Playlist
RaMell Ross's extraordinary realization of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida adopts an ingenious visual approach to the novel's exercise in subjectivity. Ross's first fiction feature confirms his status as a visionary cinematic artist.
Martha's strained relationship with her mother fractures completely when a misunderstanding drives them apart. Their mutual friend Ingrid sees both sides of the rift.
Follow the stories of a group of Londoners during the events of the British capital bombing in World War II.
In Mumbai, Nurse Prabha's routine is troubled when she receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband. Her younger roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a spot in the city to be intimate with her boyfriend. In Mumbai, Nurse Prabha's routine is troubled when she receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband. Her younger roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a spot in the city to be intimate with her boyfriend. A trip to a beach town allows them to find a space for their desires to manifest.
Anora is a comedy about a sex worker shot in New York City and Las Vegas.
Nina, an OB-GYN, faces accusations after newborn's death. Her life undergoes scrutiny during investigation. She persists in her medical duties, determined to provide care others hesitate to offer, despite risks.
When visionary architect László Toth and his wife Erzsébet flee post-war Europe in 1947 to rebuild their legacy and witness the birth of modern America, their lives are changed forever by a mysterious and wealthy client.
The film is set across the first two decades of the 21st century and tells the story of how a Chinese woman lives to herself in silence, celebrating the prosperous Belle Epoque with songs and dance. Some 22 years in the making, the film's first elements were shot as far back as 2001.
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.
When a ship sinks near her isolated fishing post, Eva must choose: rescue the shipwrecked or survive winter. Guilt ridden, the fishermen believe they are being punished for their choices.
Grown men's recreational baseball game stretches to extra innings on their beloved field's final day before demolition. Humor and nostalgia intertwine as daylight fades, signaling an era's end.
Edward, civil servant, flees fiancee Molly on their wedding day in Rangoon, 1917. His travels replace panic with melancholy. Molly, set on marriage, amused by his escape, trails him across Asia.
A near-future Tokyo awaits destruction as the city is rocked by a series of foreshocks that predict a larger, more disastrous quake on the horizon. With the anxiety looming over them, a group of teenage best friends and musicians get into typical teenager trouble that tests the strength of their relationships.
Ongoing exploration of the contemporary world with a tragicomic study of human strengths and weaknesses.
Follows the villager's reaction to three newcomers, who become scapegoats in a time of economic turmoil.
Returning to Saint-Martial for his late boss's funeral, Jérémie's stay with widow Martine becomes entangled in a disappearance, a threatening neighbor, and an abbot's shady intentions.
American filmmaker Julia Loktev, born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent media journalism in Putin's Russia—just months, as it turned out, before the country's invasion of Ukraine. Structured in five chapters, Loktev's film is an extraordinary vérité document of a moment of immense change and anxiety.
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.
Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam, shares all his secrets to de-mythologize his mythologized life.
On an empty road in the middle of the night, Shula stumbles across the body of her uncle. As funeral proceedings begin around them, she and her cousins bring to light the buried secrets of their middle-class Zambian family, in filmmaker Rungano Nyoni's surreal and vibrant reckoning with the lies we tell ourselves.
A comedy-drama exploring human relationships in Zambia and Guinea.
A voice that claims to belong to a hippopotamus. A voice that does not understand the perception of time. A voice that tells of a historical event as if in a trance. "Am I making that sound that comes out of my mouth? And what is a mouth anyway?" The only thing the animal knows for sure is that it is dead. The first and only hippopotamus ever killed in the Americas. The Colombian press called him Pepe. Between encounters and misunderstandings, epiphanies and sadness, we enter a world full of stories replete with even more stories. In a serious and playful way, both authentic and deceptive, images and sounds narrate the overwhelming orality of places full of beings who, like Pepe, died without ever knowing where they really were.
This film tells a compelling story set within the socio-political landscape of Iran, reflecting the challenges faced by individuals under restrictive regimes.
