Informed by an underlying sense of anxiety and anguish, Michael Robinson’s Polycephaly in D nestles fragments of narrative within a collage of sound, image, and text that oscillates between the elegant and the discordant.
pool and desert telepaths
An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time. (Silent short, voiced in 1937 and 1996.)
A lonely kid who lives in the countryside meets a strange boy who has a ragged umbrella over his head and there is always rain pouring over him. The rain boy is dazzled by the other kid's boots and offers three wishes in exchange for them.
In a winter of northwestern Argentina, a young woman, a sheep and a llama dance to take off the cold
Hansjürgen Pohland's short documentary is an audiovisual study that captures events and people on the streets on film. The special feature of the work is that the people and objects are portrayed exclusively through their shadows.
A risk averse insurance actuary's life is turned upside down when his pleasure seeking mirror image id switches places with him in order to show him how to live.
A Thousand Words explores a daughter's relationship with her stroke-stricken father through still pictures and 8mm footage he shot while serving in Vietnam.
We Should Have Coffee Sometime is a four-minute animated documentary exploring a loss of faith. The film begins with a meditation on the end of a relationship. About one minute later it is revealed that the relationship is not between friends or romantic partners but between co-director Maile Martinez and God. To complement and clarify the narration, the project employs a variety of animation styles.
Home movies and family photographs mixed with drawings and texts tell the story of a family that has lived with disease.
Johann Lurf‘s film Endeavour slides between documentary, avant-garde film, and science-fiction. This highly singular combination of materials and techniques gives the viewer of Endeavour a feeling of flight, as the film continually evades the gravity of genres and definitive definitions. Lurf uses NASA footage from a day and a night launch of the space-shuttle that follows the booster rockets from take-off to splashdown.
Multi-faceted artist Phil Niblock captures a brief moment of an interstellar communication by the Arkestra in their prime. Black turns white in a so-called negative post-process, while Niblock's camera focuses on microscopic details of hands, bodies and instruments. A brilliant tribute to the Sun King by another brilliant supra-planetary sovereign. (Eye of Sound)
A short film about the aftermath of a spontaneous human combustion. Based on the short story 'Blowing Up On The Spot' by Kevin Wilson.
A symphony of found footage scenes, each shot loosely connected to the one before.
From leaving Egypt 10 years ago, to almost dying a month ago in a car accident. This film is about the journey in between and the massive role the internet played in the life of prominent Youtuber and Yes Theory co-founder Ammar Kandil.
In the world's first media interview, shot in Paris in August 1886, the great photographer Nadar interviews the famous scientist and sceptic Chevreul on his 100th birthday. In their own words - originally recorded in shorthand - they discuss photography, colour theory, Moliere, the scientific method, the crazy ideas of balloonists, and - of course - how to live for 100 years. These two legends of the 19th century have a lively and interesting conversation. One was born before the French revolution; the other was destined to see the marvels of the aeroplane and the movies.
Nannies combines autobiographical elements with a reflection on the presence of nannies in Brazil. With a subjective narration, the film incorporates photographs, domestic footage and newspaper adds from the 20th century, as well as contemporary images of nannies and children, building a personal narrative about the presence of nannies in the daily lives of many Brazilian families. A situation where the affection is genuine, but does not dissolve violence and racism.
Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.
A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.
Sun Scream tells the comedic tale of a down-on-his-luck vampire named 'Pippin', and his last-ditch efforts to sell at least one bottle of sunscreen before facing the wrath of his ferocious boss 'Cy the Cyclops'. Luckily for Pippin, the truck of an extremely sunburned farmer breaks down in front of his stall on the hottest day of the year. However, 'Billy' ain't no bumblin' yokel, and Pippin will have to do everything in his power to prove his product will protect anyone, even a vampire, from the sun's deadly rays.
The subject matter of Memory Room 451 is the cultural and historical significance of 20th-century hairstyles – the Afro, the conk, dreadlocks – in Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Akomfrah has disguised this exploration as a science fiction story – in the manner of the groundbreaking writers profiled in The Last Angel of History – while providing a bravura display of the aesthetics of video art in the 1990s. The tale of visitors from the future who gather dreams from unwitting subjects in order to construct a history of the Black diaspora both defamiliarizes Akomfrah’s ongoing project and points to the danger that extracting history from memory can be a kind of expropriation.
"Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming" is a Proof of Concept for a possible Sequel from the television series "Battlestar Galactica".