30/30 Vision: Three Decades of Strand Releasing
Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company’s indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on iPhones. Produced by Strand Releasing and Connor Jessup.
James Schamus
Fatih Akin
Catherine Breillat
John Waters
Fenton Bailey
Randy Barbato
Gregg Araki
Ira Sachs
Karim Aïnouz
Brady Corbet
Tommy O'Haver
Tom Kalin
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
João Pedro Rodrigues
Christophe Honoré
Isaac Julien
Rithy Panh
Bradley Rust Gray
So Yong Kim
Jon Moritsugu
Rose Troche
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Alain Gomis
Athina Rachel Tsangari
Alain Guiraudie
Connor Jessup
Jon Jost
Cindy Sherman
Jenni Olson
Bruce LaBruce
Lulu Wang
Amy Davis
Roddy Bogawa
Andrew Ahn
Elisabeth Subrin
Abu Bakr Shawky
Anna Franquesa Solano
Daniel Ribeiro
Also Directed by James Schamus
What is the real value of a dollar? You think that a dollar bill is money and that banks are where your cash is stored and safeguarded. Well, you’re wrong. Like, really wrong.
In 1951, Marcus Messner, a working-class Jewish student from New Jersey, attends a small Ohio college, where he struggles with anti-Semitism, sexual repression, and the ongoing Korean War.
A young Karl Rove vies for the position of chief campus conservative under the guidance of Lee Atwater.
James’s film provides us with a thoughtful history of photography and the moving image that both pays tribute to the past and celebrates how advancements in technology support the ever-evolving nature of cinema. His film elaborates on a history of storytelling through image and how we can use the iPhone and other new technologies to create, reflect and inspire in our day-to-day lives.
Also Directed by Fatih Akin
Villagers in Turkey's Black Sea village of Camburnu struggle with the government's decision to turn their community into a garbage dump.
Nejat seems disapproving about his widower father Ali's choice of prostitute Yeter for a live-in girlfriend. But he grows fond of her when he discovers she sends money home to Turkey for her daughter's university studies. Yeter's sudden death distances father and son. Nejat travels to Istanbul to search for Yeter's daughter Ayten. Political activist Ayten has fled the Turkish police and is already in Germany. She is befriended by a young woman, Lotte, who invites rebellious Ayten to stay in her home, a gesture not particularly pleasing to her conservative mother Susanne. When Ayten is arrested and her asylum plea is denied, she is deported and imprisoned in Turkey. Lotte travels to Turkey,where she gets caught up in the seemingly hopeless situation of freeing Ayten.
Can Daniel follow the sun from Hamburg to the Bosporus by Friday to meet his love?
In 1915 a man survives the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, but loses his family, speech and faith. One night he learns that his twin daughters may be alive, and goes on a quest to find them.
Akin plays a loser who pretends that he has good dope and finds that he has to deliver in real to a gangster.
New York, I Love You delves into the intimate lives of New Yorkers as they grapple with, delight in and search for love. Journey from the Diamond District in the heart of Manhattan, through Chinatown and the Upper East Side, towards the Village, into Tribeca, and Brooklyn as lovers of all ages try to find romance in the Big Apple.
Thirteen German directors present short films exploring the state of their country.
Award-winning director Fatih Akin takes us on a journey through Istanbul, the city that bridges Europe and Asia, and challenges familiar notions of east and west. He looks at the vibrant musical scene which includes traditional Turkish music plus rock and hip-hop.
Also Directed by Catherine Breillat
A music video directed by Catherine Breillat, featuring the music of Elodie Frégé.
An adaptation of the classic tale of a wealthy aristocrat with a blue beard.
Georges Deblache is a police inspector who is past middle age and who is so despondent about his life that he refuses to have a medical check-up, even though he suspects he has cancer. His partner is Didier Theron, who has recently married a woman whom he has worshipful feelings for -- feelings which don't stop him from routinely bedding the many women of color he encounters while doing his job. Georges takes a keen interest in his partner's unrealistically appreciated wife and pushes his way into her not entirely unwilling arms.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
A man rescues a woman from a suicide attempt in a gay nightclub. Walking the streets together, she propositions him: She'll pay him to visit her at her isolated house for four consecutive nights. There he will silently watch her. He's reluctant, but agrees. As the four nights progress, they become more intimate with each other, and a mutual fascination/revulsion develops. By the end of the four-day "contract", these two total strangers will have had a profound impact on each other.
A music video directed by Catherine Breillat, featuring the music of Elodie Frégé.
A young French man and an older English woman spend one night together on a ship.
Anthology of short films about the French city of Nice, by various directors. A homage to Jean Vigo and his "À propos de Nice" from 1930.
Lili, a pouty and voluptuous 14-year-old, is caravan camping with her family in Biarritz. She's self-aware and holds her own in a café conversation with a concert pianist she meets, but she has a wild streak and she's testing her powers over men, finding that she doesn't always control her moods or actions, and she's impatient with being a virgin. She sets off with her brother to a disco, latching onto an aging playboy who is himself hot and cold to her. She is ambivalent about losing her virginity that night, willing the next, and determined by the third. The playboy's mix of depression and misogyny ends their unconsummated affair, so Lili has to hunt elsewhere.
Bored and restless, Alice spends much of her time lusting after Jim, a local sawmill worker. When not lusting after him, Alice fills the hours with such pursuits as writing her name on a mirror with vaginal secretions and wandering the fields with her underwear around her ankles. And, in true teenaged tradition, she spends a lot of time writing in her diary.
Also Directed by John Waters
A picture perfect middle class family is shocked when they find out that one of their neighbors is receiving obscene phone calls. The mom takes slights against her family very personally, and it turns out she is indeed the one harassing the neighbor. As other slights befall her beloved family, the body count begins to increase.
Notorious Baltimore criminal and underground figure Divine goes up against Connie & Raymond Marble, a sleazy married couple who make a passionate attempt to humiliate her and seize her tabloid-given title as "The Filthiest Person Alive".
An incomplete project, Dorothy the Kansas City Pothead stars John Waters' long-time casting agent Pat Moran in the role of Dorothy.
Child actors perform a 'kid-friendly' table read version of John Water's notorious 1972 X-rated cult classic film, Pink Flamingos.
An insane independent film director and his renegade group of teenage film makers kidnap an A-list Hollywood actress and force her to star in their underground film.
John Waters' first sixteen-millimetre film, about a deranged nanny who kidnaps young girls and forces them to 'model themselves to death' in front of her boyfriend and their crazed friends. It was never shown commercially.
The life and times of Dawn Davenport, showing her progression from bratty schoolgirl to crazed mass murderer - all of which stems from her parents' refusal to buy her cha-cha heels for Christmas.
Commissioned for the 2019 30th Anniversary shorts omnibus, 30/30 Vision: 3 Decades of Strand Releasing.
John Waters' second film, shot on 8mm, and featuring Divine for the first time. Essentially a plotless collage of random incidents involving sex, drugs, religion and The Wizard of Oz, it was shown with an equally random soundtrack mixing “obnoxious radio advertisements, rock 'n' roll and press conferences with Lee Harvey Oswald's mother”. It was shown three times in public, but never released commercially.
'Pleasantly Plump' teenager Tracy Turnblad achieves her dream of becoming a regular on the Corny Collins Dance Show. Now a teen hero, she starts using her fame to speak out for the causes she believes in, most of all integration. In doing so, she earns the wrath of the show's former star, Amber Von Tussle, as well as Amber's manipulative, pro-segregation parents. The rivalry comes to a head as Amber and Tracy vie for the title of Miss Auto Show 1963.