A timely, heartrending tale set against the backdrop of the "Woman. Life. Freedom" movement in Iran follows a newly promoted investigating judge who, under pressure from his corrupt superiors, is forced to betray his own morals by cracking down on protesters without due process. This fateful decision sets off a chain reaction, as his compliance with the oppressive regime leads to a devastating rift with his wife and two daughters. Tensions escalate when the paranoid father discovers his gun is missing, plunging the family into a slow-burning spiral of fear and distrust.
In the shadow of the Hijab Protests, this powerful drama subtly exposes the insidious impact of the Islamic Republic's chauvinistic and oppressive regime on the private lives of its citizens, with a particular focus on the suffering endured by women. The Seed of the Secret Fig is the latest masterpiece from acclaimed director Mohammad Rasoulof, a filmmaker and political activist whose career has been marked by relentless harassment and censorship by the Iranian authorities. Despite being sentenced to eight years in prison during the making of this film, Rasoulof managed to complete it and flee his homeland just in time for its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where his courage was recognized with a Special Jury Award. – Amir Bogen
Karsh, an innovative businessman and grieving widower, builds a device to connect with the dead inside a burial shroud.
A man obsessively searches for his missing daughter after receiving disturbing videos exposing his secrets, leading to a chilling confrontation with the voyeur.
In September 1975, Sara Jane Moore fired two shots at President Gerald Ford on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco's Union Square. Moore holds the center of this fleet and compelling nonfiction drama from protean filmmaker Robinson Devor, who lends it the feel of a 1970s thriller.
Rebecca is a girl healer whose fame attracts flocks to her father Lawrence Byrne's mission deep in the Amazon jungle. Rebecca and Byrne are dragged into an escalating conflict.
Nobody knows where the woman comes from. She is sitting on a park bench and diligently playing a child's recorder. She says she is from France. With no money or means of supporting herself, she has been advised to teach French. This is how she comes to have two Korean women as her pupils. The woman likes to walk barefoot and to lie down on rocks. And when she is feeling up to it, she tries to see each instant in a non-verbal way and to live life as rationally as she can. But things remain as hard as ever. She relies on the Korean alcoholic drink of makgeolli to provide a bit of comfort every day.
In the underground coal mines, Nam and Viet, young miners, face danger and darkness. One prepares to leave for a new life, but they must find Nam's father's remains, a soldier lost in a faraway forest, retracing the past through memories.
17-year-old Jeff is invited by his friend Max's family to spend some time with them in film director Blake Cadieux's secluded log cabin.
In this enveloping second part of the Youth trilogy, shot between 2015 and 2019, Wang Bing deepens his vérité portrait of a generation struggling to survive on meager wages amidst a nation's economic expansion, emphasizing the distrustful, increasingly combative relationship between workers and management.
As New Year's break is coming, Zhili's textile workshops are almost deserted. The few remaining employees are desperate to be paid for their trip home. From the banks of the Yangtze River to the mountains of Yunnan, everyone will be celebrating the festivities in their hometown, and performing the rituals of prosperity among their families. For Shi Wei, it's also the opportunity to get married, as it is for Fang Lingping. Her husband, a former IT specialist, will have to follow her in Zhili after the ceremony. Learning is hard, but does not hinder the advent of a new generation of workers.
Lee, who recounts his life in Mexico City among American expatriate college students and bar owners surviving on part-time jobs and GI Bill benefits. He is driven to pursue a young man named Allerton, who is based on Adelbert Lewis Marker.
When does a democracy end and a theocracy begin? Apocalypse in the Tropics investigates Brazil's descent into religious fundamentalism during the Covid-19 pandemic and president Bolsonaro's leadership.
With candid interviews and newly revealed archival footage, co-directors R.J. Cutler and David Furnish, Sir Elton John's husband, paint a riveting and highly intimate portrait of a musical icon and trailblazer.
Mexico, today. Lawyer Rita receives an unexpected offer. She has to help a feared cartel boss retire from his business and disappear forever by becoming the woman he's always dreamed of being. Mexico, today. Overqualified and exploited, lawyer Rita is wasting her talents working for a large firm far better at whitewashing criminal garbage than serving justice. But an unexpected way out appears, the sort of offers you can't refuse : to help feared cartel boss Juan "Little Hands" Del Monte - aka Manitas - retire from his business and disappear forever. Manitas has a plan he's been fine-tuning in secret for years : to become, at last, the woman he's always dreamed of becoming.
