Playlist
In the south of contemporary Italy, a community devotes itself to divinatory practices dating back to Roman antiquity, such as ornithomancy and the interpretation of celestial phenomena. In the midst of these tormented lands, a series of gestures and attitudes emerge, opening up new horizons.
In a remote location, Léo and Nicolas are creating "Vivarium", a video game which shows the decay of a house strangely reminiscent of their own. As they navigate the challenging creative process, tensions rise and the duo is put to the test.
Cihan is a former Kurdish political prisoner from Turkey. The daily life he leads today in France does not suggest the scale of the misadventures he went through when he was twenty, which Capture recounts.
Taking its title from the tactical protest strategy of the same name – "an action that seeks to achieve an end directly and by the most effective means" – DIRECT ACTION is a contemporary portrait of one of the most important militant activist communities in France – a 150-person strong rural collective that survived multiple violent eviction attempts by the French state, successfully resisted an international airport expansion project, created an autonomous zone from 2012-2018, and spawned a remarkable new ecological movement in 2021. Through a collaborative and uniquely immersive observational approach, DIRECT ACTION documents the everyday of a diverse ecosystem of activists, squatters, anarchists, farmers and government-labeled "eco-terrorists" – so as to better understand how the success of a radical protest movement can offer a path through the climate crisis facing us all.
A storyteller of peace serves as a guide in the "Gama"—natural caves where many local people lost their lives during the Battle of Okinawa. The woman in blue standing by his side represents the intersection of the present and the past.
To live in a trailer surrounded by vegetation, insects and slugs, in a place you'd never guess was right in the middle of Berlin, might be a lifetime's ambition or perhaps it's simply a temporary hideaway. Some of those we encounter in this intimate, but never invasive, lyrical documentary are currently in a process of transition, while others are "merely" looking for love and closeness. The observational approach makes for a truly authentically populated film, whose testimony transcends the scope of individual narratives, and whose sense of detail helps to create the agreeable atmosphere of a languid summer afternoon. Are we viewing a documentary about people once united in the now dissolved Mollies collective, or are we watching ephemerally poetic love stories as they unfold?
Centuries prior to the colonization of the Americas, Purple Martins began to nest in gourds that people hung to store food and water and became companion species for many tribes. The birds that European settlers brought with them drove Purple Martins out of their wild habitats so that now they can only nest in birdhouses that people build to prevent their extinction. Without dialogue or narration, Homing follows the migration of Purple Martins from the Amazon to the Great Lakes, between the conservationists who study them and to the houses they are dependent on for survival. —Tamer Hassan
Iulia lives alone in Monaco since her father left, who returned to Russia due to sanctions against their country. She no longer attends school. She feels increasingly lonely and threatened.
In Gaza, you have to arrive in the evening in spring, lock yourself in your room and listen to the sounds coming in through the open windows…. We are in 2018. I'm 25 years old and a foreign traveler. I meet some young Palestinians of my age.
Rodrigue and Reine live with their three children in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. They make their living from a meager yield of cassava flour and are very active in the local church, where the battle between God and Satan is central, and believing in evil spirits, curses and witchcraft is common.
Rodrigue and Reine live with a big secret: they both have AIDS. The pastor proclaims in his sermons that the illness is a divine punishment, and this weighs heavily on the minds of the deeply religious couple, especially now that Rodrigue is becoming visibly sicker. They cling to prayers and miracles, seeing every stroke of luck as a blessing from God and every setback as a punishment.
Thus they are flung back and forth between hope and fear, between shame and relief. The towering steel cross that they together hoist in the opening shot of the film is a striking symbol for both the support they find in faith and the burden they have to bear—with increasing despair.
For several months, I surveyed the territory around the airport area of Paris-Charles de Gaulle. As an explorer, I use adapted or unadapted, authorized or unauthorized voices to cross and explore the territory of flows, its interstices. In this zone under extreme control, permanently scanned by radar, I must be stealthy, transparent, light.
AEROFLUX is organized around 19 chapters. Each chapter presents a different experience, a journey, sites, an exploration. I cross interchanges, the airport, building sites, fields, villages, sometimes dead-end roads made me turn around... I cross a detention center, a burned street, the N104 national road under renovation, a motorcycle racing track, the traces of an evacuated roma camp, warehouse docks, a landfill area.
The Charles de Gaulle airport zone anticipates the city-country of the future in the Western countries, a vertiginous future. The very symbol of globalization, liberalism, and ecological disaster, this site offers me a setting, a playground and a place to write about an increasingly alarming situation.
In New Mexico USA, a group of women is confronting environmental racism stemming from nuclear research and uranium mining. Battling against government narratives that conceal this reality in museums and tourist sites, they refuse to be silenced.
One morning, my friend Derrick calls me to say that he wants to leave the USA. He just left his appartment and sleeps in his car. At almost 50 years old, he is still struggling through the nightmarish labyrinth of an ultra-liberal and racist America, looking for a way out.
Intriguing portrait of summer fireworks, in which delayed and separated sounds create a unique rhythm.
Scattered memories of bygone years in my village, where friendships, a working-class daily life, wanderings and flat fields are celebrated during a poetic and political journey.
Louis, a young man treated for schizophrenia, lives with his mother and stepfather. He refuses his mother tongue, the English idiom, which is spoken by everyone around him. Taking refuge in the study of foreign languages, he develops a series of methods of his own as coping mechanisms. Inspired by "Le Schizo et les langues", a book by Louis Wolfson.
In his third appearance at Curtas, multidisciplinary artist and American filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson takes us on a black-and-white film journey through Detroit Zoo, introducing us to Maya Perry, who speaks poetically about the return to nature of the crested toad, a species whose large golden eyes can only be found in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
In a center for animal behavior research, humans conduct astonishing experiments with insects. As witnesses to these experiments, our perception of these familiar animals is gradually transformed.
