Playlist
This French agitprop ode to the Palestinian struggle was thought lost until recently rediscovered in the Third World Newsreel collection by archivist Draye Wilson. Composed of still photographs and a bit of Vietnam footage from Joris Ivens, its re-emergence echoes a call for global solidarity.
As many as 100,000 people, predominantly members of the minority Tamil community, are estimated to have disappeared during the 26-year-long Sri Lankan Civil War. Through a unique synthesis of interviews, news clips and re-enactments this docufiction reflects on this harrowing history as families search for loved ones that disappeared without a trace.
A sequel to her earlier Black Rectangle, and reminiscent of Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren's groundbreaking animations, Rhayne Vermette's buzzing miniature A Black Screen Too is a burst of colour and movement undercut by darkness.
In 2012, Mohamad had witnessed his best friend gunned down by an armed militia on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria; the blood spilled into the lake contaminated his memory. Ten years later, the reflections on the Laurentian waters bring back Mohamad's trauma. I asked him if he'd like to dig out the memories, to repair the pain by retreating for a few days into the most distressing calm possible for him. He tells us about death, immigration and anger. We wonder how and why we should tell this story. —Samy Benammar
A misty afternoon returns a Mapuche couple to their wedding video. In their civil ceremony, they are noted as one of only two couples married in the indigenous language of Mapudungun.
A man searches for memories of his family's past, alternating between Geomeunyeo, Buseok Temple, and his grandmother's house, all of which are located along a straight line on the map. Geomeunyeo is a rock located in the reclaimed area of Buseok, Seosan, South Korea. It was originally a reef that was exposed above sea level, but is now above ground. The name of Buseok, which means floating rock, is said to be derived from Geomeunyeo. —Kyujae Park
Days after the 2022 Philippine elections, a filmmaker lies to the police about making a film, just when a protest was put to a halt. Upon the retrieval of his deleted recordings of landscapes, some Filipino children began to experience a spectral figure from the dark side of history — which have taken away their ability to read and speak, and their innate sense of local language, as vengeful spirits escape and are reborn through an oceanarium underground somewhere in Manila. —Gio Lingao
Lawrence Lek directs an animated court drama where the defendant is a driverless car accused of kidnapping its own creator. Setting the premise for the artist to address themes like accountability, agency, the (already happening) use of AI in the justice system, and the future of class struggle. In the tradition of Philip K. Dick and Franz Kafka, this trial is a powerful reminder of the normalisation of the absurd and of the urgent need for a new system of ethics.
In a remote Chinese village, a peasant family endured wars, the communist revolution, and the deadliest famine. Persecution and hardship eventually forced the family to scatter. Against the backdrop of China's rapid urbanization, the filmmaker sets out to unearth her family's enduring bond with this long-forgotten village, hidden deeply in the vast mountain range of Loess Plateau.
Amit Dutta, arguably the greatest living Indian avant-garde filmmaker, has worked with animation since his earliest shorts. Over the last decade animation has taken centre stage in his practice and now reaches its zenith with his first feature-length essay in the realm.
