate the plane and finally solve aviation’s greatest mystery?

War Zone: Bear Grylls Meets President Zelenskyy

Bear Grylls travels to Ukraine to meet and interview the Ukrainian president. Along the way, he witnesses the consequences of conflict for the people of Ukraine and learns more about the experiences of ordinary Ukrainians.