In 1962, Yann Le Masson films the words of Algerian activists upon their release from prison in France. Over 50 years later, as the soundtrack has disappeared, I set out to find these women. An inquiry upon their silent story. An essay on cinema, that depicts their disappearance and keeps them alive forever.
The first release by Little Egypt Collective stages a sound recordist reconnecting with the flat fields where once stood Pyramid Courts – the housing projects that formed the heart of the Black community of the Little Egypt region of southern Illinois.
A solitary wanderer whistles a nostalgic melody—borrowed from a 1935 Fréhel chanson—while walking in and out of a forest twice. His repetitive, minimalist gesture evokes memory, age, and the yearning for past lovers who have drifted away
A heavenly inquiry lands in a village to inspect the sleep of a peasant and his renegade goose. Led by the hums of a spectral apparatus, the visitation detects esoteric frequencies from a spiritual reality cloaked in the peasant's home and land.
In the scorching heat of the desert, where the ground is blistering and the air thick with pervasive sand, an infrastructure project unfolds in the unforgiving natural environment. The scale of this endeavour is so immense that the individuals navigating through it appear minuscule in comparison. Within the haze of sand and dust, those who have relocated for the construction of the infrastructure, returning from a day's toil, find their way back to the tented area hastily assembled.
As the roaming lens of the camera moves through the living area and returns to the expansive terrain where this massive engineering project is unfolding, the sun begins to set. Trucks and figures gradually disappear into the swirling winds and sand. At this moment, the camera's eye, constantly worn down by the persistent dust, suddenly loses its usual ability to discern light and shadow. Nevertheless, it persists in its attempt to capture, to the point where it seizes the abstract interplay of light and shadow in this world. The light itself becomes akin to etched marks on the virtual canvas of digital imagery, leaving behind traces and lingering impressions.
In a 1981 Dutch oral history project, two researchers recorded testimonies of several members of a 1930's women's anti-war movement. There remain few records of this history, whose actors were forced to destroy or burn any and all evidence likely to incriminate them. By the time of the oral history project, all remaining women were in their late 80's. Grappling with a faltering memory, one member regrets not being able to get hold of a film shot during their last collective action, carried out in Rotterdam in 1939, before the bombing of the city. Following the execution of the person who made the film the material was left to be forgotten in a private collection. These two archives, recently recovered by Groenewegen and never before seen or heard, make up the material of Remanence. At each level, her film emphasizes the way in which events persist across time, highlighting the traces and echoes of gender politics left in the memories of the protagonists and in each of the viewers. These women's experiences, both intimate and political, highlight a history of internationalist struggles against rising fascism and its recapitulation of patriarchal norms, drawing a connection with feminist struggles across the world.
Eryang has turned his Beijing cave into a private micro-club with fine music and a mezzanine bed for love. No space at all, but lots of time to kill, with passion and psychedelics. They drink and ponder money, Communism and the cosmos.
"Nothing falls from the sky apart from rain," says Amílcar Cabral in a tape recording from 1970. The women of the Satna Fai agricultural workers' collective listen to this historical document stemming from the politician, poet and theoretician; they rest as Cabral demands equality between the sexes, which he sees as essential for shared progress. The setting is the Abotcha building in Malafo, a traditional Balanta village in Guinea-Bissau, which has housed the Mediateca Onshore since 2023. Together with filmmaker Sana na N'Hada and others, since 2011 director Filipa César has been working on reconstructing the audiovisual memory of the country's liberation movement and making it accessible to the public; artist Marinho de Pina has been involved since 2017. In Resonance Spiral, César and de Pina document the construction of the Abotcha and the agro-poetic practices that take place there, showing dialogues between archive, performing arts and community. At the same time, they grapple with their own position, sharing insights, despairs – and the mud of the mangroves.
Hazem arrives in Belgium after a painful journey from Gaza. Elettra arrives in Brussels to study documentary film. Their first moments together trigger the desire to know each other and the camera becomes the tool they share for understanding. Exiles and inner migrations find a way to just and softened gazes.
In a training center, real caregivers and simulated patients enact medical consultations. The purpose of these role-playing games is to develop the human qualities of therapists.
About 50 years ago, the CIA was looking for new ways to collect intelligence, and launched a secret program on psychic vision and extrasensory perception. Is it a coincidence that this happened at the same time and place as the creation of the internet?
Foča is a municipality in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina where women were raped and abused on a large scale during the Bosnian war. Women, and girls as young as 12 years old, were imprisoned at various locations to be gang-raped, mostly by Serbian fighters. This was cause for the Yugoslavia Tribunal to designate "systematic rape" and "sexual slavery"—war crimes that frequently went unprosecuted—as torture and crimes against humanity. As a result, these crimes can now be universally prosecuted.
The so-called Foča case called on great courage from the countless women who testified about their horrific experiences. To preserve their anonymity the women were identified using numbers or letters. In this forensic video essay, filmmaker Kumjana Novakova uses mostly written testimonies by the women to explore the collective memory of the rape camps. In grainy video footage, the camera explores the places where these inhuman crimes took place, while the women speak about the unspeakable.
In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America's color bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup.
Director Johan Grimonprez (Double Take, 2009) returns to Sundance with this magnificent essay film that vibrantly embodies the historic and continually evolving colonial machinations that underpin what author and Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane refers to as an ever-evolving "algorithm of Congo Inc."
Cyclone Dean stirred up the soil in Martinique: a cemetery for the enslaved resurfaced. The psychiatric hospital came up with the idea of associating this patch of land with an original form of cure. The film interweaves the care of bodies, the colonial footprint and the story told by plants.
