It’s New Year’s Eve and while the Brussels’ city streets are teeming with drunken revelers, the paths of two solitary souls will cross. Max, a poor sod, is drowning his existential confusion in alcohol. Julie, a young woman, finds it impossible to reconcile herself with the bitter realities of her life. But on this festive night, they’ll try to put aside their personal mess and painful pasts. Unfortunately, that past remains hot on their heels. Max’s urgent money needs drove him to commit a robbery with a trio of idiots. Juliette missed a meeting with a bottle of sleeping pills and feels the urge to try again if she can’t find anything worth living. The clock is ticking away to midnight. Whatever happens, there will be fireworks!
Max
An abstract, minimalistic showpiece of late structuralist film made up of 360-degree pans across a children’s playground – and to one of the gods of his cinephilic pantheon, Anthony Mann. In concrete terms, he alludes here to a scene in Mann’s Glenn Miller Story in which black-and-white documentary material from the Second World War is in experimental film fashion nightmarishly intercut into a scene, breaking with Hollywood conventions.
A costume designer is sent to the Catskills for an interactive theatre piece set in the 1920s. When she arrives things seem dark, strange and off. She soon realizes she is part of a student film.
Three teenagers from the industrial part of Los Angeles try to form a punk rock band in Hollywood, in this feature length film by renowned artist Raymond Pettibon.
Featuring a cast that includes Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, Mike Watt of the legendary hardcore band Minutemen, and Pettibon himself, this deadpan narrative pays dubious homage to the 1960's radical underground. In this crudely rendered home video of a commune of stoned revolutionaries, the cameras are hand-held, the edits in-camera, and the dialogue is wryly on-target. Pettibon's band of outsiders reenacts a countercultural moment defined by rock music, drugs, and ideological paradox — and in so doing, captures their own late-80's West Coast grunge milieu as well.
Diwan, a lyric anthology, an outdoor movie with people. With people living in the surrounding precious and very beautifully photographed nature, are neither more nor less than one part of it. What Nekes manages there with landscape, as a cunning and quote many fine artist in a medium that runs in time, as he defeated the time changed, by themselves for change of scenery uses, as it interferes with the laws of chronology through the rewind ability of the camera or destroyed, which is a compelling and highly aesthetic experimental company.
First film by Julio Bressane shot in exile, "Memoirs" is a film about a man who repeatedly kills the same type of woman in same places, the same way. Filmed on the streets of London.
Bressane's second London film, shot in six days in his apartment. "I had seen the French avant-garde films of the 1920's and naturally the title cites Breton. But underneath it can also be read in many ways. It is a cinema that is invented on the spur of the moment, like you invent an instrument to play music and then abandon it. This film came out like an improvisation, a total risk. It is a deconstruction of meaning but not in the analytical, intellectual sense. I have always tried to lose myself with my films. There is no trace of American or French underground cinema. If anything, it is the idea of home movies, there were many ideas for digital films long before digital film existed. This film made itself, it was like a jazz improvisation. Amor Louco is a lost object, it doesn't speak any language, it has no signs, no letters, no captions. And in the scene where the cataract is cut with the razor blade, it was the adventure of the film itself that was put to the test".
As the earth closes its final chapter, two women are forced to reconcile with their emotional identities.
As a family struggles to survive in rural isolation during the Great Depression, their daughter's secret affair begins a journey into the unknown.
Against the backdrop of an unfathomable megalopolis, in a story that follows the associative qualities of a dream logic, the protagonists quote from concepts of neo-liberal elitism, and a mix of religious delusions and hallucinations of the apocalypse. The film begins in a sacral space, where Randi, a figure that references Ayn Rand, transforms a parapsychological medium into two digital clouds and sends them on a journey through a megalopolis in full growth. There they materialize as two bodies, which go by the names of Mr. Freedom and Ms. Independence.
Inside the claustrophobic scenery of a fancy apartment in the city of Frankfurt three men and a woman lock themselves in for ten days. Oskar and Julia are a couple. They have sex and let themselves be filmed. Benjamin and Bastian are behind the camera, trying to get pictures of absolute intimacy. Closeness as it can only be found among lovers.
The film consists of three sequences shot by a fixed camera: the first shows the balcony of a hospital with patients (soundtrack from the film "Vivre sa vie" by Jean-Luc Godard), the second is a scraped wall and the third is a crossroad with pedestrians and cars (sound taken from the film "The Time-Machine " by George Pal).
The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.
A psychiatrist and his needy patient discuss their relationship in a snow-covered field.
The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.
Ten groups of kids from various parts of Finland, aged between 12 and 15, improvise an episode each based on one of the Bible's Ten Commandments.
Attempts to showcase how the creation of art directly correlates to the perception we have of ourselves and the life around us as shown through the eyes of a struggling family.