Playlist
<p>What makes Jamaica so special, multicultural, raw and spiritual? New Yorker Khalik Allah’s visual prayer and ode bares the Caribbean country’s soul in wonderfully unpolished, analogue images. Jamaica – blessed with fertile soil, yet cursed with a horrific history of slavery – proves a veritable melting pot of cultures, religions and traditions.</p>
<p>An Irish filmmaker grapples with the legacy of his estranged father, the late documentarian Arthur MacCaig, through MacCaig's decades-spanning archive of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Drawing on over 30 years of unique and never-seen-before footage, 'The Image You Missed' is an experimental essay film that weaves together a history of the Northern Irish 'Troubles' with the story of a son's search for his father. In the process, the film creates a candid encounter between two filmmakers born into different political moments, revealing their contrasting experiences of Irish nationalism, the role of images in social struggle, and the competing claims of personal and political responsibility.</p>
<p>In Blue Orchids, Johan Grimonprez creates a double portrait of two experts situated on opposite ends of the same issue—the global arms trade. The stories of Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent, and Riccardo Privitera, arms and equipment dealer for the now-defunct Talisman Europe Ltd, provide an unusual and disturbing context for shocking revelations about the industry of war. While interviewing Privitera and Hedges for Grimonprez’s recently released feature Shadow World (2016), it became clear that the two men were describing the same anguish and trauma, but from paradoxical perspectives. One has dedicated his life to unmasking lies, while the other has built his life on them. Both their personal and political histories gradually reveal the depths of suffering and duplicity, showing that the arms trade is a symptom of a profound illness: greed</p>
<p>Set to a breath-like rhythm, Anna Marziano’s Beyond the One is an essayistic exploration of love’s various guises, considering different attempts at courtship, living together, and sustaining connections with people once they have died.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Based on remains of Argentine films that were never completed, The Endless Film is a parallel history of cinema. A journey in negative throughout creation and loneliness. A history about what was not. A film created on fragments from other films that never existed. As a cinematic Frankenstein, coming back to life in front of our eyes. </p>
<p>Asturias. Three conversations with three victims of Francoist Civil War crimes recorded in the same place where the events occurred. A forest where searches for mass graves are being conducted in conjunction with the shooting of the film. Ramón Lluís Bande's words bring the distant memory into the present, while simultaneously, the cruelty of the corpses emerges from out of the soil of History.</p>
<p>The Guajira is a borderland peninsula between Colombia and Venezuela of resolute natives as well as disinherited adventurers. Some there take advantage of the peripheral territory to smuggle through isolated ports and over rugged landscape. They write their rebellious proclamation in the sands of crisscrossing desert paths and their rusted motors accompany their solitary voices with an unorthodox music, animating their indiscipline and adhesion to pure movement.</p>
<p>A story about inmates who live in a prison without walls on the most remote island in the world.</p>
<p>The film follows Agustina as she finds the videotapes that her father Jaime recorded before the accident that took his life. The family secrets surrounding Jaime push Agustina to get involved. Her search will reveal a story marked by sexuality and political activism.</p>
<p>Alfredo Ovando Candia was a military general who served as co-president of Bolivia from 1965–66 (and again from 1969–70) after overthrowing President Víctor Paz Estenssoro. His political and military service connect him to the largest massacre of workers in the country’s history, as well as the military campaign in which Che Guevara was found and killed. Incorporating archival footage from Ovando’s de facto administration, home movies, and interviews with relatives, filmmaker-grandson Mauricio Alfredo Ovando’s debut feature studies the many profiles of his grandfather to juxtapose his family’s fond memories with the harsh official history.</p>
<p>A 78-year-old businessman, scientist and writer, is full conflicts and illusions of fame. He sorts through obstacles to publish his book and surrounding himself with people, searching for validation. After losing contact with the world, he’s trying to safe his legacy and fight loneliness.</p>
<p>Of all the hellholes in the world, El Cartucho, in the Colombian capital Bogotá, was perhaps the worst. In the 1980s, the colonial neighbourhood of solid middle-class houses degenerated into the fiefdom of a drugs gang. The streets became the backdrop to a flourishing trade in drugs, people and garbage, crack houses sprang up all over and life wasn’t worth a damn.</p>