A map – a world – unfolds on a table. We take an audiovisual tour through Brussels, which at the same time forms a cinematic message to Chantal Akerman. Gray morning light reveals parked cars in quiet streets, a swimming pool without visitors, an empty metro platform. We're taken to places where people spend a gray day: a gymnasium, a museum, a lost and found, a library, a cinema. Like Akerman often appeared on camera in her own films, we see Giolo, resting in a hotel room – the open window subtly lets in the sleeping city. Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose celebrate the passing of time in stillness and movement. Between the sounds and images of the city, silent, surreal scenes with objects are shown in a sky-blue studio: an inflated swimming ring, a red toy car, a still life, a vase, a rolled-up movie screen. An image of a subway corridor is suddenly reminiscent of an empty cinema screen, an open window, and the frame of a painting. The alternating, associative images function as absurd, critical, and poetic comments on everyday life.
Reflecting on the construction of oral history and its relation to the land, The Soldier's Lagoon dives into the misty Páramo region and offers an elusive living archive that navigates the dense fog separating Simón Bolívar's past and Colombia's present.
Tú me abrasas is an adaptation of "Sea Foam", a chapter from Cesare Pavese's "Dialoghi con Leucò" published in 1947. The ancient Greek poet Sappho and the nymph Britomartis meet beside the sea and have a conversation about love and death. Sappho is said to have thrown herself into the ocean from lovesickness. Britomartis apparently tumbled off a cliff and into the water while fleeing from a man. Together, the two discuss the stories and images that have emerged around them to try and understand, at least for a moment, the bittersweet nature of desire. The film adapts not only the text but also footnotes and gaps in the story. For example, the fact that, in 1950, a desperate Pavese committed suicide in a hotel room with this book by his side. Or that Sappho's poems have survived only in fragments. Or that sea foam is historically and scientifically associated with fertility and bacteria, that is, with life itself. "Everything dies in the sea and comes back to life," says Britomartis. Tú me abrasas introduces new readings and translations that go beyond the myths by Pavese and Sappho.
The Sylvester Stallone vehicle Rambo III (1988), is both a superficial commentary on the failure of war to resolve differences and a surreal interpretation of American exceptionalism through the actions of the individual. Although set in Afghanistan, with the hero besting a Russian army, the film was shot in the Israeli desert, with the involvement of the country's military. Filmmaker Daniel Mann employs a variety of approaches to unpack what was to most audiences a brainless shoot 'em-up, but to Mann is a work of many meanings.
Interspersed with the reading of letters Mann wrote the Hollywood star, Under the Blue Sun contrasts Rambo's exploits with the ways the media in our reality constructs narratives around conflict. Through Mann's investigation, he encounters Bashir, a Palestinian Bedouin and self-taught artist who worked on Rambo III. Bashir's experience as an indigenous individual stripped of tribal land in Israel, serves as a powerful reflection not only of colonial politics but also of how these dynamics are perpetuated and amplified in mass productions. Mann's film delicately unveils interconnected narratives that define the geopolitical, physical and environmental landscape of Israel/Palestine. The result is an intelligent and discursive exploration of propaganda, war and colonialism that manages to avoid falling into the trap of militancy, and ultimately leaves us wondering if we truly need another Rambo in this world.
Moving images shot from the ground against moving images shot from the sky. The words of women, men and children against official speeches. People who don't want to move, "just like the pine tree by the riverbank". A valley turned into a reservoir. Class struggle lies underground… and underwater.
Ulysse and Hadrien are in the same boat: university halls in the heart of Paris, a dissertation to submit, and a desperate political situation. With this shared condition at its heart, and marrying filmed journal with comic mises en scène, Camarades creates the situationist portrait of a youth caught between utopia and instability.
3 months ago, I lost my love. So I went back to live with my parents, in the house where I grew up. There, among the scattered memories of my happy childhood, I remember other moments when happiness had faded.
Fatmé, 11 years old, Syrian, lives in a tent with her family. Her disheveled hair, dirty clothes, and love for fighting are subjects of discussion among those around her. Which makes her mother wonder: is she a boy or a girl ? To this question, Fatmé responds with laughter, "I just want to be the strongest."
A factory stands in the middle of pristine nature.
She would like to disappear, she would like to become a landscape.
Once a tributary of the Seine, now lying forgotten in the sewers of Paris, the ghost of the Bièvre fascinates me. I set off on foot to find its source and its meanders lead me to the people who live along its banks, themselves brought by a current of a different nature, with more distant origins.
A broken phone and the digital memory of a broken relationship. Both fragile, both recomposed to reveal the fragments of a first love that seems to fade away. Through the careful manipulation of discarnate metal components and the director's attentive look on a found intimate archive, a parallel movement of lingering and resistance to the ephemeral. A playful reflection on what remains.
Through a collection of archived videos found in the depths of YouTube, ordinary people apply to join a space mission team heading to Mars in the year 2022. This announcement from Mars Venture, nearly a decade ago, reveals our society's interest in the conquest of the red planet and prompts us to question the colonial rhetoric inherent in New Space projects.
Ainá Xisto, a Brazilian filmmaker and visual artist, shows us through her creation life as metamorphosis, as the possibility of transmutation or new ways of saying 'I'. Amidst dreamlike 16mm landscapes, we approach a magical reality inhabited by real stories and characters, open to dialogue and to the other, in a more-than-human relationship.
No one has ever seen a skateboarder on this skatepark in the Loiret region. At first glance, this place just outside the village is deserted. But if we hang out there for a while, we enter an empire without adults, where relationships are made and broken to the rhythm of the seasons.
Antoine told me that he put animals on a pedestal, because they had the nobility to remain wild. I decided to follow him in his search for the phantom-like beings that haunt his thoughts. The same ones that occupy Michel's mind. So I too decided to wait for them with Michel.