Bill Murray, Naomi Watts, and a charismatic Great Dane named Bing propel this wise and insightful character drama based on the acclaimed novel by Sigrid Nunez and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel.
Based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva's best-selling memoir in which his mother is forced into activism when her husband was captured by a military regime in Brazil, 1964.
For an exhibition that ultimately never took place, the Centre Pompidou asked the filmmaker to reply, in pictures, to the question: "Where are you at, Leos Carax?" His attempt at an answer is itself full of questions about himself and "his" world: "I don't know, but if I were to reply, I would say…" Such is the genesis behind the aptly titled self-portrait It's Not Me. In this essayistic collage, cult self-taught filmmaker Carax looks back at his childhood, assesses his first attempts at filmmaking, revisits his recent works of cinema, and interweaves personal history with world history. This forty-minute assault on the viewer's senses, filled with material sure to inspire post-film discussion, had its world premiere at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
Follows the life story of the world's greatest opera singer, Maria Callas, during her final days in 1970s Paris.
It is a documentary/fiction hybrid film about the American indie band Pavement, incorporating scripted scenes with documentary footage of the band and a musical stage play consisting of songs from their discography.
Mismatched cousins David and Benji reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history.
Writer-director Jesse Eisenberg (When You Finish Saving the World, 2022 Sundance Film Festival) returns to the Festival with a poignant, funny
exploration of the unexpected permutations of intergenerational trauma. Eisenberg's intimate, resonant script complements the tension and humor of the two very different cousins' tumultuous road trip with a sensitively drawn reckoning of the legacy of World War II among the survivors of survivors.
While Benji's irreverent charm only partially masks his deep melancholy, David's frustration with and genuine love for his cousin become achingly clear. Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin give devastating, funny performances as characters grappling with their grandmother's history and the ways their own lives have diverged. Michał Dymek's eloquent cinematography and a Chopin-driven score bind the tour group's complicated, emotional reaction to the Polish setting into the texture of the film.—HZ
The leaders of seven wealthy democracies get lost in the woods while drafting a statement on a global crisis, facing danger as they attempt to find their way out.
The last completed film by the veteran Jean-Luc Godard, finalized the day before his assisted death in September 2022, Scénarios folds together many of his lifelong inquiries into a precise, sober treatise on art, cinema, language, and death.
Conceptualized by Godard and shot by his trusted collaborator Fabrice Aragno, with Exposé du film annonce du film "Scénario" the maestro — cigar in hand — presents a guided tour of a scrapbook-meets-storyboard for a feature left unfinished.
A time capsule of New York City between August 13-15, 1965, framed by the Beatles' arrival in the city and their first concert at Shea Stadium. The film consists exclusively of archive material from the period (ABC, CBS, NBC), 8mm home movies and images of the concert, which was recorded with fourteen 35mm cameras. Four teenagers are sent on a trip through time and inserted in the archive material by means of animation.
The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) — a group of current and former Amazon workers in New York City's Staten Island — takes on one of the world's largest and most powerful companies in the fight to unionize.
Chronicling the historic efforts of the ALU, Union is an intimate and surprising story of dogged determination, unorthodox tactics, and speaking up despite David vs. Goliath odds. Capturing up-close, in-the-trenches moments with the upstart labor union leaders — including the charismatic Chris Smalls — as they try to build support for their movement on their own terms, filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing bear witness to the realities of labor organizing in the United States — challenging at best; near-impossible when facing the unlimited resources and influence of a corporate giant. They track exhilarating victories and demoralizing setbacks along the way, but foremost spotlight the far-reaching ability of collective action to inspire hope and bring self-determination to workers who've long felt disenfranchised and powerless.—BT
Little, Big, and Far is a hybrid feature film with a focus on astronomy, physics, and natural history museums. The main character, Karl, is an Austrian astronomer and dark sky advocate, at a crossroads in life and work. At 70, with jobs at risk and his physicist wife distancing, he and his colleague, Sarah, also struggle with the environmental crises reshaping their fields. After a museums conference in Greece, Karl decides not to return home and heads for a small island in hopes of finding a dark enough sky to reconnect with the stars. Left on his own at a remote mountain trail, he ascends and waits for darkness to fall.