Thunderland, as a matter of fact is an audiovisual performance combining soundscapes by musician Frédéric Boisclair with live 16mm projections by filmmaker Charles-André Coderre. The performance focuses on the hydroelectric, aluminum and pulp and paper plants located in Shawinigan, Mauricie. The project's initiator, Frédéric Boisclair, comes from a family of factory workers at these plants. Composed of original material and 16mm archival footage taken from corporate films shot in the region's factories, Thunderland, as a matter of fact examines the various places and materials specific to the Mauricie region's collective industrial imagination. —Charles-André Coderre
THE EARLY SUN, RED AS A HUNTER'S MOON follows this temporal tradition in an interpolation of Kiowa lore in excerpts from N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain, a reunion in Portugal between the filmmaker and their friend after 20 years, and a historical attempt to decode a cryptic letter from 1890 with "hieroglyphic script" that arrived at Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian Industrial School sent from a reservation in the Oklahoma Territory to a Kiowa student named Belo Cozad. Shot on expired 8mm film, the film presents a collision of fragments of time and Kiowa memory. —Adam Piron
In horsemanship a half halt is a pulse on the rein to say, hey I'm still here, holding you. It indicates something around the bend, a warning and a reassurance. Here, a series of interruptions are held together by those who catch me when I'm falling. Rosie reads their poem. Grace and I brave the dark. Camera breaks. Record skips. Lovers reunite through a viewfinder. We're all filming each other on horseback. A meditation on intimacy in times of offscreen emergency, both personal and political. Seizures as elevators. —Sofia Theodore-Pierce
From the disordered-saying(s) of a lifetime, to the material tracings of an unstructured narrative, 'All said done' is less a portrait of a person than an incomplete image of class relations and affective labor. This film is dedicated to the memory of my father, the one who laughed, 'kill'. —Micah Weber
Inseparable from its legacy as 'the land of lakes and volcanoes' is Nicaragua's legacy as a 'country of poets,' rendering a resistance that is encountered in all physical senses. Concrete Resources (Thank you for keeping me a company of images) examines the enmeshment of poetry and violence within Nicaragua's national identity considering U.S. intervention and extraction in the larger void of the isthmus. Through visual and sonic collage, memories of this space as one side of my family's home and the other's site of study are pulled apart and built back again using family ephemera, U.S. government archives, and surrogate landscapes. —Emir West
A televisual stream of consciousness assembled from archival footage set in the Black media explosion of the 1980s. A frenetic remix of public access television, video diaries, commercial mass media, and citizen journalism sequenced as short vignettes featuring musical and poetic performance, documentation of state violence, political theater and expressions of Black love. —Alexis McCrimmon
The first of a trilogy of 'dance' films (followed by The Bamboo Flute and the as-yet unreleased Priye Charushile), Bhavantarana expands on some of the modes Shahani had first explored in Khayal Gatha. The dance form is the famous Odissi, a form in Orissa that emerged from an earlier folk mode typically performed by young boys. The dancer is one of India's leading figures, Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra. The film begins with a traditional sculptor hewing a dancer's image from a piece of stone that he holds down with his feet, expanding from there to links from dance to sculpture, and from folk to classical forms. While several dances come from Mahapatra's traditional repertory, the finale – the spectacular Navarasa – is choreographed specially for the film.
Made in the woods in New Hampshire at a time when I had lost focus in my life. A film that lets you experience the search for center/focus. The projectionist, provided with a set of instructions, will be part of this experience (the film) by searching and losing/finding focus as they are projecting the film. —Burak Çevik
Trees and natural artefacts disappear in the flicker effect of landscape compositions where sweeping branches carve moving structures into the viewer's memory, and the transformations of living image threads remind us of the inexhaustible visual exuberance of meadows. —Canyon Cinema
"typhoon diary 风球日记" travels through various dream-states to explore the narrator's personal connection to rain as a medium for both dissociation and transformation.
The found fragments of exile bring life to an unfinished film started by a Brazilian artist who lived in Los Angeles. Working under a pseudonym, the unknown filmmaker lingers on absences, empty landscapes and disembodied voices. These visual vacancies act as apparitions of a distant Brazil wrought by US Imperialism and military dictatorship. An unfinished piece, the film portrays the lingering fragments of work as dispersed as the diasporic maker.
California continues to destroy and rebuild itself. This collage film takes a surgical approach to carving through 60 years of California's historical violence. It comprises footage of the L.A. riots, slaughterhouses, wildfires, mid-century Malibu, and 90s' newsreels to unveil a cataclysmic future predicated on cycles of rebirth in the West.
Elegant and rigorous, while surprisingly playful, Chis Kennedy's Go Between observes the Brisbane River, passing boats, and cars on the William Jolly Bridge through an intoxicating play of masking and superimpositions.
A dragon dance troupe, an aikido class, an ice skating rink. Three scenarios or scenes through which the sensation of falling, or learning to fall, become metaphysical ruminations on modes of existence that draw strength from letting go.