By taking a virtual stroll through Street View, on Google Maps, we can explore the dissonance between the way the city is represented on these maps and the way it looks today, in relation to its own changes over time.
One winter morning, crows are heard in the distance, a thick mist covers the shore. A world wakes up, and makes another landscape sound.
For a long time I watched Guadeloupe, my parents' island, from a distance. From continental France. It all came together when I saw footage filmed by Guadeloupeans during the 2009 general strike. 44 days of unique mobilization, recreated in this film through my eyes.
Dakar 2009. At the heart of the night, three friends gather around a fire. Serigne tells for the first time to Cheikh and Alpha his epic journey to Spain which he has just been repatriated. He has only one idea in mind, jump in the first boat and go to sea again. His friends try to convince him to stay but Serigne, as if bewitched, seems already gone.
Frantz Fanon is a renowned politician and decolonisation activist. This feature focuses on his visionary social therapy methods during his time as a psychiatrist in Algeria from 1953 to 1956. A piece of sober anti-racism.
November, 2021. Twenty-six royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey are about to leave Paris to return to their country of origin, the present-day Republic of Benin. Along with thousands of others, these artifacts were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892. But what attitude to adopt to these ancestors' homecoming in a country that had to forge ahead in their absence? While the soul of the artifacts is freed, debate rages among students of the University of Abomey-Calavi.
A poetic study of the stages of a lesbian relationship by two women performance artists from honeymoon, through struggle, to break-up, to enduring friendship." (Barbara Hammer)
An appeal is launched to alleviate a coal shortage and achieve the objectives of the USSR's five-year plan. Against a backdrop of military marching music and industrial sounds, the miners of Donbass set to work en masse.
Dimitris Athiridis's fourteen-hour exergue – on documenta 14 follows curator Adam Szymczyk as he oversees the 2017 edition of one of the world's most influential art exhibitions.
During the rehearsals of a theater adaptation of Émile Zola's book L'Assommoir, the real and fictional lives of actress and artistic director Anne and her stage character Gervaise appear to intertwine.
Experimental and intimately filmed scenes provide insights into the constantly shifting parallel worlds between which Anne and Gervaise are navigating. The fascinating play between reality and fiction leads to a constant tension: are the intimate scenes she plays with her neighbor Benoît real or part of the play? And the outbursts of anger, the arguments and the tears?
In the meantime, serious themes are explored, such as alcohol addiction, domestic violence, the consequences of divorce, the impact of harsh Parisian life on love, and working in a male-dominated environment. The ambiguous play within a play contributes to the realization that there may actually be no distinction between reality and fiction. This inevitably leads to the question: what role are we playing ourselves?
A portrait of ordinary women whose first words are captured. The spontaneity of the filmmaker's gesture is matched by the spontaneity of the women's words. Same age, same world, they recognise each other and the street is the scene of their meeting.
In the Chancy neighbourhood of Pointe-à-Pitre, the economic capital of the Guadeloupe archipelago, bulldozers from demolition firm Avenir Déconstruction are pulling down residential blocks consigned to history. On nightly patrols L'homme-vertige : Tales of a City follows the city's wanderers through the empty streets. These are dizzying circumstances. They all carry the wounds of this city within them and are now seers. Circulating throughout the internal and external spaces, both endangered, are the director's empathetic conversations and relationships – with the lung-diseased former freedom fighter Ti Chal, with the crack addict Priscilla, with the wild, angry and then calmer Eddi, with the fish scaler Kampèch. Even elegant Erik resists the inevitable dilapidation with his view of the city, his recitation of texts by Joël Beuze and Amílcar Cabral. Malaury Eloi Paisley: "And I ask myself why I feel the need to wander the streets of Pointe-à-Pitre."
Claudine Bories gives the floor to men and listens to them talk about themselves, their childhoods, love, their sexuality, their relationships with others and their daily lives. Each man is shown in his own personal or family environment and talks about his own story.
It's summer on a leisure base in the tougher Paris suburbs. A land of adventures, flirting and transgression for some, a place to hide out or take a break for others. With its beach and its hidden nooks and crannies, it's like a childhood kingdom waiting to be explored, resonating with the turmoil of today's society.
I recount my 20 years of work with the filmmaker Robert Kramer, who died in 1999. It is an account of the filmmaker's gestures and practices. It's a way of recalling the central place he gave to experience as a way of getting round the traps of the script. It's also the story of a friendship that transformed me.
A 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.
Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, is a land border between the African continent and Europe. In transit, Malik and his friends, underage youths from Morocco, try to reach Europe by any means necessary. At the same time, day and night, they survey the city like seismographs revealing the most burning present as well as the movements of the most distant past...
Otherhood brings together a mother and her daughter, the three American poets Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Lucille Clifton, but also a peacock and two camels.
I am alone in an apartment. Opposite, a lake. I have to immerse my mother's funeral urn in it. This was her wish. How to mourn the loss of a "bad" mother? How to honor her without betraying myself ? Ghosts appear, my perceptions get confused. My daughter Lucie comes to free me from the past.
Pierre Guyotat, at home, between 2002 and 2009: scenes from the life of a writer. First, he organizes his library: each book is subject to commentary, reminiscences, and questioning. Then we see him at work, preparing with an assistant the edition of his Notebooks based on manuscripts from the 1960s. Finally, we find him in his room, sitting on his bed, discussing the Kings of France and then developing a text aloud, in a captivating self-dictation. Because Pierre Guyotat gives himself without restraint or embellishment to the unadorned attention of Jacques Kébadian, this most precious film allows us to experience as rarely before the intimacy of a writer's life: his work and his passion.