Also Directed by Fenton Bailey
In 1972, a seemingly typical shoestring budget pornographic film was made in a Florida hotel, "Deep Throat," starring Linda Lovelace. This film would surpass the wildest expectation of everyone involved to become one of the most successful independent films of all time. It caught the public imagination which met the spirit of the times, even as the self appointed guardians of public morality struggled to suppress it, and created, for a brief moment, a possible future where sexuality in film had a bold artistic potential. This film covers the story of the making of this controversial film, its stunning success, its hysterical opposition along with its dark side of mob influence and allegations of the on set mistreatment of the film's star.
Documentary film takes a look at some of the world's most influential fashion images as conceived by the magazine's iconic fashion editors.
Compilation. Tells the story of Nelson Sullivan who was the unofficial video documentary filmmaker of the late 1980s downtown New York nightlife and LGBTQ+ community, with extensive archival segments directed by Sullivan himself.
"Wishful Drinking" is based on Fisher's memoirs of the same title. The stage adaptation had its world premiere in 2006 at the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. It later played at Berkeley Repertory before opening on Broadway in October at Studio 54. The show takes audiences on a comic tour of Fisher's messy personal life and career. The actress-writer recounts stories about her work on the "Star Wars" series as well as her relationship with her parents Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. She also discusses her much-publicized problems with alcohol and drugs.
Nude men in rubber suits, close-ups of erections, objects shoved in the most intimate of places—these are photographs taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, known by many as the most controversial photographer of the twentieth century. Openly gay, Mapplethorpe took images of male sex, nudity, and fetish to extremes that resulted in his work still being labelled by some as pornography masquerading as art. But less talked about are the more serene, yet striking portraits of flowers, sculptures, and perfectly framed human forms that are equally pioneering and powerful.
Alternately candid, funny, poignant and heartbreaking, this documentary focuses on a cross-section of men and women of all ages who invoke the exact moment in their lives--whether as toddlers, grade-schoolers, teens or young adults--when they knew, once and for all, that they were gay. Inspired by the work of writer Robert Trachtenberg, award-winning filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato set out across the country to interview these men and woman of all ages and walks of life and ask them a single, simple question: When did you know?
"Party Monster: The Shockumentary" tells the story of the rise and fall of Michael Alig, a kid from Middle America who aspired to take the place of Andy Warhol. Michael quickly rose to become the biggest party promoter in New York and King of the so-called Club Kids. But after spiraling into drug addiction, Michael brutally murdered his roommate Angel Melendez.
Paid 50 dollars for their time, 101 male prostitutes -- spanning all ages, ethnicities, and personal backgrounds -- are questioned by the filmmakers about their lives.
In September 2001, respected German historian Lothar Machtan dropped a bombshell on the world of Hitler studies: Hitler was secretly homosexual. His highly acclaimed and explosive book "The Hidden Hitler" ignited a storm of controversy. With information from the bestselling book, award-winning filmmakers Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato and Gabriel Rotello explore areas of the Führer's private life.
Explores this rapidly growing marijuana industry through an irreverent approach to the misconceptions and promises of the marijuana explosion.
Also Directed by Randy Barbato
In 1972, a seemingly typical shoestring budget pornographic film was made in a Florida hotel, "Deep Throat," starring Linda Lovelace. This film would surpass the wildest expectation of everyone involved to become one of the most successful independent films of all time. It caught the public imagination which met the spirit of the times, even as the self appointed guardians of public morality struggled to suppress it, and created, for a brief moment, a possible future where sexuality in film had a bold artistic potential. This film covers the story of the making of this controversial film, its stunning success, its hysterical opposition along with its dark side of mob influence and allegations of the on set mistreatment of the film's star.
Documentary film takes a look at some of the world's most influential fashion images as conceived by the magazine's iconic fashion editors.
Compilation. Tells the story of Nelson Sullivan who was the unofficial video documentary filmmaker of the late 1980s downtown New York nightlife and LGBTQ+ community, with extensive archival segments directed by Sullivan himself.
"Wishful Drinking" is based on Fisher's memoirs of the same title. The stage adaptation had its world premiere in 2006 at the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. It later played at Berkeley Repertory before opening on Broadway in October at Studio 54. The show takes audiences on a comic tour of Fisher's messy personal life and career. The actress-writer recounts stories about her work on the "Star Wars" series as well as her relationship with her parents Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. She also discusses her much-publicized problems with alcohol and drugs.
Nude men in rubber suits, close-ups of erections, objects shoved in the most intimate of places—these are photographs taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, known by many as the most controversial photographer of the twentieth century. Openly gay, Mapplethorpe took images of male sex, nudity, and fetish to extremes that resulted in his work still being labelled by some as pornography masquerading as art. But less talked about are the more serene, yet striking portraits of flowers, sculptures, and perfectly framed human forms that are equally pioneering and powerful.
Alternately candid, funny, poignant and heartbreaking, this documentary focuses on a cross-section of men and women of all ages who invoke the exact moment in their lives--whether as toddlers, grade-schoolers, teens or young adults--when they knew, once and for all, that they were gay. Inspired by the work of writer Robert Trachtenberg, award-winning filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato set out across the country to interview these men and woman of all ages and walks of life and ask them a single, simple question: When did you know?
"Party Monster: The Shockumentary" tells the story of the rise and fall of Michael Alig, a kid from Middle America who aspired to take the place of Andy Warhol. Michael quickly rose to become the biggest party promoter in New York and King of the so-called Club Kids. But after spiraling into drug addiction, Michael brutally murdered his roommate Angel Melendez.
Paid 50 dollars for their time, 101 male prostitutes -- spanning all ages, ethnicities, and personal backgrounds -- are questioned by the filmmakers about their lives.
In September 2001, respected German historian Lothar Machtan dropped a bombshell on the world of Hitler studies: Hitler was secretly homosexual. His highly acclaimed and explosive book "The Hidden Hitler" ignited a storm of controversy. With information from the bestselling book, award-winning filmmakers Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato and Gabriel Rotello explore areas of the Führer's private life.
Explores this rapidly growing marijuana industry through an irreverent approach to the misconceptions and promises of the marijuana explosion.
Also Directed by Gregg Araki
A teenage hustler and a young man obsessed with alien abductions cross paths, together discovering a horrible, liberating truth.
Jordan White and Amy Blue, two troubled teens, pick up an adolescent drifter, Xavier Red. Together, the threesome embark on a sex and violence-filled journey through an America of psychos and quickiemarts.
Luke is a gay hustler. Jon is a movie critic. Both are HIV positive. They go on a hedonistic, dangerous journey. Their motto: "Fuck the world".
Kenzo creative directors Carol Lim and Humberto Leon have tapped American independent filmmaker Gregg Araki, one of the leading lights of the New Queer Cinema movement, to write and direct an original short film featuring the brand's fall collections for men and women.
Veronica is a white-bread beauty searching for a good man in Los Angeles. While slam dancing at a Halloween rave, she meets Abel, a sensitive poet. Then she meets Zed, a supersexy tattooed drummer with incredible biceps. Who will she choose? Does she go for true love or cheap sex? She can't decide so she chooses both. But after managing to nurture a picture-perfect threesome, along comes Ernest, a rich movie director with deep baby blues that sweep Veronica off her feet. What's a girl to do now?
Smith, a typical young college student who likes partying and engaging in acts of random sex and debauchery, has been having some interesting dreams revolving around two gorgeous women -- and is shocked when he meets the dream girls in real life. Lorelei looks just like his fantasy brunette, while a mysterious red-haired girl being chased by assassins draws him into an international conspiracy. Or is it all just a drug-induced hallucination?
