IDOMU II(2020)

Ottimismo democratico(it)

Notes on Vanishing(en)

Moving image artist Lily Alexandre forces herself to ask an unspeakable question: should trans people make ourselves disappear?

out of touch (franklinia still life)(en)

the franklinia flower, now extinct in the wild, appears here as a printed image (a drawing from 1782) pinned against a kitchen wall. hand and figure move disjointedly. the light of day gives way to electricity, to darkness, and to morning. recorded on a video camera built in 2002: an obsolete image tracing some accidental gestures and capturing a form of life existent only in cultivation. some fragments of vermeer, general electric, and chiquita brands international.

Phantasia(xx)

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Alternate Earth(de)

A scientific expedition travels to an alternative Earth in hope of finding a new home for humanity, which has destroyed its own planet. But is it even possible to escape old patterns?

Conversation with Two Lovers(en)

Shot in two places marrying with each other by a single and fractured bridge between Condrieu and les Roches-de-Condrieu, this film is the continuation of exploring ephemeral movement through the use of editing, camera movements and color sampling.

Italia K2(it)

After the successful conquest of Everest in 1953, two Italians reach the summit of K2, the second highest mountain in the world, the next year,after careful preparation and the formation of the team of climbers, scientists, and porters.

Fine Lines(en)

For nearly three years, director Dina Khreino interviewed world-class mountain climbing athletes, listening to what compels them to leave behind families, friends, and everyday comforts to risk everything for a fleeting glimpse into the unknown. What she found was a tribe, a diverse group of professional adventurers and amateur philosophers forged by the ultimate test of body, mind, and spirit. In the face of shifting winds, sheer granite cliffs, and impossible odds, they climb. Each for their own reason, but every one connected by the vertical world. In this rarefied air, these athletes are fundamentally changed, not just as climbers, but as human beings.

Hrály dudy(cs)

When Night Falls in Late December, Everything That Was is Left Behind(en)

A series of vignettes captured in Brevard, North Carolina at the end of December.

Shaping Bamboo(en)

For the 'Are'are people of the Solomon Islands, the most valued music is that of the four types of panpipe ensembles. With the exception of slit drums, all musical instruments are made of bamboo; therefore the general word for instruments and the music performed with them is "bamboo" ('au). This film shows the making of panpipes, from the cutting the bamboo in the forest to the making of the final bindings. The most important part of the work consists in shaping each tube to its necessary length. Most 'Are'are panpipe makers measure the length of old instruments before they shape new tubes. Master musician 'Irisipau, surprisingly, takes the measure using his body, and adjusts the final tuning by ear. For the first time we can see here how the instruments and their artificial equiheptatonic scale-seven equidistant degrees in an octave-are practically tuned.

Nocturnal(en)

A one minute short film showcasing the sights, sounds, and people that characterizes Singapore's nightlife.

Figli del Minotauro / Storie di Uomini e Animali(it)

The Mancuso family has practiced transhumant grazing for generations, moving the herd of Podolica cattle from the Marcedusa countryside to the large Sila forests.

20 years and other untranslatabilities(xx)

By reversing the image of the burning and destruction of Chinese-Indonesian homes and cultures in the May 1998 tragedy, the filmmaker documents a funeral and cremation she conducted in response to the ethnic hatred that was still being discussed 20 years after the 1998 atrocities. Can memories be erased? What can we choose to forget? What continues to haunt us?

Vacuumin’ Around(hu)

A documentary about a person who cleans his room with a vacuum cleaner, filled with disasters and mishaps.

Okay, Mr. Ray!(en)

No one could spin a yarn to make a sale like Ray Lum. Twenty years after their initial meeting, Bill Ferris returned home to Mississippi in the early ‘70s with a camera. The result reveals a look back at the colorful rhythms of Ray’s life—at home, at the auction, joking with strangers outside country stores— and provides a glimpse at Southern manhood, friendship and loss. Now nearly Ray’s age when they first filmed, Ferris has become a Grammy Award winning documentarian and renowned folklorist. Using never before seen 16mm footage and new animations, OKAY, MR. RAY is a short documentary film about how even the tallest tales help us keep the memory alive of the ones we love.

Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait(en)

Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material and unpublished notebooks, the film weaves a complex and personal portrait of Margaret’s life, from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to the potential Margaret envisaged for film as a poetic medium.

Making the Nature Scene(en)

Long before Kim Gordon was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Body/Head, she was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Sonic Youth. In the ’80s, Gordon and her bandmates were fixtures of New York’s downtown art and music scene; one regular haunt of theirs was legendary nightclub Danceteria, which served as the setting for a short film Gordon made sometime around 1985. Now, as Dangerous Minds points out, said video has surfaced online thanks to filmmaker/designer Chris Habib (a.k.a. Visitor Design). “Excellent video I found in my Sonic Youth archive,” Habib writes on the clip’s Vimeo page. “I digitized it for Kim during her [early 2000s] CLUB IN THE SHADOWS exhibition at Kenny Schachter’s old space in the West Village.”

Estráda(sk)

The Red Gate: Magellan at the Gates of Death, Part I(en)

"In the final format for MAGELLAN, Frampton had planned to disassemble these two films into twenty-four 'encounters with death' that were to be shown in five-minute segments twice a month. In their present state, seen together and roughly the length of an average feature film, the two parts of MAGELLAN: AT THE GATES OF DEATH constitute perhaps the most gripping, monumental, and wrenching work ever executed on film...Frampton in 1971 began his filming of cedavers at the Gross Anatomy Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to the lab four times over the course of the next two years and then spent nine months assembling his 'forbidden imagery' into an extraordinary meditation upon death."–Bruce Jenkins