Mark Brown is a paleobotanist. He has devoted his life to a crazy project: recreating a primary forest in his own garden in Normandy. Viewers of Pierre Creton's previous film, A Prince, already know him: he is the man giving a lecture on the origin of flowers to the class of Alberto, played by Vincent Barré. Those who are familiar with Creton's work will recognize the members of his usual band, all gathered here. Because his films, whether made alone or with Vincent Barré, always come from a place between curiosity and friendship, adventure and loyalty. This time, the adventure involves letting Mark Brown guide us, walk after walk, in search of the endemic plants of the Pays-de-Caux. In 2006, Barré and Creton made a wonderful film-herbarium in the high-altitude valley of the Spiti River, in the Himalayas: The Arch of the Iris (FID 2006), a film vibrant with beauty, the handheld DV camera collecting each specimen in situ. By replaying this gesture in more familiar landscapes, between the Seine and the cliffs, the directors give it a whole new dimension. First, there is "The Shooting," filmed digitally: the little band joyfully strolls, from meadow to peat-bog, following in their guide's wake. One takes notes, another records sounds, a few chat along the way, and Mark gushes over each and every flower. Meanwhile, the last one bustles about, focused on his task: checking the light, choosing the focal length, triggering the shot that will capture on film the singular beauty of each plant. The collection of these shots forms the second part of the film: "The Herbarium". After the wide shots and landscapes, after the digital image, the sudden appearance of flowers in close-ups, transfigured by 16mm, is a wonder for the eyes. Flower after flower, in a low voice, as if intimidated by so much beauty, Mark Brown improvises a commentary, between science and poetry. Too modest to say it aloud, he shares another lesson by example: getting closer to plants, sharing their lives, is a condition for poetic survival in the midst of disaster. Cyril Neyrat
A writer, teacher, feminist activist, pioneer of Afro-Surrealism and key member of the Négritude movement, Martinique-born Suzanne Césaire was a trailblazer who deserves greater attention and credit than she has ever received. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich's fascination with her subject is seen in the research that went into the making of this film – including hours of audio interviews with Césaire's living children and family. But this is no mere biopic. Instead, Césaire's life is presented through an investigation by a group of filmmakers keen to grapple with the writer's life and legacy. Shifting between present and past, blurring the lines between the imagined and the biographical, the film homes in on Zita Hanrot's character, an actress and new mother haunted by voices as she prepares to play Césaire.
Hunt-Ehrlich, an artist and filmmaker renowned for delving into the inner worlds of Black women, delivers an absorbing exploration of a figure side-lined, if not completely erased, by history. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire profits from Hunt-Ehrlich's fragmentary approach, acknowledging that the complexity of her character demands more than conventional hagiography. Noting how her husband Aimé's success in the political sphere eclipsed her achievements, the film aims to reassert her place as a radical voice and visionary.
– Vanja Kaludjercic
With Beatrix (FID 2021), their first feature film, Milena Czernovsky and Lilith Kraxner had already demonstrated the subtlety of their art of portraiture, through the attention they paid to the most tenuous gestures, to ways of being, of inhabiting a space, a place. In this second feature film, they focus our attention on two young women, Errol and Sacha, in their twenties. We will know little about them. The film, anchored in their daily lives, leads from situation to situation, just sketched, perceived in fragments, without salient events, seeming to belong to the ordinary of a life apparently without history. "Are you crazy, are you normal, are you weak?" questions in the form of a prologue the magnificent trio of elderly women who punctuate the film like an ancient choir, offering their commentary. From gestures to situations left hanging, through an elliptical montage, bluish lets us glimpse their inner movements as if in dotted lines, showing each of our two protagonists facing their own hesitations, their own enigma. Growing up? Becoming an adult, finding a place to be oneself. And creating one's own self-image. A moment in life, bathed in the blue of the title: that of the city in winter, that of the virtual world that punctuates the film as if echoing their questions. That also of their feelings, of this nuanced atmosphere in which the film is bathed. Nicolas Feodoroff
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.