<p>“Deliberately leaving for exile means choosing oneself, not disappearing; rapidly or slowly becoming ever smaller, until we reach our true height, the height of being”. This citation from Chilean poet and novelist Roberto Bolaño opens Alessandro Focareta’s first feature-length film, a program evoking with extreme lucidity the principles guiding his artistic trajectory. From Cuba, where the Italian filmmaker settles to take classes at the cinema school, he starts communicating via SMS with his mother who is still in Italy, fighting against cancer. For the duration of his stay on the island, the author undertakes research for a possible film, the one the spectator discovers. By mixing several temporalities, recent and remote recollections, realities and poetic fantasies, family films and traces of public history, Focareta reveals a present time marked both by separation and contemporary discovery of the self. All through the sequences, the film becomes the diary of a more intimate, rather than physical, exile: the sweetness of narration doing hardly more than amplifying the wounds needed for any evolution of the awareness of the self.</p>
<p>Influenced by the sound of the city, different artists improvise ephemeral pieces that dance between music and what is typically considered to be “noise.” Different sonorous and visual textures converge in this documentary about the creation of experimental music in Buenos Aires.</p>
<p>The present, past and future of the conquest of the city known as Buenos Aires.</p>
<p>Located on the Northeast coast of Brazil, a village of fishermen enact a ritual of embracing the fish that they have caught. The affectionate hug that accompanies the ritual marks a passage of death and a relationship between species that is imbued with an ambiguous sequence of gestures of tenderness, violence, and domination. The utopian dream of a harmonious community with its surroundings is a testament to the lack of connection between a man from the city and the nature that is at his service. Between fiction and reality, documentation and fantasy, the naturalness of domination hides the root of this relationship constituted by the constant exercise of strength, power and devotion.</p>
<p>A pilgrimage of fishermen ply the Gulf of Mexico under the sky of historic patina.</p>
<p>During the filming of a documentary about abandoned cinemas, a conflict of interest between the director and producer prevents the film from being shot. This won’t stop the cinema from being demolished… or a documentary from being made about it.</p>
<p>A 70-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman share a candid and twisted relationship with a deadline.</p>
<p>When a celebrated sculpture briefly went missing from a Rodin exhibition in Santiago, the "theft" turned out to be a provocative statement, masterminded by a precocious art student. His actions sparked a public outcry and a furious debate on the nature of art itself. This lively and perceptive documentary revisits the scene of an extraordinary incident that captured the world's attention and challenged the global art community.</p>
<p>Three decades after the death of Che Guevara, an Argentinian filmmaker returns to his homeland as the documentary considers the relevance of utopia.</p>
<p>During ten years, Ecuador was ruled by an authoritarian president that used political propaganda in a way the country had never seen before. "Paropagandia" explores how the propaganda machine was built and what are the consequences when one country is ruled under the old principles of political propaganda.</p>
<p>Along distant and desolate streams, five men start looking for the fossil of the largest feline that has ever inhabited these lands – the saber-toothed tiger –, holding onto the hope of saving themselves through the sale of the bones of the tiger.</p>
<p>In January 2000, Ecuador adopted the US dollar as its official currency; as a result, several Ecuadorian citizens were forced to do whatever it took to earn a living. One of them, Marcelo Terán Gonzáles, shares his story and lets us learn how that part of the country's dark history changed his life forever.</p>
<p>In Inhambane, Mozambique, the sketchy and funny portrait of a youth who dreams, despairs, cleans, flirts and climbs baobabs.</p>
<p>A dystopian reflection on the current Brazilian political climate since the dismissal of President Rousseff, through two renegade characters waiting for redemption in the city of Brazilia.</p>
<p>In a natural crisis scenario, the entire population of Azores is forced to evict due to an uncontrolled plague of hydrangeas, a common flower in these islands.<br /> Two young soldiers, bound to the beauty of the landscape, guide us to the stories of sadness of those forced to leave and the inherent desire to resist by inhabiting the islands. The filmic wandering becomes a nostalgic and political reflection on territorial belonging and identity, and the roles we assume in the places we came from</p>
