5.9Begotten is the creation myth brought to life, the story of no less than the violent death of God and the (re)birth of nature on a barren earth.
6.0A forgotten faceless celebrity ascends into heaven along the path of self-discovery and through a land of faded memory.
5.5Avant-garde homage to pre-revolution Russian silent movies, and to the poet Aleksandr Blok.
5.8In this fragile yet frightening poetic fantasy set against a dark industrial landscape, a woman sits knitting on the porch of her home when a man appears and takes the knitting from her.
7.0This fantastical movie inspired by the music of Michael Jackson features imaginative interpretations of hit tracks from the iconic 1987 album “Bad”.
6.5We are first presented a cobweb castle, filled with the haunting doubts of the young protagonist. Spirits appear on the screen and are heard on the soundtrack. Gradually a female guide emerges and escorts the young man into an antechamber to another (and possibly higher) world.
6.4An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility. More an exercise in style than storytelling, the story follows two detectives trying to uncover the case. Homosexual tension and explosive violence drives the story which delivers some weird and fascinating visuals.
0.0In the dining room of the abandoned house a white, faded entity feeds on her pieces. Memories keep her here and time transforms her into something new.
10.0Simultaneously sumptuous and gorgeous, garish and grim, this is a re-working of Pinocchio for the neo-liberal era. Rachel Maclean’s dark fairytale, which represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale 2017, depicts a brash and baroque binary world of poverty and riches where the prospect of easy wealth tempts even good boys like Pic into bad ways. But if everyone believes the lie, what’s the problem?
0.0There is no escape… From one side of the globe to the other, there is no escaping the faces, the visions, the ever-watchful camera. There is no escaping the mask, there is no escaping the resonating echoes of images and sounds that cross each other over time. There is no escaping the cinema. There is no escaping the terrors of the mind. “A mysterious loner, perhaps a poet, journeys through a series of uncanny surrealistic landscapes with an unclear purpose. His adventure is divided into three sections. The main theme of this experiment is to compare the eerier qualities of different landscapes and interpose the characters within them, elaborating the project’s ongoing preoccupation with extracting sinister moods from ordinary settings. In a way, these can be seen as experimental horror films in which an atmosphere of dread is evoked and sustained without the expected narrative trappings.”
7.6A woman returning home falls asleep and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and complete mismatching of the objective view of time and space, her dark inner desires play out on-screen.
5.0An anthology of surreal films by Patrick McGuinn featuring Vincent, a puppet who is obsessed with Twinkies and pasta.
5.9An attempt to bring the work of surrealist artists to a wider public. The plot is that of an average Joe who can conjure up dreams that will improve his customer's lives. This frame story serves as a link between several avant-garde sequences created by leading visual artists of their day, most of whom were emigres to the US during WWII.
4.7A young bride escapes her wedding ceremony with a stranger and together they set off on an epic journey though increasingly bizarre lands. They encounter talking animals and mournful exhibitionists, converse with a discoursing rock, journey through a surrealist's psychedelic hotel, instigate a prison riot, escape from naked cannibals living in a tree and battle a wind-up midget dictator!
0.0An abstract work featuring three dancers, the performers interact with large screens as well as each other. Included in Shirley Clarke’s Four Journeys Into Mystic Time, costuming and color play an integral role in this piece.
6.0What does the energy harnessed through orgasm have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dušan Makavejev has the answers (or the questions). His surreal documentary-fiction collision begins as an investigation into the life and work of controversial psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich and then explodes into a free-form narrative of a beautiful young Slavic girl’s sexual liberation.
7.0An experimental short film that evokes moments in the life of a man recreated through the magic of memory. Made from documents from various sources, this film is composed of several scenes: the stages of the day and of life between joy and carefree youth, the cruelty of the working world, the horror of war. The final result is put into perspective with the birth of a child, perpetuating the cycle of life.
7.3Shows a couple (Adam and Eve) and various objects, simultaneously, in time, space and movement.
0.0Described as 'a fairytale with its roots in the worlds of dadaism and surrealism'.