The Experimental Image World of Shuji Terayama(1993)

FLES(en)

A young man sits at a local restaurant with his friend: but he isn't paying attention to her as she speaks. This film visualizes his chaotic state of mind and how he uses mindfulness practice to tune back into the conversation. Mindfulness is being able to sit with and observe your thoughts. Being mindful improves focus and mental health. FLES is SELF spelt backwards.

Dancing Plague(en)

Dancing Plague, a GTA V mod, flips the script. Holding H key forces male NPCs to dance uncontrollably, revealing the game's biased animations where female characters (often sex workers) have the flashiest moves. This disrupts the game's gender roles, making masculinity both playful and challenged. Interestingly, female characters ignore the male dance frenzy. This is a humorous critique of the game's gender politics. The mod's soundtrack, by Azu Tiwaline, blends electronic music with trance traditions, deepening the critique and adding an immersive ritualistic feel.

treefolk(en)

A data moshed experiment using videos of daily life and textures overlayed with components from older videos creating a personal collage of the last few years.

Guinea(ja)

Yukari Nishihara, 25, earns her living as an art model and aspires to become an actress. One day, while she was out, she saw “a man's face about to jump off the roof of a building”, and since then she has been suffering from a peculiar constitution: she sees a suicide while on her period, faints, and develops a fever. The goddess of love does not smile on Yukari, who is unable to become a sweet girl with a nice boyfriend. The only things that can save Yukari now are her best friend Hana, who has a keen intuition, and a suppository that can break a fever in one shot. On the day of an important audition, Yukari has decided that this is her last chance. However, Yukari realizes that she has forgotten her antipyretic suppositories, and her eyes meet those of another soon-to-be suicide victim. She is in a desperate situation. What does Yukari do?

Magic Conch Shell(en)

Estranged lovers reconnect through the power of the Magic Conch Shell.

Caterpillar(ja)

A half-hour experimental film that shows Fukui moving towards cyberpunk imagery in a manner similar to Tsukamoto, featuring industrial locations, a malfunctioning cyborg/android and a hulking metallic ‘caterpillar’ that stalks characters.

River of Fundament(en)

Visionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elements of performance, sculpture, and opera, reconstructing Mailer’s hypersexual story of Egyptian gods and the seven stages of reincarnation, alongside the rise and fall of the American car industry.

Dada(en)

The Dadaist, an eccentric creature who embodies the concept of the 20th century European avant-garde art movement Dadaism, destroys and mocks art pieces such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, whilst expressing his impulsive fury at logic and reason.

Big Bang Love, Juvenile A(ja)

An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility. More an exercise in style than storytelling, the story follows two detectives trying to uncover the case. Homosexual tension and explosive violence drives the story which delivers some weird and fascinating visuals.

Man Under Table(en)

In an anachronistic dystopian landscape, a beleaguered young man attempts to navigate his way through the indie film scene in LA.

Astronomical Echoes(pt)

Made by film students, the short film is a tribute and authorial reinterpretation inspired by old Pink Floyd music videos as a psychedelic trip. Using overhead projectors to capture a liquid light show, the narrative is stitched together from a retro photograph, bringing a bit of 60s psychedelia with an air of nostalgia. With the combination of two of the band's songs ("Echoes" and "Astronomy Domine"), the music video brings the concept of the realism and ludic, of the present moment and insanity. Composed of characters who are part of a fictional band and travel through the delight of a mind that lives in the past while resting in reality.

The Illiac Passion(en)

Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.

Into the Meridian(en)

A musical audiovisual journey in four parts. A young man finds himself unexpectedly taking an audiovisual odyssey into a world of surreality, slowly recounting his memories, revealing the puzzle pieces that led him to where he is, and maybe how he can get out.

The Other Side(is)

A silent short. Water, footsteps, darkness and light. Shot and edited entirely on a phone in a single day.

Pena(pt)

A newly-born harpy discovers herself.

Flower of Flesh, Celestial Body(es)

Mea Culpa(es)

House(ja)

Hoping to find a sense of connection to her late mother, Gorgeous takes a trip to the countryside to visit her aunt at their ancestral house. She invites her six friends, Prof, Melody, Mac, Fantasy, Kung Fu, and Sweet, to join her. The girls soon discover that there is more to the old house than meets the eye.

Re/cycle(en)

With input from actor and writer Jan Hlobil, director and cinematographer Rene Smaal presents a film in the true surrealist tradition, in the sense that only 'found' elements were used, and that it defies interpretation based on ordinary cause-and-effect time sequence.

3STIGIA(es)