<p>No attention in the media, no official reports. When the Turkish army embarked on a major operation to defeat the Kurdish PKK in 2015, the only cameras to film the continuing violence belonged to local people. Filmmaker Gürcan Keltek realised that these anonymous live-streams should not be forgotten.</p> <p>In Meteors, he uses archival footage of restless cities and inhabitants in a wider context; philosophical reflections in which fantasy also starts showing its face. In a dreamy, calm tempo, his black-and-white film changes location for each chapter, from hunters in the mountains to cities that progressively change into ruins under martial law. And then it closes with an exodus of survivors under apocalyptic circumstances: meteorites raining down, animals fighting, an eclipse of the sun. Keltek places the hidden events in Southeast Turkey in a dark poetic context. An intriguing and occasionally delightful mixture of fact and fiction.</p>
<p>A young woman struggles to overcome lost love, unplanned motherhood and ghostly apparitions.</p>
<p>Thirty Lights is a journey into a world that slowly disappears, seen from the perspective of four girls who inhabit it.</p>
<p>Marta takes care of her newborn daughter and is visited daily by friends and family in her Lisbon apartment. In the intimacy of this home, they exchange tales of their lives.</p>
<p>In moments of desperation, essentials come to life.</p>
<p>Many years ago, the cities by the river were gripped by a contagion. Things started to change and everything slowly became something else. It was not clear if transformation was a symptom of the disease or a way to escape it. The contagion touched everything and everyone: animals and plants, stones and soil, men, women and children, their thoughts, their dreams, their memories. An old woman once told me how all memories turn into trees, I could hardly make out what she was saying. She said she could hear the trees singing: To be a body, to be any body. After the years of contagion ended, the cities appeared untouched. One had to look hard to see the traces of the previous time. If one could listen to the trees, what would they say? A way out, a way out?</p>
<p>Synopsis: Gushing colors. A time disjointed, yet synchronous. A transcendent turn, a quest for agency, a reunion with currents of the forest.</p>
<p>The interior of the earth became a refuge from the threat that moved closer and closer to the island. The volcanic tubes served as communication vessels between time and space. This was where they experienced their resistance.</p>
<p>"Plus Ultra" is the motto of the Spanish state. This slogan was used to encourage navigators to conquer new territories and to forget the warning from mythology: "Non Terrae Plus Ultra" (there is no land beyond here). The Canary Islands, testing ground for the tactics used during the colonization of the Americas, becomes the setting for a tale about this land.</p>
<p>It's a phenomenon characterized by the experience of seeing light without light actually entering the eye.</p>
<p>Festejo Muito Pessoal recycles fragments of brazilian films (1924-1931) from the silent era quoted in Paulo Emílio’s article and of Jean Vigo’s films. The soundtrack brings songs recollected by the Mission of Folklore Research organized by poet Mário de Andrade in 1938.</p>
<p>A collage of collected imagery turned ritual travelogue: from the Sahara to the oceans of South America, passing through an old ancestors abode.</p>
<p>In an image void a tongueless voice speaks. Composed entirely of found footage re-manipulated through tape deterioration, a journey into the realms of an ambiguous daemon via the portal of an oceanic screen.</p>
<p>Present machines meet up with monsters of the past, in an arid and prehistoric landscape.</p>
<p>Around the sleeping bodies, some presences occupy the architecture and move around the space in obscure activities: nothing of their actions is visible to us, except in the fragments in which the image shows itself under the flashlight. Monelle is a circular film without any narrative or hierarchy, without a beginning or an end, and it circumscribes a place of promiscuity and ambiguity between the different formats used—35mm and CGI animation—and the approaches of two opposites film attitudes—the structural cinema and the horror genre.</p>
<p>The island of Patiras is the first land on the water of the estuary of the Gironde (west south of France). It is a rough and delicate corner, where time is suspended, but swept by the wind, burned by the sun, blown by the salts of the spray.</p>
<p>A eulogy for wasted potential sends the out of date to the out of body: trash to treasure. An appetite for destruction charts the product life cycle, interrupting the horizon through an intersection of perspectives.</p>
<p>A summer day in a city park. A scorcher. Those who can not escape looking surrogates to their holiday mood. The beaches are colored in green and off-stage feeds the view. childish and burned plots views. Pursuits to loss of sight.</p>
<p>An abstract work that superimposes multiple images of the Tokyo landscape.</p>
<p>A 2016 Portuguese language documentary written and directed by Miguel Seabra Lopes and Karen Akerman, starring André Dahmer.</p>
<p>Sampling Argentinian critical and revolutionary films from 1956 to 2006, Los (De)pendientes offers a great step in the conception of film history. Without any words, considering the past, it tells what visual works were faithful to the real issues of their times.</p>
