Art With a Message: Protest, Propaganda, Satire and Social Comment

Kaarel Kurismaa. The Limits of Timelessness(et)

A documentary about the Estonian artist Kaarel Kurismaa shows the viewer an insight into the world of artists. Kaarel changed his creative direction several times; he explored different artistic styles. Kaarel Kurismaa laid the foundations for Estonian kinetic and sound art. He is a highly versatile artist whose creative energy is divided between painting, sound, installation, monumental art, and film. On the crest of the avant-garde wave of the 1970s, he created several important sound and kinetic objects in Estonian art history.

Leonor Fini(fr)

Portrait of an Artist

Bricks!(en)

In 1976, the Tate Gallery exhibited an experimental artwork that became a national sensation - Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII, or, to its detractors, 120 bricks laid on the floor. This documentary explores the origins of Andre's work and the extraordinary fallout from its exhibition.

World Order(ru)

World Order is a nearly two-hour documentary film by documentary film director Vladimir Soloviev examining the vast political changes in the world since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992. The film was first broadcast on Russian television channel Pervy Kanal on December 20.

Berlin Utopiekadaver(de)

A taxi drives through the city of Berlin. Its driver is a punk, left and a well-known figure in the autonomous scene. The stations of his trip are the most important places of the autonomous scene: all in the struggle for survival. The last evictions have not yet been processed and the next ones are coming right up.

The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness(ja)

Follows the behind-the-scenes work of Studio Ghibli, focusing on the notable figures Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki.

Pelle vegetale. Un'intervista(it)

African Underground: Democracy in Dakar(en)

African Underground: Democracy in Dakar is a groundbreaking documentary film about hip-hop youth and politics in Dakar Senegal. The film follows rappers, DJs, journalists, professors and people on the street at the time before, during and after the controversial 2007 presidential election in Senegal and examines hip-hop’s role on the political process. Originally shot as a seven part documentary mini-series released via the internet – the documentary bridges the gap between hip-hop activism, video journalism and documentary film and explores the role of youth and musical activism on the political process.

Circle of Light(en)

This film without words is composed of Pamela Bone's unique photograhic transparencies. Her talent has been said to 'push photography beyond its own limits, liberating it to the status of an entirely creative art form.' Inspired by nature, and being more responsive to feeling than to thought, Miss Bone has sought to express the mystery and beauty of the inner vision through photographic means alone: landscape has the quality of a dream; children on the sea-shore have a sense of their own enchantment, trees are forboding and strange when night moves in their arms. It took Miss Bone twenty years to find the right technique and so overcome the limitations that photography would impose.

Logistics(xx)

Logistics or Logistics Art Project is an experimental art film. At 51,420 minutes (857 hours or 35 days and 17 hours), it is the longest movie ever made. A 37 day-long road movie in the true sense of the meaning. The work is about Time and Consumption. It brings to the fore what is often forgotten in our digital, ostensibly fast-paced world: the slow, physical freight transportation that underpins our economic reality.

Koenigs Kugel - Der Bildhauer und der 11. September(de)

Adlon recounts the making of the sculpture, "Kugelkaryatide" the sphere that stood in the center of Tobin Plaza between the two towers of the World Trade Center. The film follows the sculpture from its creation as the largest bronze sculpture of recent times to the aftermath, where it now stands, heavily scarred, in Battery Park.

Boiled Angels: The Trial of Mike Diana(en)

Florida, 1994. Artist Mike Diana is convicted on an obscenity charge in the wake of an undercover police officer purchasing his limited edition zine Boiled Angel. Here is the very unusual story of what led to this First Amendment debacle happening for the first time in the United States.

Square Fieldwork(en)

Milah van Zuilen, visual artist and forest ecologist in training, uses the square to deal with the habit of people to construct nature. Square Fieldwork is filmed in the Bohemian forest in the Czech Republic and the concrete structure of Barendrecht, The Netherlands.

East-West Passage(hu)

In the summer of 1989 tens of thousands of tourists from communist East Germany came to Hungary. They were deeply disillusioned because they felt they had no future in East Germany. There was no freedom, no choice in the shops, salaries were low and they could not travel except to Eastern Europe. They wanted to go to a prosperous and free West Germany but they could not get passports, so they hoped that by travelling through Hungary, the least suppressed country of the Soviet Block, they could cross the Iron Curtain into Austria and then travel on into West Germany. For them the Hungary of twenty years ago was the new east-west passage. Written by Czes

Fall 2(en)

Bas Jan Ader rides his bike into a canal in Amsterdam.

I'm Too Sad to Tell You(en)

This short film is part of a mixed media artwork of the same name, which also included postcards of Ader crying, sent to friends of his, with the title of the work as a caption. The film was initially ten minutes long, and included Ader rubbing his eyes to produce the tears, but was cut down to three and a half minutes. This shorter version captures Ader at his most anguished. His face is framed closely. There is no introduction or conclusion, no reason given and no relief from the anguish that is presented.

Bomb It(en)

Through interviews and guerilla footage of graffiti writers in action on five continents, the documentary tells the story of graffiti from its origins in prehistoric cave paintings thru its notorious explosion in New York City during the 70’s and 80’s, then follows the flames as they paint the globe.

Alison Watt: Phantom(en)

Alison Watt became the National Gallery's Seventh Associate Artist in 2006. This art film records her two-year residency, as she created paintings inspired by masterpieces in the National Gallery. She already had a lifelong attachment to paintings in the collection, yet the prolonged contact, particularly with Saint Francis in Meditation by Francisco de Zurbarán, led her to notice new details and unexpected nuances which influenced her own art. Through a series of interviews with Watt, this art film documents the formation of this exhibition, with particular emphasis on the creative process.

The Sixth Side of the Pentagon(fr)

On October 21, 1967, over 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. It was the largest protest gathering yet, and it brought together a wide cross-section of liberals, radicals, hippies, and Yippies. Che Guevara had been killed in Bolivia only two weeks previously, and, for many, it was the transition from simply marching against the war, to taking direct action to try to stop the 'American war machine.' Norman Mailer wrote about the events in Armies of the Night. French filmmaker Chris Marker, leading a team of filmmakers, was also there.

Can Art Stop a Bullet: William Kelly's Big Picture(en)

The film documents the creation of Kelly’s monumental artwork “Peace or War/The Big Picture”. It is a tapestry of history and art, drawn from major artworks and photos from the defining conflicts of their times. This immense visual collage allows the audience to navigate through time and place, meeting survivors of these horrific moments in history and the artists who have created work commenting on these periods, some of which have become iconic. Through Kelly’s drawings, the audience is transported to the concentration camps of the Third Reich, the bombing of Hiroshima, “the troubles” in Ireland, the race riots in the US and Pol Pot’s Year Zero. Interwoven with archival footage of these cataclysmic events, the audience is invited to visit anti-war and anti-gun demonstrations today, events that call for similar injustices to be stopped. The film is a parallel work to Kelly’s masterpiece, unfolding to create the ‘Big Picture’ in documentary form.