Playlist
<p>Experience that transforms the M100 GAV into a large film set for a feature film, where audiences will be able to witness the filming and participate in unexpected ways.</p>
<p>Pushing at the limits of non-fiction cinema, <strong>A Man Imagined</strong> is a bracingly intimate and hallucinatory portrait of a man with schizophrenia surviving amidst urban detritus and decay. Made in close collaboration with 67-year-old Lloyd, this immersive documentary fable follows the jagged path of a decades-long street survivor, across harsh winters and blistering summers, as he sells discarded items to motorists, sleeps in junkyards and lapses into near-psychedelic reveries.</p>
<p>“Just like cinema, friendship is a sculpture in time,” says Cao Guimarães. The people the Brazilian artist and filmmaker has maintained relationships with over decades have, like him, dedicated their lives to the arts. This means that the line between film and friendship is sometimes blurred. He notices this when he and his regular cameraman set out on a road trip lasting three days and nights, from Belo Horizonte to Montevideo. But the overlap between art and life becomes even more apparent when the COVID pandemic makes physical meetings impossible and all contact takes place artificially on screens.</p> <p>Friendship is a mosaic of domestic moments that form the creative strata of Guimarães’ work. They are recorded in a variety of formats, from Super8 and 35mm film to cassettes and old answering machine tapes. These audiovisual doodles are sometimes poetic, sometimes banal, and sometimes profound, mournful or uninhibitedly joyful. Above all, they are a celebration of spending time together and growing older.</p>
<p>A woman dreams of a future economic crisis affecting the cryptocurrency market. Thousands have been cryogenized, awaiting better times. Are they suspended, or are they falling into the void?</p>
<p>Shot entirely in a virtual environment, Knit’s Island is an exceptionally cinematic and contemplative documentary. The film is set in a rural game world that is both impressively realistic and uncannily not quite right. What is still “real” in this virtual existence, which will probably play an important role in the lives of more and more people in the future? With this question, the filmmakers set out to explore the sparsely populated 250 square kilometers of the game.</p> <p>They encounter zombies, dodge shootings, and speak to a disconcerting group who set out simply to kill as many other participants as possible. Above all, they meet players who spend hundreds or thousands of hours here, roaming, growing food, forming communities.</p> <p>“Sometimes I confuse my digital memories with those in real life,” a player says. “This virtual nature reminds me of my homeland, Australia,” says another in Berlin. The boundaries between role-play and reality gradually fade – all the more so during Covid lockdowns, when for many players, the video game became their most important “outside world.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><span style="background-color: #14181c; color: #99aabb; font-family: TiemposTextWeb-Regular,Georgia,serif; font-size: 16px;">An atmospheric and dreamy picture poem from Argentina’s vast La Pampa region, where ancient stories of spirits are evoked in dark and evocative images between reality and the beyond.</span></p>
<p>A mesmerising account of the lives of women in Kosovo made from archival VHS footage.</p>
<p><em>Quebrante</em> follows Ms. Erismar, a retired teacher and spelunker, as it traverses the caves, ruins, and phantasmagorias of the Trans-Amazonian Highway – still a fresh scar of the wrecked dream of Brazil’s history – portraying its stones and ghosts.</p>
<p>On July 22, 2017, in San Antonio, Texas, police found a truck in a Walmart parking lot with 39 illegal immigrants in its bed. A tractor had been transporting them undetected from the border town of Laredo to San Antonio. Because the cooling system inside the truck failed, resulting in extreme heat, eight people died during the transport, and two others succumbed to dehydration in the hospital.</p>
<p>Let's take a dark room. Celeste Rojas Mugica and her father Lucho lock themselves in it to develop images of the past. This past is Chile during the Pinochet years. Lucho Rojas was a photographer there but also an opponent of the regime, and therefore clandestine. His life oscillated between taking photos of the present and making himself invisible – between light and shadow. "The exercise consisted of, and still consists of: closing your eyes and imagining a place": the method and discipline of the clandestine. This sentence, the first in the dialogue between father and daughter that constitutes the framework of Une sombra oscilante , also formulates the theoretical hypothesis of the film: considering the image not from the point of view of the visible object, but from the faculty of imagination. In this singular dark room, development is no longer a solitary technical operation of revelation, but a poetic and political process of imagination for two. Developing the image means describing it not to exhaust