Jane, a struggling but perpetually stoned actress, has a busy day ahead. She has several important tasks on her list, including buying more marijuana. Even though she already has a good start on the day's planned drug use, she eats her roommate's pot-laced cupcakes and embarks on a series of misadventures all over Los Angeles.
The film follows three couples, one gay, one lesbian and one heterosexual, spending a weekend together.
David, Craig and Alicia are a triangle of young lovers who find angst and despair as they sort out their feelings and sexuality in a late-night coffee shop.
Gay, alienated Los Angeles teens have a hard time as their parents kick them out of their homes, they don’t have money, their lovers cheat, and they are harassed by gay-bashers
Also Directed by Ira Sachs
A very gentle middle-aged man is married, but when he falls in love with another woman, he decides that to divorce his wife would humiliate her too much – so instead he decides to kill her.
A Russian woman living in Memphis with a much older rock-n-roll legend experiences a personal awakening when her husband's estranged son comes to visit.
Jake is a quiet, sensitive middle schooler with dreams of being an artist. He meets the affably brash Tony at his grandfather's funeral, and the unlikely pair soon hit it off. The budding friendship is put at risk, however, when a rent dispute between Jake's father, Brian, and Tony's mother, Leonor, threatens to become contentious.
The story revolves around the Christodora, an East Village apartment building that was ground zero for the AIDS crisis.
In this short film Ira decided to pay tribute to another one of Strand’s filmmakers, Jacques Nolot. His film is a meditation on not only the passage of time but on how we remember our lives through recorded images
About two men who’ve been together for fifteen years, and one of them has an affair with a woman.
A portrait of the filmmaker's father, an American businessman on a quest for money and women in modern Moscow.
Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Norman René, Peter Hujar, Ethyl Eichelberger, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cookie Mueller, Klaus Nomi... the list of New York artists who died of AIDS over the last 30 years is countless, and the loss immeasurable. In Last Address, filmmaker Ira Sachs, who first moved to the city himself in 1984, uses images of the exteriors of the houses, apartment buildings, and lofts where these and others were living at the time of their deaths to mark the disappearance of a generation. The elegaic film is both a remembrance of that loss, as well as an evocation of the continued presence of their work in our lives and culture.
After 39 years together, Ben and George finally tie the knot, but George loses his job as a result, and the newlyweds must sell their New York apartment and live apart, relying on friends and family to make ends meet.
A collection of shorts made by various directors in response to 9/11.
Also Directed by Karim Aïnouz
Donato fails in his attempt to save a drowning man, and meets one of the man's friends. He decides to start his life over, but pieces of his past keep coming after him.
A documentary about Berlin's former airport Tempelhof. A film about Departures and Arrivals. And about those Berliners who come here to escape from their daily lives and those refugees who came here to finally arrive somewhere.
In northern Brazil, Hermila patiently waits for her husband. However, he has abandoned her. Sexy, restless and resolute, she raffles off "a night in paradise" with herself. This beautifully-shot portrait doesn't shy away from the burdens of a young scarred woman, but it also celebrates her courage to live according to her own rules.
A trip, sort of a daydream in the Brazilian badlands. Remote places reveal traditions and customs of a landscape that is at once primitive and contemporary, regional and globalised.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
The Earth pos-pandemic.
José Renato, a 35-year-old geologist, is sent out on a solitary expedition to the hinterlands of northeastern Brazil. The purpose of the trip is to assess possible routes for a canal that will connect the area with the only major river in the region. As the field trip progresses, it becomes clear that Renato shares with those places the same emptiness, sense of abandonment and isolation.
An experimental collective film lasting little more than an hour, compiled from 10 episodes by a total of 14 different young Brazilian filmmakers. The project was an initiative of the directing duo Felipe Bragança and Marina Meliande, who sent a ‘letter of concern’ to inspire the participants. In it, a 16-year-old girl wrote about her dreams, which have been translated by the directors into films about love, youth and the possibilities of cinema.
Also Directed by Brady Corbet
In 1999, teenage sisters Celeste and Eleanor survive a seismic, violent tragedy. The sisters compose and perform a song about their experience, making something lovely and cathartic out of a catastrophe - while also catapulting Celeste to stardom. By 2017, Celeste is a mother to a teenage daughter of her own and is struggling to navigate a career fraught with scandals when another act of terrifying violence demands her attention.
A reminder of a long-forgotten event, combined with a challenging situation, provokes a man to extreme action.
The chilling story of a young American boy living in France in 1918 whose father is working for the US government on the creation of the Treaty of Versailles. What he witnesses helps to mold his beliefs – and we witness the birth of a terrifying ego.
The film chronicles 30 years in the life of one artist's enduring monolithic vision. The story opens in 1947, as a Hungarian-born Jewish architect emigrates to the United States. Initially forced to toil in poverty, he soon wins a contract that will change the course of his life.
Corbet's segment continues his films’ inquiry into power and modern idols, juxtaposing the monumental fountains of the House of the Republic in Bucharest with the 1989 execution of former Romanian president Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena.
Also Directed by Tommy O'Haver
Short film depicting a gay man's crush on a straight man.
Ella lives in a magical world in which each child, at the moment of their birth, is given a virtuous "gift" from a fairy godmother. Ella's so-called gift, however, is obedience. This birthright proves itself to be quite the curse once Ella finds herself in the hands of several unscrupulous characters whom she quite literally cannot disobey. Determined to gain control of her life and decisions, Ella sets off on a journey to find her fairy godmother who she hopes will lift the curse. The path, however, isn't easy -- Ella must outwit a slew of unpleasant obstacles including ogres, giants, wicked stepsisters, elves and Prince Charmont's evil uncle, who wants to take over the crown and rule the kingdom.
The true story of Madalyn Murray O'Hair -- iconoclast, opportunist, and outspoken atheist -- from her controversial rise to her untimely demise.
When Berke Landers, a popular high school basketball star, gets dumped by his life-long girlfriend, Allison, he soon begins to lose it. But with the help of his best friend Felix's sister Kelly, he follows his ex into the school's spring musical. Thus ensues a love triangle loosely based upon Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", where Berke is only to find himself getting over Allison and beginning to fall for Kelly.
The true story of suburban housewife Gertrude Baniszewski, who kept a teenage girl locked in the basement of her Indiana home during the 1960s.
Billy, a struggling young gay photographer (who likes Polaroids), tired of being the "other man", falls in love with Gabriel, a waiter and aspiring musician who is probably straight but possibly gay or at least curious. Billy tries to get Gabriel to model for his latest project, a series of remakes of famous Hollywood screen kisses, featuring male couples, while also trying to win his affections.
A musical celebrating queer cinema, which used the melody of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General,” by the D’Oyly Carter Opera Company, but re-wrote the lyrics to depict queer cinema with a full choir.
Also Directed by Tom Kalin
Teenagers Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb share a dangerous sexual bond and an amoral outlook on life. They spend afternoons breaking into storefronts and engaging in petty crimes, until the calculating Nathan ups the ante by kidnapping, and murdering, a young boy.
They Are Lost to Vision Altogether acts as erotic retaliation on legislation such as the Supreme Court sodomy ruling — declaring the private bedroom as open target for the State — or the Helms Amendment — the U.S government's refusal to fund explicit AIDS prevention information for gay men, lesbians and IV drug users. An attempt to reclaim eroticism and to address the contradictions of sexuality and romance in the face of a monolithic and culturally compulsory heterosexuality, They Are Lost To Vision altogether finds queer history where it can and invents the rest.
