VHS Dream Sequence

Never Be A Victim(en)

POLICE OFFICER JIM BYRNE, Canada's most honoured Safety Education Specialist brings you his famous TEN RULES, with which he has personally tested more than 25,000 students. Learn key strategies now taught in many schools and used by police working with the full NEVER BE A VICTIM Institutional Study Program. Develop your own personal streetproofing skills so you can train and test your family. Robert Gordon, who created this remarkable program in partnership with Metropolitan Police introduces this family video library against a backdrop of today's troubled society. TEACHING LIFE SKILLS FOR A SAFER COMMUNITY OFFICER JIM'S TEN RULES FOR STREETPROOFING • STRANGER MYTHS • ABDUCTION • BEING FOLLOWED • DANGEROUS PLACES • AVOIDING CARS AND VANS • GOOD TOUCHING-BAD TOUCHING

The Magic Sun(en)

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)

Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head(fr)

The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.

It’s Not My Memory of It: Three Recollected Documents(en)

“It’s not my memory of it” is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. A former CIA source recounts his disappearance through shredded classified documents that were painstakingly reassembled by radical fundamentalist students in Iran in 1979 following the takeover of the U.S embassy. A CIA film—recorded in 1974 but unacknowledged until 1992—documents the burial at sea of six Soviet sailors, in a ceremony which collapses Cold War antagonisms in a moment of death and honor. A single photograph pertaining to a publicly acknowledged but top secret U.S. missile strike in Yemen in 2002 is the source of a reflection on the role of images in the dynamic of knowing and not knowing.

Still Raining, Still Dreaming(en)

Believe it or not, esoteric film sages, i.e., Phil Solomon, are open to the possibilities of working with video — and even video games. This is a film that takes images from the notorious wanton car-jacking shoot-em-up Grand Theft Auto video game.

UPC Codes and 666(en)

“Using straightforward, scientific methods, this video reveals irrefutable proof of the presence of the number 666 in the Universal Product Code, which appears on 95% of all supermarket products. A comprehensive, step-by-step deciphering process is used to break down the UPC into its component parts, and the derivation of the number 666 is made clear. Startling evidence of the role of UPC's in the new monetary system is uncovered--the prophecy of Revelation coming true today!”

Just Hold Still(en)

In his New York City landscape, Cohen finds inspiration in disturbance. Looking to life for rhythm and to architecture for state of mind, he locates simple mysteries. Just Hold Still is comprised of an interconnected series of short works and collaborations that explore the gray area between documentary, narrative, and experimental genres.

Lapses, Regrets and Qualms(fr)

A day in the life of director Boris Lehman: he wanders from cafe to bookshop, cinema to museum, writer to musician, and into the storeroom of the film archive... He celebrates his birthday in an alleyway, with a friend, and finishes his journey with an escapade to Bruges and a stroll by the North Sea. The camera plays dirty tricks and the sound recorder gets carried away, to the point that both are clearly telling Boris to stop filming. Yet he persists…

virar mar / meer werden / becoming sea(pt)

Water as a physical and metaphysical metaphor and background of human existence. A docu-fictional essay between the Brazilian Sertão-deserts and the Northern-German flood areas of Dithmarschen. Dramas and day-by-day-observations in times of climate change.

One Second in Montreal(en)

A silent succession of black-and-white photographs of the city of Montreal.

Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre(fr)

Jean-Claude Rousseau's Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre is not only his first medium-length film, but a chance to discover this filmmaker whom Jean-Marie Straub has called, along with Frans Van de Staak and Peter Nestler, the greatest working in Europe. With this newly restored print there is also a possibility to discover the relationship between Rousseau's art of filming and Jan Vermeer's famous painting. As Prosper Hillairet wrote in 1988, four years after Rousseau had finished Jeune femme ... (for the first time as we know today): «Without adopting the usual systematic spirit and form of cinéma structurel, Rousseau presents us with simple images and leaves it at that. Keeps the image in hand. A minimalist and ascetic expression of cinema: a shot that lasts.»

All Inclusive(pl)

"All Inclusive" tells the story of seven women who are going on holidays to Morocco, getting out of the hotel and confronting women from Morocco. They will look for their own way of life in the desert, confront their world, looking at the reality that surrounds them.

Clouds(en)

Clouds 1969 by the British filmmaker Peter Gidal is a film comprised of ten minutes of looped footage of the sky, shot with a handheld camera using a zoom to achieve close-up images. Aside from the amorphous shapes of the clouds, the only forms to appear in the film are an aeroplane flying overhead and the side of a building, and these only as fleeting glimpses. The formless image of the sky and the repetition of the footage on a loop prevent any clear narrative development within the film. The minimal soundtrack consists of a sustained oscillating sine wave, consistently audible throughout the film without progression or climax. The work is shown as a projection and was not produced in an edition. The subject of the film can be said to be the material qualities of film itself: the grain, the light, the shadow and inconsistencies in the print.

Decasia: The State of Decay(en)

A meditation on the human quest to transcend physicality, constructed from decaying archival footage and set to an original symphonic score.

Daumë(en)

Culled from four rolls of Super-8 film shot while the maker was a development worker in a small South American village, Daumë is at its center a film about ritual, power, and play. Daumë is both ethnography and critique; it is an interrogation into how to represent a place that can't be represented.

Terra Incognita(en)

Terra Incognita is a lensless film whose cloudy pinhole images create a memory of history. Ancient and modern explorer texts of Easter Island are garbled together by a computer narrator, resulting in a forever repeating narrative of discovery, colonialism, loss and departure.

The Red and the Blue Gods(en)

An ethnographic field report in which the Anthropologist describes the mythic creation of an unnamed ‘sun-scraping structure’ through the ritualized actions of the Red and the Blue Gods.

Collage(es)

VHS Massacre Too(en)

The last stand of the American exploitation film. In a post video store era, media consolidation has led to the censorship and near death of the independent and exploitation film industry. Joe Bob Briggs (Last Drive-in), Debbie Rochon (Toxic Avenger IV), Lloyd Kaufman and James Rolfe (Angry Video Game Nerd) take us on an adventure that leads from the last Blockbuster video store in Bend Oregon to Troma Entertainment in New York, all in an effort to examine how history keeps repeating itself from the video store era to the modern streaming.

Noticias(es)

An observational film that using the fragmented format of a newscast program proposes a cinematic glance to the same reality depicted daily by the media.