its meaning but to flush out its parts of shadow, uncertainty, and therefore power. It is to extend it through words to imagine the story of the past, or to do it in one's head, with one's eyes closed, to project a future. The game is serious, but also very joyful: plastic inventions and ideas follow one another at an astonishing speed, all punctuated by an editing that combines freedom and rigor as rarely before. Brilliant and seductive, Una sombra oscilante profoundly renews the filmic approach to the photographic archive by inventing a cinematographic form that seems to be born from the very process of creating images – taking, developing. A dark chamber music, with four hands and two voices, draws the spectator into a captivating oscillation between the possible and the real, between what has been and what could have been, what is and what could be. In our dark times, here is a film that projects a light that is all the more joyful as it is intermittent – it does not forget the shadow from which it comes.</p>
<p>On the shores of the majestic Mount Cotopaxi, one fateful day in 1877, the flora that had reigned over the ashes for centuries was destroyed by the wrath of a volcano. Like rivers of fire, the pyroclastic torrents, scorching everything in their path, left behind a landscape of destruction that still stirs memories today. The powerful and resounding explosion shook the earth with its thunder, announcing to the flora its power and the fragility of time in the face of nature.</p>
<p>Cleudis, a 40-year-old man, finds his freedom, love, and spirituality in the land and in his relationship with animals, motivating him to move forward and discover a world of meaning.</p>
<p>Through the production of an obsidian prosthetic eye, body and territory are mirrored as traces of an inverse time, which uncover syndromes of our present.</p>
<p>Filmmaker José Cardoso’s deeply personal <em>Flowers</em> is an exercise in sense-making, led by both his conscious and unconscious mind. Navigating the barrage of online news images produced each day, he transforms these into an unexpected web of connections that link an Amazonian community threatened with the destruction of their land to an extreme right-wing Brazilian President who justifies the exploitation of the Amazon by the rising price of resources precipitated by the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh teaches us to make our enemy the object of our compassion, and the filmmaker’s three-year-old son marvels at the frogs and flowers growing in the garden.</p>
<p>Oriviades relives stories, songs, and moments with her mother as he inhabits her space between dreams.</p>
<p>An Islands' diary, told through the sombre but loving portrait of its oldest inhabitants. The Galapagos Islands and their majestic tortoises suffer the same fate of exploitation and disfigurement as the influence of humans on this once pristine and untouched corner of the world develops and devours. This film is the first 'chapter' of an ongoing adaptation of Herman Melville's 1849 novel about the islands, The Encantadas.</p>
<p>In 2022, Los Angeles-based composer and violinist Bryan Senti released his meditative album Manu, blending neoclassical music with the Latin American music of his ancestors. The album was accompanied by this eponymous film by Guggenheim Award-winning filmmaker Alexandra Cuesta. Cuesta’s documentary, filmed entirely on 16mm, explores the highlands of the Andes, the coast of Ecuador and parts of the Amazon. The entrancing music and her rhythmic black-and-white shots merge into a film-poem that, like the album, takes the form of a journey—into the interior as well as the exterior world.</p> <p>In gorgeous, contrast-rich scenes we see horses along the coastline, clouds stretching across mountains, water flowing over glistening stones, fingers tracing the outline of a rock, an illuminated white hat—alternating in short and extended shots. Manu: A Visual Album is also a documentation of the landscapes and traditions of Ecuador that are on the verge of disappearing. It uses recollection to capture something distant yet somehow familiar. It contains something from the past and yet still is in the present—something intimate and all-embracing at the same time.</p>
<p>Many in the Ozogoche Lake Region of Ecuador feel pulled to migrate north in spite of the enormous risks associated with the journey. In Ozogoche, filmmaker Joe Houlberg Silva draws a parallel between human and avian voyages and shows the annual migration of the mysterious “Cuvivi” sandpiper bird to the remote Andean lakes. Don’t miss this poignant story of cultural identity, trust, and the profound beauty of the Ecuadorian highlands.</p>
<p>At 25, Christian begins to piece together a silenced memory: the rape he suffered in his childhood. Driven by the need to heal, he embarks on a journey to the sea, which he has never seen before, hoping to find answers on the horizon. Through letters, images, and confessions, he attempts to document his journey, confront the persistent shadow of his attacker, and rebuild his bond with his mother, Marlene. United by love, but also by a silence that marked their bodies, mother and son immerse themselves in a painful search for truth, words, and reparation.</p>