This examination of a famous scandal from the 1970s explores the relationship between Barbara Baekeland and her only son, Antony. Barbara, a lonely social climber unhappily married to the wealthy but remote plastics heir Brooks Baekeland, dotes on Antony, who is homosexual. As Barbara tries to "cure" Antony of his sexuality -- sometimes by seducing him herself -- the groundwork is laid for a murderous tragedy.
Commissioned by VISUAL AIDS for the 25th Anniversary of Day Without Art
Music video for Jill Sobule's "Statue Of Liberty."
A profile of fashion designer Geoffrey Beene, on his 30 years in the industry.
Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and The American Center in Paris as part of their international Trans Voices project, Nation flashes contradictory formulations of language, politics, and medicine across a sharp and close screen. Blurring geography with the body's landscape, Nation reminds us that our bodies, like land, have been shaped by history into zones to be charted, conquered, divided, or made whole. "Think globally act locally," in one dense minute.
Short film.
Video work by Tom Kalin
Director Tom Kalin uses the elegant dynamism of parkour as a motif for aspiration in Mirror Mirror's Sublime Objective music video. The lyrics speak to striving for a goal, while the music suggests a transcendent state: a relationship that Kalin explores with the use of Shaker-inspired movement, bubbles, and imagery of rainbows and light halos. Sublime Objective is available on Mirror Mirror's LP, Interiors.
Also Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
A fluorescent tube illuminates an empty playground in the evening. Nearby a flash of light is projected on a makeshift screen. This outdoor movie is a portrait of a village repeatedly struck by lightning. As night falls, the silhouette figures of young men emerge, they are playing with a football raging with fire. They take turns kicking the ball which leaves illuminated trails in the grass. The lightning on the screen flickers amid the fire and the smoke rising from the ground. The game intensifies with each kick that sends the fireball soaring into the air. Finally the teens burn the screen and crowd around it to witness the blazing canvas, behind which is revealed the ghostly white beam of a projector. Phantoms of Nabua is part of the multi-platform Primitive project which focuses on a concept of remembrance and extinction and is set in the northeast of Thailand.
0116643225059 is an early experimental film by Weerasethakul made during his time at SAIC. The work is about a long-distance telephone conversation between the filmmaker and his beloved mother in Khon Kaen, Thailand. Weerasethakul superimposed a photograph of his mother in her youth alongside his own image and his apartment in Chicago. It renders a strong bond between the artist and his family.
Taking the recent tsunami in Asia as its starting point, the filmmakers have used the idea of a ghost seen wandering along the rocky coastline of a Thai island and, in a life-affirming gesture, they have invited some local children to direct the film for them, suggesting and filming the movements of the actor-ghost.
Created in celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this short essay centres on a monologue delivered by a reincarnation of the philosopher in twenty-first century Thailand.
The work is part of the Memoria Project, the first major series of work that is set outside of Weerasethakul’s home country. Given his affinity for the Amazon, of which Thai jungle tales were originally inspired, Weerasethakul has started to explore South America - and since 2017, has been developing a film based in Colombia. He is drawn to its topography, where active volcanoes and landslides ceaselessly transform natural landscapes. The Memoria Project presents both personal and collective memories, while retaining the artist’s fascination with illumination. A vital part of the video and photographic works is the presence of a lone protagonist on the beach. Weerasethakul worked with Canadian actor Connor Jessup who visited him during the filming of a documentary at Nuquí area in Chocó Department, western Colombia. Here, the actor is a spirit that contemplates the artist’s journey, his dream of both real and imaginary films.
Petch, one of the young men of Nabua, composes and plays this song about his village. One evening, he sang a song to Weerasethakul’s film crew regarding an August event when the former members of the Communist Party of Thailand gathered to commemorate the first shoot out in the field more than 45 years ago. Weerasethakul layers Petch’s song with an image of his friend, Kamgiang, whose grandfather was killed by the soldiers in the field not far from his home.
Invisibility displays Weerasethakul’s continued interest in the issue of perception and memory. The installation takes threads from his recent films, Cemetery of Splendor and Fever Room, both of which feature the same actors. Here, he takes them deeper into an imaginary world and ponders the future of shared consciousness. The videos depict a landscape where the protagonists are confined to a room, along with the viewers. With no way out, they infiltrate each other’s dreams. Invisibility mirrors the troubled state of Thailand’s politics. It proposes a decayed vision of the future where one needs to constantly evade reality. The viewing experience shifts between seeing and not seeing, fact and fiction, space and void.
For a Fiery Monkey Year.
In this video diary, Weerasethakul documents the set of Primitive Project in Nabua, Thailand, particularly the scene when teenagers are hypnotized and sleep inside a time machine.
Cactus River is a diary of the time Apichatpong Weerasethakul visited a newlywed couple near the Mekong River.
Also Directed by João Pedro Rodrigues
The Red Market in Macao. The red tonalities of blood, flesh, buckets and even of the fish’s eyes, carry the audience into a strange and scary universe but also beautiful and intriguing. Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata’s camera emerges like a driving force giving us the exact balance between what exists and what we see.
Chico wakes up on his 30th birthday to the sound of his girlfriend singing “Happy Birthday” to him on his answering machine. When João wakes up in bed next to him, he realizes that this is not his typical birthday.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
How would it look like, the body of Dom Afonso Henriques, first king of Portugal, tutelary figure, subject to successive mythifications throughout Portuguese history?
An impressionist and personal portrait of Lisbon. A jazz improvisation based on a score written in 1963. Guided by Paulo Rocha’s gaze and the film “Os Verdes Anos”, a look at the places in his film, which have now naturally been transformed.
João Pedro Rodrigues answers the question from the title with an autobiographical short-film.
From 7 to 25 April, 18 days of confinement during which a male blackbird takes care and guarantees the safety of its young, until they release the nest.
Nude Descending A Staircase
After breaking up with her boyfriend, a woman named Odete (Ana Cristina De Oliveira) descends into madness and claims to be pregnant with the child of Rui's (Nuno Gil) late lover, Pedro (João Carreira). As grief-stricken Rui mourns Pedro's death, Odete tries to transform herself into Pedro.
Varziela, Vila do Conde, the biggest Chinatown in Portugal. A man wearing a hat and a missing woman. A high-heeled shoe, a blond wig and a Chinese dress. The confrontation between the East Wind and the Red Dragon; the cardinal points switched as in an ultimate Mahjong game.
Also Directed by Christophe Honoré
Based on George Bataille's posthumous and controversial novel: When his father dies, a young man is introduced by his attractive, amoral mother to a world of hedonism and depravity.
Omar and Emmanuel go to great lengths to prove they are not in love.
A girl is approached by a strange boy outside her high school. He asks her to follow him to hear stories where gods fall in love with human beings.
Paul, depressed from his recent break-up with Anna, returns home to Paris and moves back in with his divorced father and amorous younger brother, Jonathan. While his carefree sibling and doting father try in vain to cheer him up, a visit from his mother seems to be the only thing that brings him joy. When Paul is then left in the house to brood and talk to one of his brother's girlfriends.
After 20 years of marriage, Maria decides to leave her husband. She moves into room 212 at the hotel across the street, with a bird’s-eye view of her apartment, her husband and the life she shared with him. While she wonders if she made the right decision, many of the people in her life offer their opinions on the matter. They intend to let her know, whether she likes it or not, on what proves to be a life-changing evening.
On a Magical Night director Christophe Honoré shares a short film while quarantined in Paris.
