Openland is an art film guided by issues surrounding micro states and its derivative definitions. Through intertwining interviews, meta-narratives, and digital landscapes, Openland unfurls a dialogue between consciousness, individuality and collectivity.
8.0The documentary, filmed in England in autumn 2020, sheds light on the genesis and background of the social drama.
7.0The Mejia family emigrated from Oaxaca to Fresno, California 40 years ago. Filmmaker Trisha ZIff filmed the family in 1996, and returns now to see the changes that have settled over them, and follows the family on their return to Mexico.
7.87-year-old Sasha has always known that she is a girl. Sasha’s family has recently accepted her gender identity, embracing their daughter for who she truly is while working to confront outdated norms and find affirmation in a small community of rural France.
7.5On June 11th, 1997, Philippe Kahn created the first camera phone solution to share pictures instantly on public networks. The impetus for this invention was the birth of Kahn's daughter, when he jerry-rigged a mobile phone with a digital camera and sent photos in real time. In 2016 Time Magazine included Kahn's first camera phone photo in their list of the 100 most influential photos of all time.
Image by Carlos Casas. Double screen projection with live soundtrack. Images and sound captured on location. Somewhere in the tundra, Chukotka Region, Northeastern Siberia, Russian Federation. Music by Prurient. Published by Von Archives. N 66° 37’ 916, W 172° 40’ 353, Sept 2006.
A dark and magical visit to the fabled Parisian address Rue Fontaine 42. This was the residence of André Breton, the mastermind of surrealism, who surrounded himself with an impressive collection of modern, Western art and ethnographic objects from Oceania and North America. The collection was sold and divided up in 2003 at a controversial auction. 'The Trick Brain' is a delirious montage and a trip back in time to Breton's private art collection, where Atkins has been scouring the archives and come up with a possessing interior film of the place that once was, complete with surrealistic paintings, scores of Indian figures and hundreds of other displayed rarities. The film's soundtrack is provided by an observant narrator, who reveals to us that the objects shown are not necessarily what they claim to be - but instead are catalysts for some kind of wonderful linguistic virus which reveals the real identity of things.
5.7An odyssey through Beethoven’s lasting presence and influence in our modern world – viewed through the eyes of the composer himself.
8.0Disobedience tells the David vs. Goliath tale of front line leaders battling for a livable world. Filmed in the Philippines, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Cambodia and the United States, it weaves together these riveting stories with insights from the most renowned voices on social justice and climate. Disobedience is personal, passionate and powerful - the stakes could not be higher, nor the mission more critical.
4.5Canadian Pacific I is made up of a series of slowly dissolved shots done from the same framing over several months. The camera frames a window with a railway yard in the foreground, a bay in the space behind it, and misty mountains in the extreme distance. Trains occasionally pass by in the foreground. Huge ships move across the bay. Blue mists hover over the mountain heads.
5.0Canadian Pacific II is designed as a companion piece to Canadian Pacific I. Shot from a window two storeys higher and in the building adjacent to the artists’s studio of the previous year, one enters into a dream state… an involvement with a vocabulary of seeing and feeling by subtle transitions of the passage of time
0.0The Philippines remains the only nation without legalized divorce. Through the perspectives of a controversial priest, a women's rights advocate, and a child of a separated couple, this documentary explores whether the legalization of divorce in the country would be for better or worse.
0.0Since the enactment of the Anti-Boryokudan Act and Yakuza exclusion ordinances, the number of Yakuza members reduced to less than 60,000. In the past 3 years, about 20,000 members have left from Yakuza organizations. However, just numbers can’t tell you the reality. What are they thinking, how are they living now? The camera zooms in on the Yakuza world. Are there basic human rights for them?
7.3When two of artist Barbora Kysilkova’s most valuable paintings are stolen from a gallery at Frogner in Oslo, the police are able to find the thief after a few days, but the paintings are nowhere to be found. Barbora goes to the trial in hopes of finding clues, but instead she ends up asking the thief if she can paint a portrait of him. This will be the start of a very unusual friendship. Over three years, the cinematic documentary follows the incredible story of the artist looking for her stolen paintings, while at the same time turning the thief into art.
Social democracy propaganda film about future dreams for Denmark in 1960. Although Denmark is free again, the former opponent and worker, Svend, is disillusioned: "It is all something soft". The dream of the future is incarnated by a young woman, Karen, who shows Svend the visions of a better life in the 'youth's land'. There are homes and a nuclear-powered car for everyone.
0.0Approximately, because so-called "ethnic" statistics are prohibited, there are an estimated 3.3 million black French citizens. Distant descendants of slaves from the Caribbean or "indigenous" peoples from the French colonial empire in Africa, they constitute a minority that is often discriminated against. Isabelle Boni-Claverie, a mixed-race woman raised in the affluent neighborhoods of Paris, daughter of an Ivorian politician and granddaughter of Alphonse Boni, a Black man who became a magistrate of the French Republic in the 1930s, examines what is blocking the social advancement of Black French people and the full recognition of their citizenship.
8.2A paralysingly beautiful documentary with a global vision—an odyssey through landscape and time—that attempts to capture the essence of life.
Migrating by sea from Holland as an eight-year-old, Dirk de Bruyn went on to be a doyen of Australian experimental cinema. But as this intimate film reveals, his work is suffused with the trauma of migration, and the struggle to recognise himself as a ‘new Australian'. In conversation with documentarian Steven McIntyre, Dirk guides us through more than 40 years of his filmmaking: the early years exploring technique and technology, a subsequent phase of unflinching self-examination brought on by upheaval and overseas travel, and more recent projects where he attempts a fusion of personal, cultural, and historical identity. What emerges is an inspiring, rugged, and at times poignant portrait of an artist committed to self-expression and self-discovery through the medium of film.