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.
"Fogo do Vento" follows some of the protagonists of the previous film, delving into the stories of this community in the Alentejo landscape, in a political film that summons the memory of previous generations and transports us from the resistance to the Salazar dictatorship to the present day, in a reflection on war and peace, highlighting the importance of its discourse in the current global context.
In November 1948, James Baldwin left New York and, thanks to a fellowship grant, relocated to Paris. The 24-year-old writer would spend most of the next decade there, escaping American racism and his own social alienation, ensconcing himself in the city's Algerian quarters and the community of Left Bank artists in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and writing his first books. In his first feature, photographer and filmmaker Yashaddai Owens imagines Baldwin's first experiences in Paris in impressionistic fashion. Shooting in black-and-white on 16mm film, Owens conveys a subjective feeling of wonder and freedom as Baldwin (Benny O. Arthur) observes and absorbs his new environment, and experiences newfound individuality and erotic liberation. A work of exhilaration, set to a lush original score by Paco Andreo, Jimmy is a portrait of the artist reconnecting with the world.
Lázaro, Luisa and Francisco, in their forties, live in Mexico City. Friends, they also form a loving trio. Nothing gives it away, as their exchanges are emptied of any affection. Prosaic, contradictory, repetitive, they diffuse a slight unease as much as they produce a comic effect. The first movement of Lázaro de noche shows their ordinary daily life punctuated by comical casting scenes, for a film about which we will know nothing, except the method of its director to audition them: observation. With Lázaro de noche , Nicolás Pereda continues his enterprise initiated more than fifteen years ago with his faithful community of actor friends. He brings them together in a mutant film with an unparalleled tone, in which he articulates images of the banal and the marvelous, and thereby explores the limits of realism, inspired by the words of the Argentinian writer César Aira. During a dinner that brings together the three protagonists, a change of camera angle and the emergence of a voice from the past plunge the film into another space-time, that of memory. Barely have they met in a writing workshop and the beginnings of their ballet of love been sketched out, when the evocation of the tale of Aladdin written at the time by Luisa projects the story into a third level of fiction and representation. Lázaro and his mother Teresita now embody Aladdin and his mother, in a profane variation of the tale, a fairy tale of raw triviality. If, over the course of its transformations, Lázaro de noche moves away from reality – from reality to memory, from memory to tale – it is without sacrificing any of its tangible materiality; the film seems to become disenchanted as it re-enchants itself. And if reading Aladdin is surprising - because, by making the same wish for food repeatedly, the hero "refuses to make the causal leap of magic and chooses the step by step of reality" (César Aira) -, Nicolás Pereda, himself, invites us to find the magic in this same step by step.
That loquacious cynic known only as "Old White Male," played by John Erdman in Heinz Emigholz's 2020 film The Lobby (NYFF58), returns in this delirious, sci-fi-comic follow-up in which our fearless, joyless monologist covers an even wider spectrum of human absurdity as he wrestles with the biggest question mark of all: The Future. Smarting from his last experience making a movie with "that nobody of a director," which he's told was "rejected by a once-famous film festival" for its alleged misanthropy, Erdman is this time joined by a caustic, endlessly philosophizing German filmmaker (Susanne Bredehöft) and a robot version of himself from the past (visualized as his own disembodied, portable miniature head). Shot in Berlin, Malta, and Mexico City, but set mostly in his bunker-like home, The Suit gives Erdman ample room to expound upon cinema, the corporeal vs. the digital, the apocalypse, architecture, health and nutrition, and what it means to see and be seen in a world that's increasingly turning inward. Texts include everything from Walter Benjamin to Nelly Furtado, and nothing is sacred.
Two women find frozen cash, try to retrieve it. A tour guide leads confused tourists around Winnipeg sites. A man quits his job, visits his mother. Storylines intertwine surreally as identities blur in a disorienting comedy.
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.