Jacques is a writer living in Paris. He hasn't turned 40 but already mistrusts that the best in life is yet to come. Arthur is a student living in Brittany. He reads and smiles a lot and refuses to think that everything in life might not be possible. Jacques and Arthur will like each other. Just like in a lovely dream. Just like in a sad story.
From Paris in the 1960s to London in the first decade of the third millennium, Madeleine and her daughter Véra flit from one amorous adventure to the next, living for the moment and taking all the opportunities that life offers. But not every love affair is without its consequences, its upsets and its disappointments. As time goes by and gnaws away at one’s deepest feelings, love becomes a harder game to play.
Ismael and Julie, who in the hope of sparking their stalled relationship, enter a playful yet emotionally laced threesome with Alice. When tragedy strikes, these young Parisians are forced to deal with the fragility of life and love. For Ismael, this means negotiating through the advances of Julie's sister and a young college student – one of which may offer him redemption.
A man hangs around an outside a tennis court. On the hard-packed surface, four teenagers play together, then they begin playing with the man a cruel game, from desire and frustration. In the streets by the train station, the man follows at a distance one of the teenagers.
Also Directed by Isaac Julien
Loosely inspired by the story of the black American explorer, Matthew Henson (1866-1955) who accompanied Robert Peary and was one of the first people to reach the North Pole, later writing an account of his experience. In this fragmented narrative, Julien contemplates on ideas and histories of the hierarchical as well as in the struggling figure we find a succinct metaphor of endless traversing, symbolizing the voyage of the modern that has to be experienced by others.
No overview.
This highly stylized short asserts sexual desire over fear in gay romantic relationships.
An exploration of the homophobia expressed by reggae and rap artists againts gays and lesbians. Inludes interviews with rappers Shabba Ranks and Buju Banton, who cite religious reasons for their particular brand of homophobia.
Shot in Texas, Isaac Julien's Turner Prize nominated film installation Long Road to Mazatlán reflects upon the construction of masculinity through a choreographed mise-en-scène.
Playtime’s cosmopolitan spectacle, presented in a kaleidoscopic montage across seven large screens, interconnects the lives of its archetypical characters—hedge fund managers and art world players in London; a photographer in Reykjavik; and a Filipina houseworker in Dubai—each of whom is based on a real-life individual directly affected by the market collapse.
Derek, in chronological order, records the work and life that stands at the foot of Derek Jarman's humour and spirit of being an artist. The filmmaker and actress, Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton respectively, have produced and narrated a film on his life whereby the use of language is perpetuated to give some type of palpable meaning to British audiences alone, and to their own personal relationship with him.
Explores the life and work of the psychoanalytic theorist and activist Frantz Fanon who was born in Martinique, educated in Paris and worked in Algeria. Examines Fanon's theories of identity and race, and traces his involvement in the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria and throughout the world.
Territories is an experimental documentary about the Notting Hill Carnival. It locates the event within the struggle between white authority and black youth, in this case over the contested spaces of the carnival, and reflects on its history as symbolic act of resistance. The film makes the case using montage: cutting carnival scenes with archive news reports - police surveillance to rioting in the street - and crossing looks of desire with alienation, from police to reveller, woman to man, man to man. Add to this a disembodied, political critique and trenchant images of police violence and the audience soon becomes aware that the documentary itself is part of the resistance.
An experimental dance piece revealing the complex dynamics between two dancers and another woman.
Also Directed by Rithy Panh
A poor, rural Cambodian family slowly disintegrates during the cycle of a single rice crop in this moving, and beautifully photographed European drama adapted from a novel by Shahnon Ahmad. Pouev, his wife Om, and his seven children, live in a small rural village in Cambodia. Their whole precarious life depends upon the success of their rice crop. Both husband and wife are worried, but for different reasons. Pouev is concerned because their acreage is shrinking. Om worries about Pouev; what would happen to her and the children if he died or was injured? Her worst fear is manifest after Pouev steps upon a poisoned thorn and dies. Om finds herself heavily burdened with the responsibilities of maintaining the crop and caring for seven youngsters. She suffers paranoia from worrying about whether the children are doing their share and the other villagers lock her up leaving eldest daughter Sokha to bring in the crop.
During the last half-century, Cambodia has witnessed genocide, decades of war and the collapse of social order. Now, documentary filmmaker Rithy Panh looks at an irreparable tragedy that is less visible, yet no less pervasive: the spiritual death that results when young women are forced into prostitution. Angry and impassioned, PAPER CANNOT WRAP UP EMBERS presents the searing stories of poor Asian women whose lives were violated and their destinies destroyed when their bodies were turned into items of sexual commerce.
Rithy Panh uses clay figures, archival footage, and his narration to recreate the atrocities Cambodia's Khmer Rouge committed between 1975 and 1979.
The film centers around a young French widow and her two adolescent children attempt to carve out a meager life for themselves by farming rice fields alongside the ocean in French Indo-China in the 1930's. Their efforts are hampered each year by the presence of the sea, which invariably floods the fields with saltwater and wipes out the crops. In desperation, the mother realizes that their only hope lies in the construction of a sea wall to prevent continued flooding, but the mother must cut a swath through the local bureaucracy in an almost Sisyphean attempt to make this happen. Meanwhile, her obstinate daughter, Suzanne, draws the romantic obsessions of a well-to-do Chinese gentleman, Monsieur Jo; though he could easily provide a way out, the possibility of a romantic relationship between Jo and Suzanne could just as easily fall prey to local racial prejudices that would damage or ruin the lives of both.
In 1999 a fibre-glas wire was installed from Thailand to Vietnam straight trough Cambodia. Rithy Panh shows us the work done in Cambodia to connect Khmer-society to "modern world". Farmers, soldiers and children work for a living there and unearthen skulls and bones -their remains from PolPot-regime you can see. The fear in their mind is portrayed by Rithy Panh in this documentary. As the other work done by Rithy Panh this deals with his people. I like it very much! The movie was awarded 1999 at "Visions du Réel" in Nyon (Switzerland) and at "Cinéma du Réel" in Paris.
After The Missing Picture (Un Certain Regard winner 2013 and Oscar nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film in 2013) and Exile, Rithy Panh continues his personal and spiritual exploration. S21 the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell analyzed the mechanisms of the crime. Graves Without a Name searches for a path to peace. When a thirteen-year-old child, who lost the greater part of his family under the Khmer rouge, embarks on a search for their graves, whether clay or on spiritual ground, what does he find there? And above all, what is he looking for? Spectral trees? Villages defaced beyond recognition? Witnesses who are reluctant to speak? The ethereal touch of a brother or sister’s body as the night approaches? A cinematic movie that reaches well beyond the story of a country for that which is universal.
Documentary of the S-21 genocide prison in Phnom Penh with interviews of prisoners and guards. On the search for reasons why this could have happened.
After having fled Pol Pot, Rithy Panh, a 15 year old Cambodian finds refuge at the Mairut camp in Thailand, in 1979. Ten years later, now a filmmaker, he returns to the camps to film the daily life of this threatened people. The peoples he meets, eaten away by inactivity, insecutity and the fear of being forgotten, have been waiting for a possible return to Cambodia.
Takes its title from the T-shirt slogan of a teenager who was killed in the Myanmar protests. The film will feature puppet figurines, and will see about totalitarianism, democracy, and a new way of communication.
Set in the newly-pacified Phnom Penh, this film is about the return to civilian life of Cambodian soldiers.
Also Directed by Bradley Rust Gray
Two friends are on a road trip and a one-sided attraction develops.