<p>A group of musicians seem isolated from the world playing beautiful pieces. But in the darkness of the night, and from their minds, there are melancholies on earth, loves and families that they left behind. Their silences, their letters, these elements shape the poetic intention of this documentary</p>
<p>A moving camera encounters a landscape of faces.</p>
<p>A man learns his daughter has been brutally murdered by her husband. Time stands still as he oscillates between the need for solace and his urge for revenge. La Bouche is an experimental musical featuring Guinean percussion master Mohamed Bangoura (“Red Devil”), loosely based on his own story.</p>
<p>To keep a promise made to her dying mother, a young woman goes off in search of her father, a womanizer she has never met. Along the way, she soon learns that he is dead. But that doesn't change her plans - she still intends to find him.</p>
<p>For over 70 years, Colombia has been confronted with internal armed conflict. Over the years, the outlines of the conflict have grown indistinct. A climate of generalized violence has gradually settled over society as a whole. Violence and barbarity have worked themselves into every aspect of daily life, and fine traces of it mark the streets. Through a multitude of these traces, perhaps the narrative of this hazy war will finally take a firmer shape. “Impression of a War” offers a vision of some of those deliberate, accidental, ostensible, fleeting or dissimulated marks. They are often signs of the struggle against oblivion, indifference and impunity.</p>
<p>Medellin. Tireless car traffic. In the margins of a society launched at top speed, some lurking engines shutdown to make a living; Jugglers at intersections, employees on breaks, whose precise and repetitive work mark the flow of time which is always repeated.</p>
<p>The Choco area in Colombia remains isolated between sea and forest. There, religious missions, military operations and touristic projects amongst others have come and gone, coexisted and ignored each other at the same time. Judgment put aside and free of narration, Tropic Pocket captures images to witness and justify these actions, leaving behind their argumentative weight. The spectator will decide which amongst these layers of reality and mystification are the most deceitful.</p>
<p>“Passing by a bedroom, at the party, I saw people heating heroin. I wanted to try it out on my body…” Accompanied by the voice-over of Jeny – a young transsexual filmed during her rehab –, the camera wanders around building 303, Bogota’s architectural icon. A chance encounter: a few years back, when the filmmaker’s father asked her to film the architecture faculty where he had taught, an accident with her 16 mm film resulted in a superimposition of the portrait of Jeny. The film is a testimony where the discreet affirmation of revolt can be heard: “neither torturer, nor victim”. Jeny (who refers to himself in the masculine gender) recounts his delinquency as being the just return for the social violence committed against him.</p>
<p>Produced out of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, Laura Huertas Millan’s masterful La Libertad follows a group of matriarchal weavers in Mexico, whose backstrap loom – a pre-Hispanic technique preserved for centuries by Indigenous women in Mesoamerica – provides the formal structure for the film’s exploration of handicrafts and their ties to freedom. With echoes of the influential ethnographic work of Chick Strand, La Libertad combines astute observation, testimony, subtle transfers in scale, space and texture, as it weaves its own singular study of labour, creativity, and the mysterious traces that circulate between them</p>
<p>Antonia is a lyrical singer whose beauty is uncommon, lush and somber. Recovering from a suicide attempt in a rehabilitation institution, all her family ties are irreparably broken. But her sister remains deeply affected by what happened.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:16px"><span style="font-family:Georgia,serif">Aequador is an alternative history built as a travel account without words: an equatorial dystopia evoking the excesses of a progressist and modernist dream in Latin America during the twentieth century. We imagined a bygone era where an extremist ideology would tried to conquer the Amazon territory. The film describes in a composite and voluntarily fragmented way this parallel present, where fake ruins and relics of utopian architecture in 3D coexists with vernacular constructions and daily lifes of human beings</span></span></p>
<p>The story of A journey into Earth Otherwise Said is inspired from the first accounts of the natural and ethnographic explorations in America by the Conquistadors, the missionaries and scientists. The film is entirely shot in the Tropical Greenhouse of Lille, a building constructed in 1970 by Jean-Pierre Secq, a sort of reinforced concrete botanical Crystal Palace. The architecture and the plants of this closed place are used as narrative supports for an initiatory journey. As in a sort of philosophical tale, between the pastiche of the travel diaries and a " jungle movie ", the film makes us penetrate the night of an exotic « elsewhere ». The greenhouse becomes the theater of a rain forest, presenting the speech of an "explorer" and his visions: odd animals and masked women. It is a free reflection on the conquest of America and the images that it engendered.</p>