Before his legendary proto-cinematic studies in motion, photographer Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned to document the United States Army's war against the Modoc tribe in Northern California in a series of stereographs, many of them staged. Alternately unnerving, meditative, and explosive, Adam Piron's Black Glass examines the entangled histories of visual technology and the genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations by white settlers through a violent collision of image and sound.
Often working with images from British state archives to reflect on imperial legacies, filmmaker Miranda Pennell, in her third appearance at the festival, takes us to Gaza in December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media raises questions about what it means to be a spectator. What we see and read, beyond the shapes and colors that document reality.
Investigating the contradictions of being disabled and American, Jordan Lord's essay film braids themes of representation, access, nationalism, and labor, interrogating cinema's status as, at once, an ambient phenomenon and an inherently ableist medium. Assembling audio description and commentary along with found and original media, An All-Around Feel Good troubles assumptions about what it means to pay attention and to belong—to a nation, an audience, a unified collective.
America's violent history of settler colonial extraction and enslavement is posited against the expansive lens of geologic time in The Deep West Assembly. Commingling theater and computer animation, textiles and dance, Black and Indigenous cultural traditions, Cauleen Smith locates an anti-racist methodology for the end of the world in the spaces underground, where the interior of the Earth becomes a place of possibility and new ways of relating.
The emerging field of computer vision turns its powers toward one of cinema's earliest subjects: the train journey. With surprising insights and occasional poetry, software follows the human along old routes of imperial expansion, across borders of landscape and language. Blinking awake in a sleeper car, it is another passenger slowly discerning its surroundings—and another machine with which we remake our world.
Artists Tolia Astakhishvili and James Richards's collaboration cultivates a sense of ruin and renovation, an architectural ouroboros in which previously created work yields new use. In this digitally composed space, volume is collapsed, vertiginously upending our visual perception. The camera-eye floats unsteadily within it, as the soundtrack weaves together heterogeneous materials, further propelling and disorienting us through their world.
Morgan Quaintance, winner of the 2020 New:Vision Award, returns to CPH:DOX with a new and evocative work that combines found footage, analogue 16mm and satellite imagery – not to mention loops and repeats – in an investigation of temporal processes from two radically different perspectives: the physical being of the body and the planetary, geological conditions. Change and dissolution pave the way for new becomings in 'Efforts of Nature', which with a rhythmic and almost pulsating force insists on perception itself as a medium for new and transcendent insights. In a short period of time and with a number of striking film and video works, Quaintance has reached a unique level of abstraction, which here is allowed to reach new and dizzying heights.
Being John Smith is a deceptively wry and deeply felt work by the English avant-garde legend, in which Smith reflects on his life and career by way of his generic name, grappling with his own mortality and legacy, through a minimal, unassuming deployment of text, image, and voice.
An emotive portrait of a multispecies matriarchal family composed using found footage from communist Poland.
Working with a robot integrated with him, a boy tries to make a new body part to expand the limits of human abilities. The boy is communicating to two other kids simultaneously via the specially made glasses. Their visions reflect the real world and also the cyber world. Everything seems like connected each other, but…
Microorganisms float against a desert landscape, the lights from cellphone towers blink like fireflies, and a mysterious dialogue between two minds adjusting to a new beginning. In Sebastián Schjaer's Like an Outburst, animals, humans, and machines seek a tenuous coexistence and different ways of seeing and living in the world.
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.
Revolving Rounds is a cyclical film in both form and content. Shot at an agricultural field on the outskirts of Vienna, Johann Lurf and Christina Jauernik's 3D short begins as it ends, tracking a planimetric path alongside three greenhouses as the early morning sun beams across the surrounding lands
Streaks of iridescence and dull clatter disintegrate the brutalist architecture of Albany's Empire State Plaza in Laura Kraning's ESP as modernist structures glitch, smear, and flicker through the intervention of a faulty inkjet printer, rendering the capital city into a pulsing monochrome tesseract, a sinister grid of light and noise.
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.
Against a dense, sinister soundtrack of drones, bells, night creatures, and electric hum, flashes of illumination reveal a trembling crepuscular landscape in Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie's The Land at Night. It's a nocturnal ramble through dry grasslands, empty roads, and the skeletal remains of deserted dwellings.
"Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya" traces alternative cartographies of time, rooted in the very geologic formations of our planet. Examining volcanic time as a means to comprehend and express Earth's geological history, the film seeks a sensing and knowing that recognizes the divergent nature of the time scales that surround us. From almost instantaneous catastrophic ruptures to the formation of mountains over millions of years, the film invites us to become immersed in time.
Using tectonic plates as imaginary maps, Szlam films a constellation of ancient landforms, from the eroded vestiges of volcanic activity to the relics of the Gondwana Rainforest, tracing a path along the central eastern ranges of Australia, which were illuminated in the afterglows of the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai eruption. Szlam films on 16mm and edits in-camera, creating dazzling landscapes through multiple exposures. The vibrations, murmurings and signals of Earth form the soundscape composed by Australian artist Lawrence English. "Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya" evokes the layered histories of Mount Beerwah to the titular Bunya Mountains, rendering a unique perspective on the shifting faces of our environments.
A silent city symphony, projected from gorgeous black and white 16mm film. Materia vibrante lets the resonating frequencies of the urban environment create the inaudible hum that keeps the engines of society running, absent of the inhabitants running around like little ants toiling away.
Santiago in the shimmering summer heat. High-res images undergo a digital zoom which transforms spaces into surfaces and houses into textures. In between, there are the small gestures of everyday urban life. And two women in search of a place for their love.
In No Spank, a remote Greek island that doubles as a starched and highly regimented girls' school serves as the setting of Jordan Strafer's mordant and ribald coming-of-age story, in which the artist's trademark mise-en-scène, flair for period minutiae, and tensely taciturn performances evoke the grim frustrations, petty rebellions, and light body horror of adolescence.
Benjamin Britten's elegiac musical setting of William Blake's "The Sick Rose" supplies the title of Rosalind Nashashibi's video, which unfolds as an elliptical cross-media dialogue between the multimedia artist Elena Narbutaitė, the sculptures of Marie Lund, and Nashashibi's own paintings and camera. What emerges is a set of funny and deep reflections on artist-types and the contexts and meanings of art-making—as a place to breathe and wonder, or a form of wasting time. "Don't take it all too seriously."
In 1998, two high school girls sent a letter to the first-ever women's newspaper in Iran.
Tangled spirals, rapid encounters, a quiet war between the vertical and the horizontal: Simon Liu's Refuse Room captures Hong Kong's architectural densities and lurid fluorescence through shadows, graffiti, and detritus, surfacing the tense and dizzying atmospheres of a city in anxious slumber, caught between fragmentation and solidarity.
A film of electric sonic and visual rhythms, Karimah Ashadu's Machine Boys is one part 21st-century Scorpio Rising and one part incisive micro-ethnography. Intimately capturing Lagos's sub-economy of motorcycle taxis—known locally as "Okada"—Ashadu zooms in on both the thundering, tricked-out machines and the bodies of the riders, whose performances of masculine bravado mask the precarity of their dangerous and illegal livelihoods.
Practice, Practice, Practice' is what Richard Bradley did three times before he took down the confederate flag flying over City Hall in San Francisco, California in the 1980s.
In Francisco Rodríguez Teare's sly, tender, and unsettled October Noon, a group of friends in a forest enclave on Santiago's central mountain reimagine the 2019 protests that rocked Chile as a speculative future.
In Zachary Epcar's Sinking Feeling, human bodies and voices are counterposed with the shimmering abstractions, ambient fizzle, and rigid linearity of corporate architecture. A disquieting glimpse into a post-post-modernity of dread and torpor, Sinking Feeling peels back the surfaces of these Ballardian non-places to release pent-up fluids, a stifled longing, a hidden radiance.
The fragile materialities of Yangzhou wood engraving and analog film converge in Lei Lei's fractal portrait of labor and craft. Exploring techniques of light and poetry, wood and celluloid, re-engraved montages demonstrations of expertise with a cacophonous electronic soundtrack and the personal histories of the women whose labor sustains these traditions.