Ercolano, on the outskirts of Naples, is plagued by corruption, dysfunctional public services and record unemployment. Many of the leaders of the old political class found themselves before the courts. In December 1995, Luisa Bossa, elected mayor, showed her determination to re-establish the rule of law.
Shot in 1987 and 1988 from north to south along the East Coast, a broad geographical cross-section of a precise time in United States history, and a wistful journey through a country where Robert Kramer, in the company of his fictional alter-ego, Doc, observes people and landscapes with the care and concern of a traveling doctor.
How hair has been used as an instrument of domination or as an expression of demands. Hair abused, hair controlled, hair shorn and hair free. Much more than an aesthetic issue, it's a political one.
The film documents the production of Richard Serra's monumental sculpture Berlin Block (for Charlie Chaplin) in Hattingen, including interviews with workers at the Henrichshütte steelworks, and testifies to Richard Serra's interest in industrial development.
Pierre had prepared this trip like a historian. During the day, discovering the city and in the evening, high up on a terrace, with the minarets chanting all around us, Pierre would improvise and talk about his art, his life, his childhood, the war, religion and the landscapes he loved. (Colette Fellous)
A cross-generational binding of three filmmakers seeking alternative possibilities to power structures they're inherently part of. The film grew out of abandoned film projects of Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer. Shot at the furthest point of a motorcycle trip Hammer took to Guatemala in 1975, and laced through with Deren's reflections of failure, encounter and initiation in 1950s Haiti. A vever is a symbolic drawing used in Haitian Voodoo to invoke a Loa, or god.
What is the meaning of military occupation? Through the testimonies of the soldiers who implemented it, director Avi Mograbi provides insights on how a colonialist occupation works and the logic at work behind those practices. Using the 54-year Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip the director draws us a "Manual for Military Occupation".
On June 30, 2023, on the Place de la Concorde, a spontaneous demonstration takes place against police exactions. La Concorde has a history. The square is a symptom of the excesses and lies of successive governments. There is no concord. And yet…
"Charged with the turmoil of the (not-so) distant war in Ukraine, Cosmocide 2022 is akin to an audiovisual bouquet of glimpses from the fervent present that are deposited on the tomb of history. Both avant-gardist and primitive, the film bristles with formal invention, yet its aim goes well beyond passive pleasures of the eye. Between barbed wire and the invisible shore, the directors muse on our turbulent times, reinstating their belief in the image as a transformative, uncharted force of this world. More intense than ever, the duo's relationship with the camera allows for the perpetual rejuvenation of our gaze."
The film captures four years (late 2019-late 2023) of an unprecedented wave of feminist and antifascist activism, as expressed onto walls through collages sharing the same graphic style. Political gestures, both individual and collective, these calls to rise up against patriarchy are changing all at one time the public space and subjectivities under our very eyes.
Armenia and Azerbaijan are engaged in a multi-secular conflict. A war breaks out again. In Stepanakert, capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, men are at the front, women hide in the cellars, director Silva Khnkanosian sets out to find them and keeps a logbook. Life is organized under the bombs, women follow the war on the radio or checking their phones. No one sees defeat as an option. Yet after 44 days of battles, radio announces the capitulation of Armenia. We must leave.
The revolutionary fervour that swept through Latin America in the 20th century owes much to the participation of millions of Christians who engaged in political struggles in the name of their faith. Driven by liberation theology, they paid a heavy tribute for undermining the traditional relationship between Church and Power. Far from Marx's idea that religion is the opium of the people, here the people fought for the advent of the Kingdom of God on earth rather than in heaven.
Touchingly blending the epic and the intimate, the film reveals the remarkable evolution of a guerrilla organization engaged in a decades-long struggle for land rights against the Colombian state. The narrative unfolds from a history of persecution and demonization to a transformative phase of disarmament and the acquisition of constitutional power.
This film made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective shows the destruction of the West Bank's Masafer Yatta by Israeli authorities and the unlikely alliance which develops between the Palestinian activist Basel and Israeli journalist Yuval.
Point Virgule is based on images shot in super 8, and a text from Silvia Federici's book, Beyond the periphery of the skin. The film questions the way in which capitalism transforms our bodies into a work machine.
Reel No 21 comes as an additional reflection on a collection of twenty films in 16mm format, safeguarded in Tokyo by the movement of Japanese solidarity with Palestine. It is an undelivered love letter, written by a Japanese activist, that was lost on its way to a Palestinian filmmaker. Fragments of the letter are found thoughout the collection and compiled into an imagined structure that reveals itself over the course of the film. The film as catalogue, the film as time machine, the film as archive: these themes Reel No 21 deals with have the feel of a montage essay; at the same time, the act of restoring these films exposes the motives, aspirations and disappearances of a generation and its struggles— not only in Japan but also around the world. It is a film essay that explores questions of transnational solidarity by gazing at 16 mm films that have been collected and projected by a Japanese solidarity group
The Siege of Sarajevo lasted from April 1992 to February 1996. Young men were called up to protect their city, a few of them chose to take along their cameras to face the violence they witnessed throughout those grueling 1,425 days. Now, 30 years later, they show us their films and share their wartime filming experiences and thoughts on cinema as a means of survival and resistance.
It is the last occupied roundabout in France, in the south of the island of Reunion, it is occupied by a community of activists. Surrounded by the incessant flow of cars, they debate ecology, the decolonial question and act for sovereignty and food autonomy.
Equipped with a DV camera, the filmmaker visits the Peking University and Tian An Men Square. In the underground carriages, a notice announces: "Disinfected today". It is 4th June 2005. The filmmaker questions passers-by: what day is it today? What is the date? Those he asks avoid answering, as the subject is taboo. Few mention 4th June 1989 and the student movement. The younger people may simply not know. Others cautiously respect the law of silence or stick to official formulas.
