The Lion's Den(2017)

Pickled Punk(ja)

This independent film follows the actions and inner thoughts of four unusual individuals as they go about their lives in Tokyo, occasionally meeting up with one another. Their thoughts tend to focus on questions of death, existence, and the conflict of society against the individual. All of the action is performed silently, with narration dubbed over.

The Twenty-One Lives of Billy The Kid(en)

Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.

Nocturne(es)

After ending a very close relationship, Manuel falls into melancholy and begins to rethink his way of loving. Within his thoughts are the social problems that surround him. He realizes that with these comes a rethinking of what love is. An idea that we have been carrying for a long time: the idea that to love is to possess.

Disparate, Shifty Fate(en)

Wax and wane until there is naught but boring pain.

Finds Itself in Corners(en)

Lines align during acclimated apexes, shadowy vertices, and bright burrows.

Anônimo e incomum(pt)

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.

Complainant(en)

There is nothing left to do but complain.

Permanent Shadows(en)

A teenager decides to shut himself off from the world around him after receiving bad news.

HoLy Cycles(en)

Steadily reading while/becomes treading into murky waters.

Closed Vagina(ja)

Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive

Every Ambulation a Betrayal(en)

Return to 'burn' only to find out you're already in that urn.

We Could All Do With a Little Back & Forth As Far As It Concerns the To & Fro of Everywhere Each of Us Go(en)

(Some of us) Still run down the same [mental&emotional] streets we revered/reproached/replaced as children.

Face Lift(en)

Be better and more beautiful than you were before.

What Was It Supposed to Be Like?(en)

Rather pointless, rather stilted, fetid; not what we want us going after.

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer(ja)

A Japanese salaryman finds his body transforming into a weapon through sheer rage after his son is kidnapped by a gang of violent thugs.

Cremaster 3(en)

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...

Glen or Glenda(en)

A psychiatrist tells two stories: one of a trans woman, the other of a pseudohermaphrodite.

Twist Again(en)

Rosso Fiorentino's painting "The Deposition of the Cross" comes to life. The Christ is gradually removed from his cross by the biblical characters who surround him.

Hideo, It's Me, Mama(en)

HIDEO, It's Me, Mama is a psychological melodrama that introduces narrative and structural devices that are integral to Idemitsu's work. Exploring the flawed universe of the contemporary Japanese family, she focuses on a woman's identity as mother through mother-child and husband-wife relationships. Hideo, a young man living away from his parents, is kept under constant surveillance by his doting mother via an omnipresent television monitor. In a cogent metaphor for familial relations in the media-saturated culture of contemporary Japan, Mama can only communicate with her beloved, absent son through the video screen. Idemitsu's poignant irony is embodied in the scene in which Mama, blind to her husband's needs, caresses Hideo's video image. (Electronic Arts Intermix)