Widow Chloe (Carla Juri) travels to Japan for work where she is welcomed by an old friend, Toshi (Takashi Ueno). Sliding between the melancholy of loss and the awe of perspectives changed, Chloe wanders an unfamiliar landscape where love has carved all the guiding grooves. blood explores the site where fragile love can emerge from immovable pain. With quiet restraint, fresh rhythm, and unforgettably rich performances, this subtle study of togetherness and apartness captures the vibrancy of internal life. Writer-director-producer Bradley Rust Gray observes the resilience of life and love, the surprise of desire, the barriers of language, and the staggering impact of relationship.
On a summer break from college, Ivy, a young epileptic woman, struggles to balance her feelings for her fledgling boyfriend while her friend Al crashes with her for the season.
Jason Gould satirizes coming out in Hollywood in Inside Out, starring Alexis Arquette and papa Elliot Gould. Lane Janger's Just One Time was a festival favorite recently expanded into a feature film that turns the tables on a groom-to-be and his fantasies of sex with two women. Bradley Rust Gray's Hitch follows two attractive young guys on a dizzying road trip that leads them toward sexual self-discovery. David Fournier's Majorettes in Space is a witty French spoof of post-modern sex, romance, relationships, the Pope and baton-twirling majorettes. And, Gregory Cooke's $30 is the bittersweet story of a closeted teen presented with a young prostitute on his 16th birthday.
The film centers around the friendship and family of a young girl, Hildur, who lives in a small fishing village on the East coast of Iceland.
Jack and Diane, two teenage girls, meet in New York City and spend the night kissing ferociously. Diane's charming innocence quickly begins to open Jack's tough skinned heart. But, when Jack discovers that Diane is leaving the country in a week she tries to push her away. Diane must struggle to keep their love alive while hiding the secret that her newly awakened sexual desire is giving her werewolf-like visions.
Also Directed by So Yong Kim
Two sisters, Nova Bordelon and Charley Bordelon, with her teenage son Micah moves to the heart of Louisiana to claim an inheritance from her recently departed father - an 800-acre sugarcane farm.
Neglected by her husband, Sarah embarks on an impromptu road trip with her young daughter and her best friend, Mindy. Along the way, the dynamic between the two friends intensifies before circumstances force them apart. Years later, Sarah attempts to rebuild their intimate connection in the days before Mindy’s wedding.
In Seoul, Korea, two sisters must look after each other when their mother leaves them to search for their estranged father.
Two Mexican-American sisters from the Eastside of Los Angeles who couldn't be more different or distanced from each other are forced to return to their old neighborhood, where they are confronted by the past and surprising truth about their mother’s identity.
Soon after Elizabeth receives this text message, her mother isn't the only one lost in sleep. Elizabeth's car has broken down. It's freezing cold, no sign of life nearby. She just has to wait, patiently. The recovery guys will be here soon, Elizabeth. Till then, she warms her young hands on the vents, drifts into a strange slumber, followed by an even more surreal awakening. Icelandic landscapes merge with Elizabeth's memories. Fears are magically transformed into comforting and fantastical fabrics. Father, upstairs, alone.
In memory of the Japanese earthquake on 3.11, each director presents a 3 minute and 11 second short film in tribute to those who were lost that day.
Three "good girl" suburban wives and mothers suddenly find themselves in desperate circumstances and decide to stop playing it safe and risk everything to take their power back.
After an overnight long-distance drive, Joby has a special meeting—with lawyers and his ex-wife. A struggling musician with the prerequisite tattoos, slimy hair, goatee, and his head firmly floating in the clouds, Joby hasn’t been around to be a dad. Now is his last chance to fight for shared custody of his daughter, Ellen.
The exhibition 'The Complete Letters' features epistolary works defined by cinematographic creation. This is an experimental communication format used between pairs of film directors. Although each director is situated in a location geographically distant from that of their partner, they are united by their willingness to share ideas and reflections on all that motivates their work. Within this space of freedom, the directors featured in the exhibition examine their affinities and differences, within an environment of mutual respect and simultaneity of interests and with notable formal variants established in each of the correspondences.
A Korean immigrant falls in love with her best friend while navigating her way through the challenges of living in a new country.
Also Directed by Jon Moritsugu
West Side Story meets Rumble in the Bronx meets A Clockwork Orange. Bizarre tale of London, a lonely teen yearning for affection and a leather jacket who lives in a dysfunctional family home where the mother keeps popping and sexually playing with her other child, X-Ray, a member of a gang of Mods who are constantly at war with a gang of Asian Bikers. Amidst this turmoil, London and her soul mate M16 search for meaning in a phantasmagoria without it.
Satire and deconstruction the high art scene with an eyeball-scorching onslaught of mind-blowing narrative madness and honey-laced pathos.
Part AC/DC, part Jacques Derrida. An experimental film made as a response to the critical theory aspects of the filmmakers degree and academic film criticism.
Underground homage to Easy Rider about two girl bikers with bad attitudes who wind up on the wrong end of evil Cruella's shotgun.
“We're a bunch of spoiled teenagers with nothing better to do than sit around and talk meaningless shit. Let's face it. All we'll be doing for the next 75 minutes is smoking, drinking wine and complaining about not having anything to do.”
“Obscene, energetic, and grotesque… DER ELVIS is less a barbaric yawp than a 20-minute retch, building in ferocity until the final unctuous voice-over.” - The Village Voice, J. Hoberman, 11-24-87
A pretentious underground filmmaker struggles with his masterpiece while a scuzzy punkoid chick tries to keep her band from fading into obscurity.
A brief glimpse of the living conditions of the titular snackwhore.
This film involves three interwoven stories with the only seeming connection being the delusions of the involved leads. In the first element of the film, a hot-tempered world tennis star loses endorsement contracts when the press outs him even though he claims the report is false. In the second, a talent-less woman struggles to make it in the world of fashion design or the music video business. In the last, an animal activist runs a dog-adoption agency and has an imaginary friend who appears in a St. Bernard suit.
A short experimental cutup film by Jon Moritsugu.
Also Directed by Rose Troche
Max is a trendy, pretty, young lesbian, who is having trouble finding love. A friend sets her up with Ely, whom Max likes, but Ely is frumpy, homely, and older. Nor do they have much in common. Can Max learn to look past the packaging?
In a suburban landscape, the lives of several families interlace with loss, despair and personal crisis. Esther Gold has lost focus on all but caring for her comatose son, Paul, and neglects her daughter and husband. Lawyer Jim Train is devoted to his career, not his family. Helen Christianson wants to find a new spark in life, while Annette Jennings tries to rebuild hers.
At the suggestion of a straight friend, gay man Leo joins a men’s group, where he causes some upsets by declaring his attraction to one of its members.
Full of self-loathing after a gay hookup, a conflicted Christian carries out a mass shooting. What if his partner had convinced him to face himself? Would it have changed the tragic course of history?
A young man in a tricky situation follows the advice of his unconventional best friend and uses social media to create a fake boyfriend to keep his awful ex-lover out of his life. But everything backfires when he meets the real love of his life, and breaking up with his fake boyfriend proves hard to do.
A teenager finds out she was abducted as a toddler and returns to her biological family.
Also Directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson
Anxious to use artificial life to improve the world, Rosetta Stone, a bio-geneticist creates a Recipe for Cyborgs and uses her own DNA in order to breed three Self Replicating Automatons, part human, part computer named Ruby, Olive and Marine.