Mrs Schneider is redecorating her spacious house, cooking, supervising the return of her carpets… A montage of documents retraces her life back to 1908: the story of a bourgeois woman, the destiny of a class. An enterprising dealer is interested in the tableware she wants to sell.
How can you avoid the television videoclip form for the representation of electronic music? In a few sequences and thanks to highly precise framing, several groups from the electro music scene (Alter Ego, Captain Comatose, CobraKiller…) give us a glimpse into the practices, rituals, and systems of representation and construction that bond them with their public.
"The Americans invented jazz to make up for death, the star to recover from women. To comfort themselves faced with the night, they invented Broadway. Every evening in downtown New York, an artificial day begins. Its purpose is to advertise the shows, vaunt the products, and the inventors of these adverts would be quite astonished to discover that the most fascinating spectacle, the most precious object, is the street transfigured by their signage. This day has its own inhabitants, its shadows, its mirages, its ceremonies. It also has its own sun…" (Chris Marker)
At La Aldea, in the Soria hills of northern Spain, only 14 villagers remain. Mercedes was the last baby to be born in the village. Accompanied by painter, who tries to capture light and mist, she discovers numerous traces of history. On the hills, dinosaurs once walked, the Celtibers built farms, the Romans their villas and the Saracens a castle with a tower. The last inhabitants know all the stories and can tell all the legends. Little by little, the present has invaded the landscape: the castle will be converted into a luxury hotel, a hill ridge is spiked with wind farms. On television, news of a distant war rekindle memories of another… a civil war. An election campaign flits on and off the screen. Is the next step a trip to Mars?
Working with rushes and film footage, Jean-André Fieschi and Françoise Etchegaray (former assistant to Eric Rohmer) compose a second fiction of A Summer's Tale: an invitation to enter into the making of cinema's reality and discover a second tale.
Mrs Blackburn, aged 95 (the filmmaker's grandmother) is dragged into a story of her life, facing a camera that she welcomes with a charming urbanity. But here, in this quotidian of porcelain and well-polished furniture, a mysterious affair of earrings…
Night-time scenes filmed in various large cities of nineteen European countries, where shadow and light play a key role (the film's very visible grain accentuates the effect of night). This is a nocturnal architecture in which the streets are perceived differently than in the vibrant light of day: they are almost empty, yet full of many absent presences. These banal places become places of fantasized memories. (Cinéma Spoutnik)
The Gita-Govinda, a famous lyric poem from 12th-century Sanskrit literature, sings of the tormented love of the young god Khrisna and Radha, a metaphor for the impetus of the believer. The stage direction and sound score bring the miniatures to life with a breath of enchantment.
Based on the negatives of a film shot in India in wealthy bourgeois circles in the late 1920s, when anticolonial tensions were running high: the filmmakers deconstruct the images, repeat them, reframe them, colourise them, searching for the behaviour and attitudes of Westerners in the East. The film comprises two parts; street scenes that seem like a catalogue of poverty, and a show of the elegance, opulence and power of colonial rule. Giovanna Marini sings texts by Henri Michaux and Mircea Eliade that help to reveal the violence of colonial domination under the harmony of "exotic" images.
How do artists live in the Chinese world of today? Painters and poets have gone back to the dreamwalking wanderings and the intense discussions on art, love and philosophy that characterised the artists of the classical age. In the stifling summertime city, the plastic artist Li Wake comes to help the painter Wang Yongping make a film. The frontiers between what is true and false, between creation and existence, are abolished. Li finds a fellow wanderer, the young "Beibei Demon Face", who is a night watchman and poet. They meet up and create in the studio of Ding Defu, an expressionist painter who has gone adrift, inspired by the biography of Van Gogh. They all love walking around naked and turning their bodies into poetic objects, from both provocation and a desire to abandon their social roles. "The disorder of our world resembles that of our hearts."
Nocturne is a 5-minute film shot entirely at night in the deserted streets of the city. The film aims to find nocturnal images of London revealing the presence of the past, or the presence of the dead, thus referring to its hidden history. It was filmed in deserted streets around London's East End, and on the docks, since there is the impression of a resonant city, full of shadows manifesting there at night.
It's composed of long, static shots, each slowly developing over time, as if if you watch long enough its secrets will be revealed. Shot on 16mm, using long exposures and time lapse techniques, gives the film a sense of transience or historical time. The deserted, dreary streets are transformed as they appear in hyper-real color, devoid of traffic and human activity.
Eugène Deslaw, an experimental filmmaker of Ukrainian origin, produced a film-poem on the neo-Baudelairian theme of city lights. Against a backdrop of the night sky, he focuses the film on windows, streetlights and illuminated signs in Paris, Berlin, London and Prague. "The advertising of adverts, the bright projection of the lights, the torrential blaze of a city, that's what tempted me." (Eugène Deslaw)
Burnett's first film follows a day in the life of a few friends in the Los Angeles ghetto: a fight, a car in need of repair, a stubborn washing machine… Andy, Gene, their friends and entourage struggle to cope with the destitution in the ghetto. The first signs of a unique style where each scene is aimed at bringing out the truth of situations and people.
Should he lean outside of the window, shoud he move and risk to fall or let the camera fal, should he lean until he fell, he would see, one would see, beyond the frame, inhabited islands, churches and palaces where boats land.
James Benning forms the basis for his practice at large, firmly cementing the measured structure and precise compositions that characterize his work. In a series of largely fixed-frame images, he captures distinct tableaux from Chicago and the surrounding area, training his lens on scenes both quotidian and extraordinary.
13 lakes from across the United States are captured along with their environments in 13 ten-minute-long stretches. Sequences of black preface each scene as if explanatory intertitles or voids to cleanse the visual palate. The identities of the lakes are kept undisclosed as the film unfolds, removing bias and refocusing audiences' attention to the on-screen waterscapes themselves.