A journey across the former coalfields of Las Animas County in Southeastern Colorado. In the early 1900s the region witnessed one of the bloodiest labor uprisings in U.S. history known as the Coalfield War. The conflict culminated in the Ludlow Massacre where 21 strikers and their families were murdered by the National Guard and CF&I pinkertons. After the decline of mining in the area, most former extraction sites were gradually converted into wilderness areas or flooded. It is believed that the coal fires from that era still burn somewhere deep below the landscape. —Matt Feldman
Shakespearean theatricality meets the subtlety of Kathakali subverted in the dramatic space of street theatre to give birth to a performative 'Caliban'-Khelkali- a hybrid act of articuling the post-colonial irony of contemporary India.
In 1997, I filmed a sequence - a friend immersing an idol of Ganesha at Chowpati beach, Bombay on the last day of the Ganapati festival. A year later, he committed suicide. After twelve years, I completed the film. Using his footage as the leitmotif, this film is a requiem to a dead friend. —Ashish Avikunthak
Three women reminisce about their times at school and rekindle and affirm old friendships. They share a strange secret about each other that is never made known to us. The film is a cinematic interpretation of Samuel Beckett's 1967 dramaticule, «Come and Go».
The film attemps to negociate with the duality that is associated with the ceremonial veneration of the Mother Goddess Kali-the presiding deity of Calcutta. It delves into the subliminal layers of consciousness, underlying the ritual of Kali worship.
Created with handmade and manufactured emulsions, Tuktuit explores the close and enduring connections between Inuit, caribou, lichen, and land use. Lichen developers help process the images of a caribou hide being fleshed down to rawhide to make gelatin for handmade emulsion that is subsequently used to shoot the film.
This is a cinematic ode to the moon, made in large part from archival sources combined with literary fragments and bound together by a haunting original score. The film steps lightly through the ideas that people through the ages have drawn from the moon — dreams of escape, myths of heaven, songs of longing and loss, odes of yearning, stories of lost futures — taking the viewer on a constantly surprising night-walk through the night sky.
Heart Shaped examines the transient lives of seven guests staying at a themed hotel in Wisconsin. Self and strangers overlap through shared spaces and intimate choreography. Letters between the two filmmakers offer an additional layer of blurred identity and the erotics of collaboration. "One hand on the clit the other on the mind."
Contact Lens imagines the emancipation of women from the confines of narrow spaces and the tedium of routine lives. Echoing the women's yearning to break free, the film itself strives to transcend its boundaries. The movie metamorphoses the image into a fluid, feminine essence, revealing her multifaceted nature in a timeless space.
Shahani's cinematic ode to perhaps the most versatile and also, it is said, perhaps the most ancient musical instrument in the world: the humble bamboo flute. Like Bhavantarana, it brings dance together with stone sculpture, combining classical performance with tribal music to tell a civilisational story of the origins of enunciation. 'Enunciation… precedes all concepts and the word', he wrote in 2002 in a short essay titled 'Film and Philosophy', and now Shahani enunciates through legends enacted through speech, movement and stone. "Both Kalidasa in India and Rumi in Persia… thought of the bamboo flute as preceding the prana of human existence, that which imbues it with its own being and transmutes it to the Word and the object, unites it with the Beloved other", he writes. The texts evoke a transformation from the Vedic age to the birth of Vaishnavism, e.g. the confrontation between Indra and Krishna from the Rig Veda. It includes performances by iconic dancers Alarmel Valli and Kelucharan Mahapatra. —Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Necessary Trip is about a hay-day of vice in Mansfield Ohio when it used to be called Little Chicago.
In 1945, the Okinawa caves offered the population shelter from the bombs and the US troops' arrival. Kaori Oda's film works in different visual layers, superimposing oral memory culture over historical wounds. The past casts shadows over the present.