<p>This short film tells the story of a warmipangui (a term that identifies the Amazonian LGTBIQ community) who lives in isolation in the depths of the Amazon region. An unexpected encounter with an injured animal changes his destiny and that of his community. An intimate, profound story that explores the relationship between identity, territory and survival.</p>
<p>Jaime falls dead abruptly, while he works on his field in the Ecuadorian Andean paramo. He is the newest victim of a deadly and mysterious disease that has struck his Indigenous commune. As his body lies lifeless on the ground, his animal spirit emerges from his body. He wanders through the Andean moors until he meets the spirit of his wife and together, they begin their journey to the Land of the Dead.</p> <p>Jaime cae muerto mientras trabaja en una comunidad del páramo andino ecuatoriano. De su cuerpo tirado en la tierra, emerge su espíritu animal. Deambula por los páramos andinos hasta encontrar el espíritu de su esposa, y juntos inician el viaje hacia la tierra de los muertos.</p>
<p>In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut and took advantage of the opportunity to seize the archives of the Palestinian Research Center. These archives contained many historical documents on Palestine, including a rich collection of photographs and films. These images have since been renamed and re-indexed according to the vision of their new custodians, the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Against these acts of dispossession and appropriation (one sequence shows the quiet violence of their authors), A Fidai Film offers a counter-narrative based on this loss, in order to restore the traces of the plundered Palestinian history. Kamal Aljafari re-examines these images, here exclusively cinematographic or televisual, and points out the complexity of their status as well as their mode of existence as a political object. A double movement unfolds, that of making these images resurface, sometimes precious testimonies restoring the life, the struggles of the Palestinian people, but also that of rethinking the implicit gaze of those who produced them (the colonial gesture). Kamal Aljafari kneads them, sometimes mistreats them, in order to bring out the underlying ideology, the exoticizing gaze as well as the gestures of dispossession: crossing out the comments of the victors and occupiers (from the British mandate to today), adding, colorizing, removing superimposed texts, modifying sounds, recombining, editing. A gesture of anger and struggle in action as much as a restitution of a distorted or erased memory, A Fidai Film claims to be a form of cinematographic sabotage, a combative film as the title unequivocally indicates. Nicolas Feodoroff</p>
<p>It is about a country, Colombia, held in the background of the history of the conquest of space. A literal background, since NASA set up there in the early 1960s, in the jungle on the border with Panama, the Tropic Survival School, a training camp to teach American astronauts how to survive in the event of a forced landing in a so-called hostile environment. A background, which Andrés Jurado, filmmaker of exhumation (see El Renacer Del Carare , FID 2020), transforms here into a center: that of a counter-history of this conquest, written from the Colombian point of view. The director uses (staged) images of the meeting between astronauts and an Emberá shaman in the jungle as a springboard to launch the material of his film into orbit and propel us into an anachronistic and ghostly space. A constellation of archival images, documents, and sound recordings, testifying to the fascination with the race to the Moon and imperialist extractivism, compose this unusual and delirious journey, which follows a double trajectory. Orbital, and mnemonic. The arrangement of these fragments of reality, on which the director intervenes meticulously – by reframing, animation, reconstitution of synthetic voices – suggests in fact the presence of ghosts and the traces of an unconscious memory. Survivals, recalled by the palpitating echoes of Jacqueline Nova's electroacoustic compositions, and which break into the present of the images. Their connection is an act of revelation. And this spectral journey, a powerful political tool. It reveals the fictions at work in the official narrative, and highlights a decentered narrative, which Andrés Jurado offers us to look at in all its complexity, through the telescope of cinema. Louise Martin Papasian</p>
<p>A housekeeper receives a film made by her daughter. The film, combining found footage of Thailand during the Cold War with present-day images of Bangkok, triggers a re-telling of her own story of coming to the capital.</p>
<p>Libuše has been capturing her “rock-n-roll” life full of twists and turns in thousands of pictures and autoportraits. Yet the sudden photographic success after 53 years of work has not helped her to see her real self in the mirror. She is still searching for herself, the place where she belongs, as she goes through piles of negatives and diaries while working on a new book.</p>
