A Dança dos Mosquitos(2023)

(There Is No) Cure(en)

In this new video essay, filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe delves into the dread-inducing mood and tone of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s modern horror classic Cure, deploying a dizzying range of cinematic references to unravel the film’s eerie magic.

13 figures de Sarah Beauchesne au 71, rue Blanche(fr)

Karl's Perfect Day(en)

A day in the life of Swedish poet Karl Holmqvist.

á-B-C-D-é-F-G-H-CH-í-JONESTOWN(cs)

A children's film about the largest mass suicide of the 20th century reconstructs the 1978 event. The Reverend Jim Jones forced nearly a thousand followers of his People's Temple sect to drink poison in the settlement of Jonestown, Guyana, South America. A third of them were children. Jan Bušta gives sadists, voyeurs, and necrophiliacs one minute to leave the cinema. His self-reflective documentary, which is the result of ten years of time-lapse filming, does not depict dramatic scenes. To the sound of an audio recording from that fateful day, we see a collage of child ghosts preaching about escaping the corruption of the world.

Debra Paget, For Example(en)

A video essay where the author presumes motivations and insights in a fictionalized biography regarding Debra Paget, a contract player for 20th-Century Fox whom they groomed and coached for stardom.

My Paradise Is Darker Than Your Hell(cs)

Theatre director Jan Kačena poisoned himself in 2019 by inhaling fumes and suffered irreversible brain damage. While his partner makes a film as a declaration of love, he lies unconscious. In the film, the director follows moments in the everyday lives of three people close to him: Czech rapper Tyler Durden, painter Tadeáš Pochman and film director Helena Papírníková. In a naturalistic way, it captures drug addiction, self-destructive tendencies and family problems, which are the subject of intimate, often uncomfortable conversations. The result is a diary-style probe into the fate of the artistic bohemia of late capitalism.

Creature of the Sun(cs)

Childlike imagination, naive playfulness and an enchanted view of the world are at the centre of this poetic film. The child protagonists talk about their dreams, fantasies and experiences while touching on metaphysical questions of body and soul, life and death. Magic permeates every frame of this colourful collage.

VALE TUDO(sk)

Lucia "Pretty Beast" Krajčovič is a 34-year-old professional MMA fighter and mother of two children. Shortly after giving birth, she is determined to become a champion in both disciplines - sport and motherhood. With a baby in her arms, she is preparing for her next fight. Under the immense pressure of her two identities, exhausted from lack of sleep, she wrestles with a question to which she had a clear answer not long ago. How to be both Pretty and Beast and for how much longer?

Acoustic Ocean(en)

Acoustic Ocean is an artistic exploration of the sonic ecology of marine life in the North Atlantic. Located on the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway, the video centers on the performance of a marine-biologist diver who is using a life-size model of a submersible equipped with all sorts of hydrophones and recording devices. In this science-fictional quest, her task is to sense the submarine space for acoustic and bioluminescent forms of expression.

Gen A: Do What You Love(cs)

Jakub Strach aka NobodyListen is a successful Czech DJ and music producer. A portrait of his life and work can be seen as a manifesto of the millennial club-going generation. After hundreds of shows and preparations for the upcoming, renowned Addict party, the DJ must deal with the consequences of inflicting a wound scarring his image. Footage from the club backstage mingles with scenes of everyday life in which NobodyListen ponders the dark sides of the club scene, like drugs and misogyny. During the shooting, the Covid pandemic strikes, revealing the insecurities of work in culture.

Habitar(es)

An oneiric moment in the contradictory sensations that arise when experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shadows(de)

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.

Maalbeek(fr)

Sabine is looking for a missing image: a day that has left its mark forever and that everyone remembers but her. But maybe this absence is what allows her to move on with her life?

The Tragedy of an Artist(en)

The Tragedy of an Artist, is an experimental short shot over the course of a week. This film is meant to illustrate who Hero Foltz is as a person and his struggles with self identity

Happy Life(fr)

In this anxious and hectic time, Happy Life explores those unusual outlets that soothe the turmoil of the body and mind. In a meditative journey through these analgesic places, this documentary essay paints a portrait of a society in seek of meaning and relief.

Tangled Roots(en)

An intimate look into Demers family's experience raising children while dealing with the societal stigmas around disabilities and the consequences of Alberta's forgotten experiment in eugenics.

4to Piso(es)

Litanie(cs)

Elen Řádová and Tomáš Mašín’s student work draws on the genre of action films, which are characterized by emotionally intense and violent scenes. Excerpts from period blockbusters are supplemented with visual effects and edited in a way that drives the particularities of the action film genre to the point of absurdity. The resulting visual whirlwind thus deliberately escalates—and thereby diminishes—the dramatic impact of the original footage.

how much is it uncomfortable for dogs to step out on a highway?(cs)

The primary motif of the documentary is the journey. A metaphorical journey, a spiritual journey, a tangible journey, a forest path, a road, a sidewalk, a drug trip, or a journey abroad. The director pastes together a collage of micro-stories of people and places that comment on the journey. Her documentary oscillates between playful absurdism, existentialism and existential questions, environmentalism, and social commentary. The dynamism and rhythm of the narrative are then determined by the jumps between different forms of video, such as analogue film, digital film, and mobile phone filming.

We Want to Die(cs)

A poetic story of a proletarian couple’s relationship during the years of economic crisis and unemployment – of all the films directed by E. F. Burian, the film Chceme žít (We Want to Live, 1949) is probably his worst. The intention to create a powerful work of cinema that would combine modern means of expression with the ideological canons of socialist realism failed completely. Ježek and Tarnovski discovered these „shambles“ and tried to rebuild a structure out of the hopelessness and futility of life. Ježek has photochemically “transcribed” selected passages with the greatest possible degree of humility towards the work of the great avant-gardist, Tarnovski similarly makes the soundtrack visible. The improvised encounter of sound and image in dialogic mode can lead to various misunderstandings resulting in ambiguous compromise.