Ephemera and memorabilia centering on baseball legend Henry Aaron are at the forefront of American Dreams (lost and found). Here, they are seen juxtaposed against scrolling hand-written excerpts from the diary of Arthur Bremer—a Milwaukee man who plotted to assassinate US president Richard Nixon—and a soundtrack of significant political speeches and pop songs recorded between 1954 and 1976.
"On November 28, 2023 I drove from my home in Pine Flat, CA across the Great Western Divide, down to the Upper Kern River. I came to film a tree. The leaves were orange. Within a few minutes stuff I hadn't planned began to happen. I thought, oh shit. In the past few years a number of forest fires burned through this area. The stuff happening was due to this. I began to film. And then I was attacked from the air. War games. My film was to be a non-narrative the length of Godard's Breathless, but I ended up with something else. It's breathless."
The history and landscape of the junction where four US states—New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah—meet, doing so by means of four distinct artists—Vincent Van Gogh, Moses Tolliver, Yukuwa and Jasper Johns—and their biographies, forming an exploration of text, sound and imagery as they interface with place to become portraiture.
James Benning appropriates a 14-second excerpt from his own film Time and a Half (the second-ever entry into his filmography), dissecting the scene to its constituent frames, and extrapolating them as gradually shifting overlays that shape a 71-minute musing on time, labor and narrative.
With two disparate murders as its subjects, the film compiles a wealth of information, both archival and reconstructed, to illuminate each case and the conditions that surrounded their protagonists. In presenting reports, staging reenacted testimonies and employing cityscapes and landscapes, Benning creates a portrait of personae and locale alike.
The protagonist is in the throes of a mid-winter fever dream, its scenes alternating between fiction and reality, conflating and intertwining the two to shape a singular, albeit fractured narrative. It constitutes the first and most overt of Benning's engagements with fictional premises.
Four subjects—a student, a writer, a professor and a dancer—each immersed in the act of reading. Not party to the targets of their attention, a viewer is invited to partake in an alternate act of reading: one of the film's protagonists themselves, their unspoken languages of presentation, posture and movement.
The first of his works to be created outside of the United States, James Benning's Ruhr features Germany's largely industrial Ruhr region, expanding the filmmaker's navigation of environment and observation, training his lens on a winding tunnel, a steel foundry, the area's wilderness, mosque-goers in prayer, a graffiti-laden wall, a residential street and a smokestack.
A filmed tribute to Sam Shepard, executed by Benning as a single fixed frame in which gently swaying treetops are set against rolling cloud cover. Scored by the ambience of the camera's wooded surroundings, brief spoken and sung interludes act as affecting dedications that punctuate the scene's solitude.
The film builds upon James Benning's long-time engagement with the life and history of "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski, and features the replica of Kaczynski's cabin that Benning constructed in the Sierra Nevada. This cabin is pictured as the seasons pass, intermittently overlaid with Benning's recitations of five passages from Kaczynski's own writings.
Capturing the trajectory of Earth's rising moon on a consecutive pair of winter nights, the film serves as a pensive, nearly mathematical demonstration of a celestial phenomenon often regarded as commonplace. Here Benning turns his camera not to the American landscape, but to a new, otherworldly frontier.
In 1975, James Benning and Bette Gordon drove from New York to Los Angeles, documenting the process in a series of brief, real-time tableaux that would become their joint film The United States of America. Radio news, advertisements or pop music soundtracks their road trip, while a diversity of scenery gradually passes their forward-facing camera.
1975's The United States of America serves as the point of departure for this film. Rather than being a reiteration of the earlier work, it showcases vistas now contained within fixed frames. 52 shots—one for each state, plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico—document one of Benning's most ambitious undertakings to date.
Women in the steel factories of Frankfurt, Wetzlar and Mannheim talk about their working conditions and the fact that factory work and domestic work are both places of exploitation that need not only to be studied but also fundamentally changed.
Without a visa to film the war in Vietnam, Claudia von Alemann sets out to make an archive film about Vietnamese women. She manages to interview the Foreign Minister in exile, Mrs Nguyễn Thị Bình, filmed in Paris under difficult conditions.
Elisabeth, a young historian visits Lyon. In the footsteps of the 19th-century feminist socialist Flora Tristan, she roams the city with her tape recorder seeking to reconstruct the reality that Flora might have seen and perceived. In the sounds and noise, the faces and façades, she discovers layers of history. A history professor tries to set her back on the scientific pathway, but she breaks free from academic rigidity and, in search of lost time, finds her own present and that of the city of Lyon.
May 1968. 8 million French people are on strike. The Sorbonne is occupied, the students are taking up struggles and social debates, challenging traditional institutions. What was the cinema's role in this context? How did filmmakers engage in the arena of a cultural policy to be redefined? Film school students, workers from Citroën plants and experienced filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard take part in the debates.
In Claudia von Alemann's former childhood home, now converted into an orphanage, two 13-year-olds, Denny and "Ant", who have always lived there, tell their stories and talk about their worries, dreams and hopes.
Late 1967: the Belgian seaside resort of Knokke-le-Zoute is hosting the experimental film festival. A raft of side events, performances, happenings and protest actions are put on, involving Harun Farocki, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Shirley Clarke,Gustav Lamche, Armand Gatti, Mauricio Kagel, among others. This exhilarating atmosphere is what forged the legend of a festival that gave a decisive boost to Europe's independent cinema.
Claudia von Alemann filmed the co-founders of the Black Panther Party, Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, in exile in Algiers, on her own. Their filmed statements were intended for a solidarity campaign in West Germany for the release of Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale, their Black Panther friends.