<p>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.</p> <p>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.</p>
<p>An amateur archaeologist obsessed with electronic waste records images and sounds for ten years, as part of an intuitive investigation. As he shapes a personal, playful and musical diary, he travels the world tirelessly, trying to decipher what his findings hide and how he might interpret them.</p>
<p>Every document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism. The phrase is from Walter Benjamin. Tatiana Mazú González takes up the beginning of it to title her film. "And the same barbarism that affects it, also affects the process of its transmission from hand to hand," continues the author. Against this barbarism, and to account for the struggles of individuals made invisible, erased from the writing of History, Tatiana Mazú González rises up. In Río Turbio (FID 2020), she went to war against the ostracization of women from the eponymous mining town. There, she takes up the case of the forced disappearance of Luciano Arruga, a teenager tortured and killed by the Buenos Aires police, to conduct a clinical and critical examination, meticulously dissecting the traces of the state crime. "Reality is a stratified mass grave; this film, a process of excavation," writes the director. Positioned at the intersection of General Paz and Mosconi avenues where the teenager was last seen, her camera, as if to detect the invisible, stubbornly scrutinizes the details of the landscape – asphalt, traffic lights, waste – which she brings together, through editing, with a whole corpus of iconography constituting the memory of the young man – archives of gatherings in his honor, graffiti, photos. In doing so, Tatiana Mazú González brings to light the truth of a counter-History, which the crystalline voice of Luciano's mother, an admirable tragic storyteller, hammers home with anaphora, nuances and silences. Against the barbarity of a transmission process that never ceases to obscure the vision of the "vanquished" (Benjamin) and to silence their words, there remain images, faces and stories, to which cinema, that is to say the montage of images, faces and stories, can still give substance, to restore all their power of protest.</p>
<p>For geology, seismic silence determines the time between two earthquakes: the longer the silence, the more powerful the next tremor is expected to be.</p>
<p>Triggered by a dream, and through the use of photos, 3D animation and refined sound design, this moving first-person work evokes the relationship between Argentinian state policy—in the wake of the wave of privatization in the 1990s—and the death of a young father, a worker dismissed from the state-owned gas company.</p>
<p>The triple frontier is a montage operation between three countries: Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. In the next year, all three will go through very unique electoral processes. Security cameras, military, and exotic birds; neo-facism is spilling into the south.</p>
<p>A personal diary of a period living in Mexico and a portrait of the Popocatepetl, an active volcano. During the conquest, the mexican revolution, the rise of the EZLN and nowadays the feminist outburst, the volcano replied with its eruptions to the social claim. ¿Can a mountain recall? The smoke emerging from the crater agurs a rebel but suffocated heart, in the line that draws in the horizon a see a scar.</p>
<p>The cellphone is an extension of our life experience. The images that appear on our screens represent the evolution of our existence. Algorithms take us into a sea of images and news that build us as subjects. Reflection against what is presented to us is a political decision. What we see and how we build our own identity.</p>
<p>Sometimes time slows down before a glass rectangle that goes through, little by little but insistently, every aspect of life. It is a new temple, a space of faith, which reflects a face and the world around us from the hands. What is on the screens of all the smartphones in the world?</p>
<p>Blackouts across Cuba set the stage for this eerie plunge into darkness.</p>
<p>Raudel has been haunted since childhood by the sight of a strange light. Now, at the age of 27, he dedicates himself to scrapping ships in Bahia Honda, Cuba, a place where the line that separates the living from the dead is almost invisible.</p>
<p>Cities do not repeat themselves; they transmute. Some cities are created by philosophical ideas. The lively city portrayed in <strong>Terranova</strong> is made of reflections, memories of other cities, and visions of the future. It has a certain solemnity in its soundscape, without losing those strong sounds that make it unique. This particular universe that has been brought together contains many magical scenes that are filmed through a camera obscura.</p>
<p>A poetic exploration of identity and geography, Home delves into the notion of ‘Cuba’ as a conceptual and physical place. It weaves together spectral fragments, Civil War soldiers, maps, the filmmaker's parents, scanned streets, creating a shifting, mutable territory composed of memory, displacement, and intimate recollection</p>