Widely considered Shahani's most accessible film, Kasba returns to the melodramatic mode he had earlier experimented with in his three-hour epic Tarang. Here he adapts a Chekov story set in a small township in the mountainous Kangra valley. Maniram, an old-style entrepreneur made his fortune adulterating food, has two sons. One is arrested in the city for printing counterfeit currency, the other is mentally retarded and the Shakespearean fool in the story. There are two daughters-in-law, one a canny businesswoman and the other an innocent villager. Much of the film deploys a savage irony, as e.g. the movie star Shatrughan Sinha, who plays the elder son as a small-town braggart, often plays 'himself' in his swaggering style. The film's main generic achievement is to recall to the Indian cinema's melodramatic mode its original function, of integrating marginalised peoples and their languages. —Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Moving away from the contemporary, Shahani engages with the musical form of Khayal, as represented by one of its foremost schools, the Gwalior gharana. The form came into being around the 18th Century, adapting the more classical form of Dhrupad with folk literatures and performative styles often drawn from peasant and tribal cultures. In the film a student moves through, sometimes watches, and otherwise actually enacts, several musical legends such as the folk sagas of Heer-Ranjha and Nala-Damayanti, historical sagas such as the story of Rani Rupmati and Baaz Bahadur (Queen and King of Mandu) etc. The music comes from legendary musical figures from Gwalior (Krishnarao Shankar Pandit, Sharatchandra Arolkar, Jai Balaporia and Neela Bhagwat). Shahani also uses the dance of Birju Maharaj, India's leading Kathak dancer and the veena maestro Ustad Zia Moyuddin Dagar. Shahani explores the link between cinematic sequence and forms of musical improvisation in a visually stunning narration condensing legend, history and poetry, emphasising hybridity in all cultural practices.
Part of the trilogy "It's Just Business, Baby," Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea district, specifically foregrounding the act of cruising and public sex. The film (like the trilogy) intentionally lack a soundtrack to have audiences follow what the image is doing rather than the sounds associated with the image (specifically sex). —Ayanna Dozier
It's Just Business, Baby (part of the trilogy of Super 8mm shorts "It's Just Business, Baby") examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea and Tribeca districts that was renown as a site for sex work, sex clubs, and illicit sexual activity. The titular film of the trilogy captures an encounter between a client and a working girl where the lines of care are blurred following a session. The film repeats this encounter with the same actors switching parts to trouble the relationship of power that exists between that dynamic.
Bounded Intimacy (part of the trilogy of Super 8mm shorts "It's Just Business, Baby") examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea and Tribeca districts that was renown as a site for sex work, sex clubs, and illicit sexual activity. Bounded Intimacy explores the seduction of a nameless woman and the camera. The relationship between the two remains unknown and ambivalent as to whether or not the encounter is "authentic." The nature of their relationship is irrelevant as the camera captures the authenticity of the desire of the encounter between the two.
Returning to her hometown—the eponymous planned community, oriented around a factory—Danielle Dean alloys fiction and documentary, collective memory and autobiography, amid a hail of meteorites. Borrowing from Quatermass II, a midcentury science-fiction thriller shot in Hemel Hempstead as it was still being built, her film renders small-town xenophobia and corporate drudgery in the heightened tenor of an alien invasion plot.
In a small house by the sea, a woman begins a letter to an unknown correspondent. Surrounded by the books, mementoes and clutter of a life lived in one place, her home exposed to the waves of a rising ocean, she writes about the history of lost art.
Glances at an emptied apartment in Milwaukee drift into a psychodrama confronting fears of death and loneliness. Through the use of in-camera experiments, fractured imagery inquires into the hauntings and mysteries of the everyday.
In a border crossing of register, archive and memory, Translating one's own (or the symptom to be remembered) transforms the experience of a journey into a trace. It navigates as a gesture that persists over an open wound that resonates between landscapes and the passing of the days. This personal log explores the nebulous state of those who remain in a deja vu, searching for a texture with their gaze.
The queer art of Body modification took center stage in 1989 when Fakir Musafar's "Modern Primitives" movement hit alternative cultures around the globe via the punk subcultural magazine Re/Search. A photographer, performance artist, and ritualist, Musafar's work mobilized an entire generation of artists, thinkers, and seekers. A Body To Live In introduces this riveting "Gender Flex" icon to uncover the rich history of western body modification and its controversial intersections with sexuality and spiritual practices.