A historical feature film exploring the history and writings of four forgotten women protagonists of the early women's movement in nineteenth-century Germany (Luise Otto-Peters, Louise Aston, Kathinka Zitz and Mathilde Franziska Anneke). A woman from the present travels through historical periods and spaces to listen to these women and their stories of struggle. The dialogue of the film is composed entirely of quotations from texts, novels and manifestos written by the four forgotten women writers.
The second of four films by Claudia von Alemann about her childhood in Thuringia, in the ex-GDR, which she was only able to revisit after reunification. The manor where she was born is now a house for orphaned children. Excerpts from her mother's diary, flashbacks of forgotten images from her childhood.
The filmmaker's 86-year-old mother returns with her daughter and granddaughter Noemi, back to her home village in Thuringia, in the ex-GDR. She recounts how, from 1933 to 1945, she believed in the idea of national socialism and how, today, she deeply regrets it.
The filmmaker's first visit to the Thuringian village of Seebach; the place where her mother's family had a manor house and from where Claudia's family fled in 1949 to cross to the West. She is faced with childhood memories as well as the fears of those who remember the epoch of the GDR. A reflection on how she can identify with her family and its story, a confrontation with history and the stories of the inhabitants of a formerly inaccessible village, from the other side of the border.
Fred, a gypsy traveller, earns his living by nicking cars. One day, someone comes to his site and talks to him about the light. After this encounter, Fred is no longer the same, as an angel – his angel – has reached out to him. Saint Teresa of Avila says: "You find God in your cooking pots", but Fred is searching for his light among the caravans.
For the Yenish, respect for one's elders and religious fervour flirt indifferently with vandalism. Fred Dorkel is one of them: feared and respected by his community, he earns his living by stealing cars. One night, his life is turned upside down: an angel appears to him. For Fred, this is the sign of a second chance that he has to take. He decides to settle down, but this choice creates a clash with his family…
In Tijuana, on the Mexican border, men and women try to escape solitude and lurking death. "Muerto (Death)… Muerto… Muerto!" David, the gringo, rolls the "r" of "Muerto" as he has been taught by his girlfriend, a local prostitute. "Muerrrto!" she screams… She then lifts up her skirt and urinates into a tinplate bucket while threatening David with a strange knife whose handle is made out of a few canine vertebrae. In Tijuana, it is said this knife was used for satanic masses in which dogs were sacrificed and drained of their blood; a little like the bloodless corpses of drug traffickers that Tijuana comes across each morning on the roadside. Tomorrow, the knife will again change hands to live another life. David the gringo, a cop, a bar girl and even the mayor, all of them – as if swept up by some musical piece played in a downtown brothel – take a few dance steps hugging this bone, which whispers in their ears that Tijuana is holy because it is free.
Emilio had lived here in Barcelona and is a friend. Today, his silhouette, always dressed in his stage costume walking down La Rambla is still remembered. He is a flamenco singer and a man who has always wanted to see life through the prism of his art. But above all, he has simply invented his life as a poem or painting (like those by Goya) inhabited by a monstruous nature as if to remind us that life is only a piece of thinking meat.
Eighteen-year-old Jason Dorkel belongs to the traveller community. He is getting ready to celebrate his Christian baptism when his half-brother Fred returns after several years in prison. Together with their last brother, the impulsive and violent Mickael, the three Dorkels set off for a spin in the world of the "gadjos" in search of a cargo of copper.
Fred, a 30-year-old gypsy traveller, wakes up at home in the midst of bloody sheets after a long night spent running from the police. He finds his son with a young raclo (non-gypsy) and his wife and young daughter; all of them realise that Fred has been hit by bullets and that he is well and truly dead but is refusing to leave the world of the living. Each of them takes in this news with apprehension or compassion, but all of them are secretly waiting for Fred to tread the path that will allow him to accept the inescapable truth.
For once, Fred will sit down at the table. He will tell all, even what he hid from me about the famous spin in a BMW. For the occasion, he spills his guts out onto the table and, as if that's not enough, he will fling his eyes down too.
In his truck, Jo listens to traveller song: the story of a man who is in chtar (jail), and who invites a small sparrow to feed at his cell window. He also thinks about his mother who has done all she could to make her son into a good man… So, as his mother sees her son in jail, well, she wants to die. This is a rare moment of intimacy and closeness to Jo, whose temperament is normally violent and volatile. It is also the pleasure of taking things easy and listening to a naïve romantic song that says a lot about the travellers. It is in these simple moments that people lay themselves bare… And, to boot, this film is perhaps the first gypsy karaoke.
A journey with Mario, who dedicates his life to pitbull training.
The portrait of Maurice, a young "Yenish" traveller. Maurice loves taunting pitbulls, romping with his nephews and nieces, driving without a licence, and poaching rabbits with his brother. But what he does best is preserve the world of childhood at any price.
I've been going regularly to Tijuana for over 15 years and, there, I always encounter the ghostly silhouettes of women who haunt the place. I call them "the white ladies".
Immersion in the erotic heat and simmering violence of Tijuana through the story of a strange couple, El Tuerto (the one-eyed) and his wife, Pretty Eyes.
A man returns to Tijuana hoping to find a woman who has lost herself in drugs and the night and who seems to have become a "white lady", a phantom creature between sky and earth.
In Tijuana, Topo and Wera get by on their ingenuity and petty larceny. The little they earn goes into drugs and slot machines. She, Wera, was raised in Los Angeles and he, Topo, has spent his life in gangs. Time passes and disappears, and soon Wera's love for Topo is no more than a bitter memory…
Everything was to unfold peacefully around the fire, over a glass of "sky". But the spirit of revenge takes hold of the group and the presence of a gun becomes the subject of a strange incantation in which Death is beckoned, even implored.