<p>Confronted with the evidence that the Earth is not eternal, Ernesto is inspired by the Metatron´s shape to design his own alternative universe. Obsessed by how he and his project will be recorded, he has the certainty that only the ideas and not the creator should transcend.</p>
<p>A visual accompaniment to Tōru Takemitsu's sonically sparse composition 'Corona for Pianist(s)'. Taking inspiration from the graphic score that interprets notes as circles and dots, the film focuses on the micro, elemental and sensual. Light flickering on water, the patterns of landscape, the movement of hands: here time is slowed and a great sense of focus is thrust upon us.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>A stunned crowd looks on in horror, disgust, concern, disinterest and awe—at what, we don't know. The mob's interest is slowly revealed using a morphing technique and by blurring live-action reality and 3D virtual space. Stoked by contradictory information, conspiracies and divisive opinions, a burning rage threatens to incinerate more than just an edifice but an entire institution, system and symbol of civilization.</p>
<p>In the dense Colombian jungle, eras jump, genders blur and fluids flow freely. The rubber trees, tapped for their viscous sap, take on another connotation of kink while a 15th century European Missionary tries to tame what is inherently savage. In the thicket of trees, all things are wild, animalistic and queer.</p>
<p>A frantic gaze runs through the convulsed Mexico City, a colossal metropolis sustained by the myth of miscegenation and other colonial violence. Past and present weave a flurry of images; fragmented memories of this territory.</p>
<p>Synopsis:</p> <p>"It's a bird in the air, a bird that lands (...)<br /> The deep mystery, the promise of life (...)<br /> It's nothing at all."<br /> - Jobim/Moustaki -</p> <p>Note of intent:</p> <p>At once simple, profound and light-hearted, this film is a play on words; a deliberative game and puzzle.</p>
<p>April 2020. In a world where it was forbidden to meet up with friends for a long time, the director decided to film every day: the modest spark of daily life with the family, fragments pieced together to form a letter to friends.</p>
<p>A film motivated by nothing (but daily life and (my) vision). It represents nothing, it signifies nothing. There’s no hidden meaning, no defined subject, no predetermined objective. Inside and outside. Just angles, textures and flashes of color. A whole different empire of vision, impossible to be put into words. “Nothing” as anything outside common visual knowledge, anything that defies the logic of naming the world; a possibility for a new way of thinking; of dealing with our visual world.</p>
<p><em>A field guide: Flora evolving with environmental changes, and pollinators utilizing biomimicry. Natural objects are gathered, and sculptures of and from the landscape cast reflections of nature being infinite, self-knowing, and alive. Extinct species and stages of evolution are suggested, accompanied by field recordings capturing the underground soundscape of soil. Bird calls and wingbeats offer greetings and warnings. -A rock, a tree, a human—each dissolving into matter and transmuting into new forms.</em></p>
<p>A collage constructed from the frame that proposes to unite different places from the distortions of space, enclosing different landscapes in the same frame. Creating non-existent but potentially real landscapes.</p>
<p>Helicopter footage examines the desert, surveying ancient natural formations and human interventions. Dynamite changes the face of the land. Farmers work their fields. Children play hide-and-seek. Employing archival footage, <strong>UNDR</strong> constructs an eerie narrative of calculated incursion. We cannot help but recall that Palestine remains a land subjected to aerial surveillance that seeks to appropriate the landscape.</p>
<p>In 1934 an experiment by an amateur-scientist couple began. Named after a genus of moths, the Automeris Project placed a group of young children in an enclosed forest, leaving them to fend for themselves. On return visits, the couple presented self-made films, accompanied by live music, depicting the outside world. For them, these images were the perfect replica of reality seen in their expeditions. Nevertheless, the films were carefully framed, edited, and manipulated to induce a transformation and provoke the development of a new society. This film revisits the remains of the Automeris Project and recreates one such film made using the few remaining assembly notes</p>
<p>Drawn from material captured during his time as casting director on Shirin Neshat’s Tooba (2002) production in Oaxaca, Varela’s film reconfigures the images of non-professional Oaxacan actors. Cuerpos complementarios reflects on voices and lives made invisible, “missing people”, by repurposing the detritus of that production into a layered, trans-temporal meditation on labor, erasure, and the haunting persistence of presence</p>