<p>Phantom Islands is an experimental film that exists at the boundary of documentary and fiction. It follows a couple adrift and disoriented in the stunning landscape of Ireland's islands. Yet this deliberately melodramatic romance is constantly questioned by a provocative cinematic approach that ultimately results in a hypnotic and visceral inquiry into the very possibility of documentary objectivity.</p>
<p>The artist sits spinning wool at a site of memory as image and reminiscence fluctuate between the personal and the general, the pictorial and the material. Bodies wander, landscapes echo each other, and time is unwound through a carefully wrought approach to 8mm celluloid. Between the persistence and fragility of the moving image, the senses are refined.</p>
<p>Super-8 memories emerge and vanish into the imageless texture of scratched celluloid, an object at once very present and channelling long absent moments of ambiguity. A soldier allows a little girl to handle a gun, a machine like the camera that links a calm present with war and death. But who is watching this film? Whose footsteps are pacing? Who is invading and appropriating these memories?</p>
<p>Mirage evokes a desert landscape but it is the cinematic image itself that is the mirage. Working with the material textures of Super-8 film, Mirage presents two visual planes: the captured image and the surface of the film strip itself. The relationship between these is as much one of conflict as mutual support.</p>
<p>Figures emerge from and retreat back into the waters of the oasis, coming forward to greet the eye of the Super-8 camera. The scene initially appears idyllic. But the alien scrutiny of the artificial eye is sinister, at cold cross-purposes to the human warmth it brushes against.</p>
<p>Layers both space and time, superimposing imagery and creating entrancing patterns of repetition and startling interruption. Voyaging from one land to another, from found footage to mysteriously evocative scenes shot by the artist to the pure abstraction of hand-scratched film, it traces a haunting inner logic of memory and discovery.</p>
<p>Found super8 footage and found photographs from the 70's - 80's Ireland and the US are used along with 16mm material and video in various formats shot by the artist himself, and finished digitally. The film is made in a distinctive manner, characteristic of the author, assembling different images in a joint story. A drama emerges, based on the spectator's associative image-making experience and supplemented with the author's very personal and poetic texts about lost love.</p>
<p>Blood, Sea, Film is an experimental short by Mexican filmmaker Andrés García Franco that contemplates the elemental ties between water, life, and existence. Through poetic imagery and sound, the film reflects on the sea as both a source of vitality and a symbol of fragility, evoking a meditation on nature’s cycles and humanity’s place within them.</p>
<p>This film poem about the sea is a visual invitation to an imaginary journey through the landscape of waves along the Atlantic coast. Or as Herman Melville writes: "Let a distracted person sink into deep dreams... And, invariably they will lead you to water... Yes, everyone knows that meditation and water are closely connected!" The sources of inspiration for our film flow of film pictures were the "soul images" described by Melville in MOBY DICK and the rhythmic and powerful music of composer Misato Mochizuki.</p>
<p>A film by Mikel Guillen and Scott Barley. Two separate, yet poetically connected films that act as a threnody on nature; with the trees as silent observers to Man's insidious desolation. Mikel Guillen's film is dedicated to the artist, Hiroshi Sugimoto. Scott Barley's film is dedicated to the artist, Vija Celmins.</p>
<p>The earth dreams among the clouds so that the sky does not fall.</p>
<p>Created with Deb Todd Wheeler, this is variety of mediated representations of layers of atmospheric penumbra, with sources for these miasmas ranging from plastic bags to power plants.</p>
<p>The ecologic crisis is a political, economic and social crisis. It is also cinematographic, as cinema coincides historically and in a critical and descriptive way with the development of the Anthropocene. "A Film, Reclaimed" is a conversation, an essay that reads the terrestrial crisis under the influence and with the help of the beautiful and terrible films which have accompanied it.</p>
<p>The Roman statues of the Hanging Garden of Valongo hide histories of blood and death. A garden seven meters up from the ground, with long stairways that border the Hill of Conceição, from where they stand guard over the bends of Guanabara Bay, that the city insists on occupying. A monument for a city of slaves.</p>
<p>2013: Tatiana de Rose finds more than 500 slides in a serious state of disrepair on the streets of Temperley. 2016: I make a montage by selecting the 359 that were in the worst condition.</p>