Shadow Stalker outlines the history of Predictive Policing, Digital Identity Theft and the dangers of Data Mining, that uses algorithms, performance and projections to make visible private Internet systems that are increasingly used by law enforcement and promote racial profiling. Drawing on a network of critical thinkers on surveillance and machine learning, Hershman Leeson abstracts the red square zone into a specter that haunts the work. Where one falls on the map in relation to this red square becomes a proxy for who one is-location, a proxy for identity.
Documentary about an art installtion.
This docudrama presents the history of the telephone, updated and told from the point of view of a character who uses the screen as both a connection to intimacy and a condom for safe sex.
In 2015 reknown Cuban artist Tania Bruguera was imprisoned in Havana after advocating for freedom of expression. Shortly after her release she returned to the United States and located Dr. Frank M. Ochberg, the founding father of trauma therapy, particularly PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome. The filmed therapy sessions between them exposes an intimate yet profound analysis of Cuba, surveillance and the politics in of repression embedded in government and family structures.
This project uses mixed reality convergence through which users can participate in some of the digital existing archive of Lynn Hershman Leeson, now housed in the Special Collections Library at Stanford University. Created in 2006, this project is one of the first artist archive projects in Second Life and has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Montreal, ISEA and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
"A poetic allegory about technology's invasion of the body and the destruction of the immune system, witnessing the pollution of history that drowns us." - Video Data Bank
A woman's personal life unfolds over twelve years in a video diary that simultaneously parallels and reflects global history. Personal fears and obsession dissolve into a story of triumph and empowerment as the protagonist eventually finds her voice.
Film becomes a metaphor for lost history and its “negative“ impact on successive generations who look for stability in an electronic world that lacks sufficient mediation. Video retrieves lost memories for the child who, through her camera, seeks to find her father.
Strange Culture is a 2007 documentary film directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson. It stars Tilda Swinton and Thomas Jay Ryan. It premiered January 19, 2007 at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The film examines the case of artist and professor Steve Kurtz, a member of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). The work of Kurtz and other CAE members dealt with genetically modified food and other issues of science and public policy. After his wife, Hope, died of heart failure, paramedics arrived and became suspicious when they noticed petri dishes and other scientific equipment related to Kurtz's art in his home. They summoned the FBI, who detained Kurtz within hours on suspicion of bioterrorism.
Also Directed by Alain Gomis
Fatima is a little girl of eight years. By opening and closing the refrigerator, she wonders if the light stays on when the door closes...
A woman living in the projects decides to run for mayor. At first she is taken as a joke but slowly picks up steam and is taken serious.
Félicité, a strong and proud woman, sings in bars in Kinshasa. She drifts away from reality when her 14-year-old son gets into an accident. In electric Kinshasa, she wanders in a world of music & dreams... until love unexpectedly brings her back to life.
El Hadj is studying in Paris. He is one of the young Senegalese men who have come to Paris since the French colony became independent to get a good education so that he can serve his fatherland on his return. Unexpectedly he is suddenly confronted by a problem with his residence papers, just because he has arranged an extension too late. His pleasant life filled with good prospects has gone in one fell swoop. He faces a dilemma. He can stay illegally in France, the country where he feels at home, where he has his friends, has fallen in love and can drink water from the tap. Or he can return (without graduating) to the 3rd-world country of Senegal to use the knowledge he has acquired. It is not only a practical choice. It comes down to the question of who he is, who he thought he could be.
Satché is about to die. He decides to make his last day on this world the day of his life.
Yacine is in his 30s, of Algerian origins, and has come to Paris looking for inner peace. A playful and poetic quest leads him via all kinds of strange encounters to an increasingly surrealist world and to Andalusia: a state of mind.
Also Directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
The new film by Athina Rachel Tsangari.
This short piece by Athina Rachel Tsangari, commissioned for the seventieth edition of the Venice Film Festival in 2013, draws on Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt" and functions as a meditation on the state of cinema, depicting two film projectors contemplating the uncertainty of their future.
In the middle of the Aegean Sea, six men on a fishing trip on a luxury yacht decide to play a game. During this game, things will be compared. Things will be measured. Songs will be butchered, and blood will be tested. Friends will become rivals and rivals will become hungry. But at the end of the journey, when the game is over, the man who wins will be the best man. And he will wear on his smallest finger the victory ring: the Chevalier.
A great video directed by the award winning director Athina Rachel Tsangari and narrated by Willem Dafoe about the history and the importance of the Museum Benaki.
A migrant cyborg (Lizzie Curry Martinez) wanders the globe recording her encounters,
Seven girls, a mansion perched on a Cycladic rock, a cycle of lessons on discipline, desire and demise-infinitely.
A documentary that takes a look at the production of BEFORE MIDNIGHT. As the film starts, Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke are sitting around as filming has just completed. From here we get some terrific stories as they talk about the characters as well as what they bring and take from them. We also get footage from the filming of the movie where we get to see how the actors and director work together to try and build up the scenes.
A surreal account of Lizzie as she struggles to make life fit.
Marina, 23, is growing up with her architect father in a prototype factory town by the sea. Finding the human species strange and repellent, she keeps her distance. Instead she chooses to observe it through the songs of Suicide, the mammal documentaries of Sir David Attenborough, and the sexual-education lessons she receives from her only friend, Bella. A stranger comes to town and challenges her to a foosball duel, on her own table. Her father meanwhile ritualistically prepares for his exit from the 20th century, which he considers to be "overrated." Caught between the two men and her collaborator, Bella, Marina investigates the wondrous mystery of the human fauna.
Also Directed by Alain Guiraudie
Summertime. A cruising spot for men, tucked away on the shores of a lake. Franck falls in love with Michel, an attractive, potent and lethally dangerous man. Franck knows this, but wants to live out his passion anyway.
On a hot Sunday morning, Nathalie Sanchez, an unemployed hair stylist, walks across the Causses plateau in search of a shepherd. When she finds one, he tells her that he has lost his flock. They walk together and while chatting they meet several times a shepherd's son turned outlaw, Carol Izba. The latter, despite being pursued by a famous bounty killer, Pool, proves unable to leave the region...
A sleepwalker decides to paint the town red. In the search of the wild painter, a young night watchman delivers some monologue.
In a forest of western Ourania, three young warriors are searching for a young girl who was abducted by a bandit.
A strange man is involved in a village massacre and drug dealing.
A 1990 short film from Alain Guiraudie concerning the conversations of two film makers as they meet each night.
In a time and place indeterminate a bandit has kidnapped Rixo Lomadis Bron’s daughter. Bron is a wealthy landowner who reigns over the shepherds of the Purple Mountain. The time has come when Rixo Lomadis Bron accuses Manjas-Kebir of killing his daughter and urges all the country’s inhabitants to track down the assassin. It’s the time when Radovan Remila Stoï, the land’s greatest warrior, rises up against this foolhardy act which has every chance of leading to war...
Armand, a man who sells farm machines in the country, is a popular middle-aged homosexual. Just as he was getting sick of life, he falls in love with a young girl called, Curlie, and goes on the run from her parents and the police.
Christmas Eve is ruined by an act of terrorism in the city of Clermont-Ferrand. As the city descend into panic, thirtysomething Mederic falls in love with older prostitute Isadora.
Screenwriter Leo is searching for the wolf in the south of France. During a scouting excursion he is seduced by Marie, a free-spirited and dynamic shepherdess. Nine months later she gives birth to their child. Suffering from post-natal depression and with no faith in Leo, who comes and goes without warning, Marie abandons both of them. Leo finds himself alone, with a baby to care for.
Also Directed by Connor Jessup
The ghost of a young boy explores the world on the day of his death.
As the end of her life approaches, an old woman encounters a strange spirit from a nearby forest.