<p>A description of some parts of the world - explored, visited, documented, imagined. An abstract attempt at finding them again. The title refers to geographer and civil servant of the Republic of Venice Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485-1557)</p>
<p>The Headless Appearance is a hand painted film made from the negatives of old family photos. It is an abstract memento of the passing time.</p>
<p>Family archives surrounding Lucila, who suffered from Alzheimer's and was my grandmother. Corruption of the material as a manifestation of a degenerative disease, framed within a process of visual decomposition based on the destruction of memory. Fragmented and dismantled memories, unified by the soundtrack.</p>
<p>Chronophotographic decomposition of a series of shots captured from a fixed space in which the behavior of people in a tourist environment (Madrid's Plaza Mayor) is studied.</p>
<p>Morning…came a day early is a poetic study of mortality, based on found footage from the archives of the Nuefield Foundation for the History of Ideas, 1964. Morning…came a day early is based on the principles of imagist poetry; the language of common speech towards clear expression without sentiment.</p>
<p>Colombia and Peru engaged in a war during the years of 1932 and 1933. This war was the first Colombian war after the independence calling for the defense of the Colombian sovereignty. As such, it entailed the performance of patriotism of the young Colombian state. The Acevedo Brothers -filmmakers and producers of the national news El Noticiero Nacional- traveled to the frontier and filmed the war; however as spectacle it did not account well enough for the patriotic efforts conducted from the center to the periphery. Therefore some of the scenes of the war were reenacted in order to convey what actually was not dramatic enough as a war. I took the archival footage and reassembled it. I look for moments of mediation between the center and the periphery, the young nation state and its centralism, the performance of power in the image as well as what cannot be incorporated into this discourse.</p>
<p>In this grotesque found-footage film close-ups of 65 actors playing Adolf Hitler in movies created between 1940 and today are combined in shot/countershot-manner. The soundtrack is produced by the Austrian composer Bernhard Lang. CONFERENCE is the fifth part of my “notes on film” series, which deals with film-theoretical and -historical subjects.</p>
<p>The animation reminds us that Mexico is a country where the ones pointing to and denouncing corruption and impunity are silenced. The main focus of the piece is the murder of reporter Rubén Espinosa, activist Nadia Vera, Alejandra Negrete, Yesenia Quiroz and Mile Virginia, an iconic event that exemplifies the growing violence in the state of Veracruz. A story that repeats over and over again.</p>
<p>A short documentary constructed from surveillance images accompanied by interrogation audio in Guaraní. The film excavates the past from the Archives of Terror, inviting reflection on human rights violations under the Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguay</p>
<p>An activist piece dealing with the Palestinians’ right to exist. Gaza, March-April 2018.</p>
<p>The filmmaker goes back to her childhood, to the roots of the tragedy, to her desperate efforts to be accepted by her mother, to her permanent feeling of failure. Du verbe aimer A remarkable autobiographical account, constructed like a very inventively written essay.</p>
<p>Depicts pagan festivals where nothing is spared: neither violence, nor danger, nor blood. In Paucartambo, during the Feast of the Virgin, people drink and dance until exhaustion, going from night to day without interruption, for five days. They dance in the streets, in the houses, and on the graves.</p>
<p>A deeply personal documentary portrait of the director’s father, Lucho Jiménez. Through visits to places from his past—from his daughter's childhood to Lisbon via letter correspondence—the film seeks to understand how he coped with the loss of his wife and the absence of his children. At its core is an “audiovisual letter” from the filmmaker to her father, composed of letters they exchanged and his recollections of her mother</p>
<p>The telephone was invented to connect people on a long distance. Today the telephone is mostly used to connect people who are already close. Our cell phones scan the direct environment to connect wireless. We call home when we’re nearly there. We have apps that show us where we are and apps that show us where our friends are. Distance is no longer needed. On the contrary: the closer we get, the smarter the phone. A telephone is no longer only used to call. It is, among many other things, a recording device for sound and image. The most iconic image of our times comes from the cell phone: the selfie. To make a selfie, you need a distance: arm length. Closer than that, your face doesn’t fit the screen, the image gets blurred, your self becomes unrecognizable. In her latest film, Mary Jimenez touches the limits of that distance.</p>