Canadian actor and filmmaker Connor Jessup (Closet Monster, Falling Skies) profiles Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a maverick of Thai cinema who explores the slippery nature of time and consciousness with a sublimely idiosyncratic, often surreal approach to film form.
Two lonely people with a shared past - a wanderer and a waitress - meet again in a rural diner. As the nature of their relationship quietly reveals itself, the little details of their lives and memories intertwine.
A pilot navigates a storm. Inspired by the book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
A lonely boy dreams after school.
Also Directed by Jon Jost
Newport, Oregon. In a coastal town, Jeff and his wife Mattie work together facing the economic shifts. One son Chris, is unemployed; the other, Steve, is away on military service. Chris is lackadaisical and shiftless, Mattie perhaps drinks on the sly and tried to help her son, Jeff keeps his nose to the grind-wheel. Chris is dumped by his girlfriend, Jamie. Jeff scrambles to stay afloat. During a therapy session it is revealed that Chris is Jeff's step-son. Steve returns, but in a "transfer tube". Following his funeral, the family meet; an argument erupts, revealing the depths of the division between Jeff and Chris. In a counseling session Chris breaks down and is comforted by the counselor. Mattie and Jeff, lost in their grief, each lose their way.
Nas Correntes de Luz da Ria Formosa (In the Rays of Light of Ria Formosa) is a kind of documentary shot over a period of 3 months in summer of 1997 and then edited over the next 2 and a half years. The work is a spiritual portrait of a place and time. It is, as is Cabanas, willfully slow, meditative, passive. It has no evident narrative, though I hope I was able in my editing and other choices to impart a kind of slowly developing momentum which functions vaguely like a narrative, or like the melodic line in a piece of music. Finally LUZ is about light, and philosophically about life, and our place on this planet, and its place in the universe.
The wood song weaved as if it were a dream.
A tone poem about problems in a romantic relationship.
"Imagens de uma cidade perdida" is a portrait of an old area of Lisbon, primarily the Alfama, but also other central areas - Castelo São Jorge, Graça, Bairro Alto, and elsewhere. It was shot in 1997-98, over the span of more than a year. Like those places, its pace is languid and it wears the sense of "saudade" which defines Lisboa and Portugal.
One day, father makes a shocking decision in a family gathering. The family disagrees with it and against him in the very beginning. However, they make up their mind to support him at the end. A portrait of family disorganization casting the master of experimental film, James Benning.
Bowman Lake is a single image film of Bowman Lake, sunrise to sunset.
“A silent perusal of the Grand Canyon, morning to night, from a single, fixed camera position, by means of constant dissolves spaced a few seconds apart. Man — entirely absent — is no longer the center of the universe; the canyon exists outside of him. Despite the invisible photographer and his technologically-caused dissolves, this is a creditable approximation of the true foreign-ness of nature.” — Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (1974)
A telling story of an unemployed Vietnam vet in Butte, Montana, whose wife leaves him after seven years when she feels there is no longer communication between them and - more painfully and pointedly - because she is unable to have a child owing to his sterility from exposure to Agent Orange. Told in a gentle style, richly emotional, Bell Diamond was made with non-professionals drawn from the community of Butte.
Also Directed by Cindy Sherman
One of the First Cindy Sherman's super-8 film,"Doll Clothes" (officially, the film is "Untitled") has not been viewed since 1975, the year it was made. It comically crosses Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase with animated paper dolls in a sly, funny and clever precursor to the concerns that became signature elements in Sherman's remarkable body of photographic work.
A woman connects with her blind pet dove.
A prostitute waits in vain for a client.
When Dorine Douglas' job as proofreader for Constant Consumer magazine is turned into an at-home position during a downsizing, she doesn't know how to cope. But after accidentally killing one of her co-workers, she discovers that murder can quench the loneliness of her home life, as a macabre office place forms in her basement, populated by dead co-workers.
A close-up of a woman mouthing the words "I hate you" with increasing intensity.
Also Directed by Jenni Olson
A series of thirty-two trailers put together to illustrate the film industry's attitude to and packaging of African-American screen imagery.
A concise poetic summary of butch identity.
Girl, knife and doll come together in this controversial dramatization of the original early 1990s Tribe 8 queer punk band "Masochist Medley" stage act featuring San Francisco drag king Marya's legendary stage performance as Uncle Rod.
A fascinating and unlikely reinvention story, The Royal Road simultaneously explores cinematic spiritual channeling, the conquest and colonization of Mexico and the American Southwest, fading historical Californian urban landscapes, and the passions found in butch identity to achieve an achingly beautiful and poetic defense of remembering. Probing roads from El Camino Real, to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, to the road right outside the front door, Olson crafts a deeply intelligent and transcending observation of the human condition that reaches for redemption in the embrace of history, nostalgia, mindfulness, and sheer beauty. If you give yourself over to it, it will crack you wide open.
Images set to a tape recording that slain San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk made in November 1977 to be played in case he was killed.
Through voiceover and static San Francisco landscapes this experimental narrative short tells the melancholy story of a butch dyke pining over a one night stand with a straight girl.
Dutch doors, warehouse windows, and empty streets provide the background for a short tale about past lust and lost love. This glimpse into the drama of a lesbian relationship is revealed through stark visuals and the measured pace of the voice-over, providing a clever contrast between how we see and what we hear.
A provocative lesbian spoof of the famous early '90s ad campaign: "What do you do in your 501s?"
A brief reflection on faith, self-loathing and Studs Lonigan.
Film archivist and former director of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Jenni Olson created this fast-paced and often funny, campy 75-minute film comprised entirely of spliced together movie trailers. Some of the segments have themes such as a breezy look back at John Travolta's career that includes trailers from such films as Saturday Night Fever, Staying Alive, Grease, Perfect, and Moment by Moment. Other trailers include Mae West in Sextette, the disco camper Thank God It's Friday, Raquel Welch in Kansas City Bomber, Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew and the rarely seen Chastity, the serious acting debut of Cher.
Also Directed by Bruce LaBruce
A down-on-his-luck adult film star sees a chance to make a comeback via a lesbian documentary film-maker, but she is exploiting him to get financial backing for her pet project.
A theatre project developed and directed by Bruce LaBruce. It was inspired by the life and theoretical writings of Melanie Klein, one of the psychoanalytic thinkers who interpreted Freud’s work after his death.
Bruce LaBruce's take on Andy Warhol's classic.
An experimental short film directed by Bruce LaBruce.
A previously unreleased provocation from queer cinema’s outrageous auteur Bruce LaBruce
A recreation a classic Tom of Finland comic book tale.
In Fucking Different XXX, the passion for explicit sex scenes brought eight international filmmakers together. The eight short films shot in Paris, Berlin and San Francisco are about intensive sex, quick sex, romantic sex, funny sex, the first sex, and the last sex. The range goes from a lesbian quickie in the toilet, a bloodthirsty orgy, romantic fisting all the way to wet teenage dreams. The result is a never seen before look upon sexual tastes and varieties, far from clichés, with a fresh and sometimes humorous approach.
Referencing sixties B-movies like "They Saved Hitler’s Brain" and "The Brain That Would Not Die", Ulrike’s Brain finds Doctor Julia Feifer (Susanne Sachsse) arriving at an academic conference with an organ box. Inside the box: the brain of Ulrike Meinhof, which was saved by the authorities along with the brains of the three other leaders of the RAF after their deaths in Stammheim prison. Doctor Feifer can communicate telepathically with Ulrike’s brain, which is directing her to lead a new feminist revolution. To that end, she is searching for the ideal female body to transplant Ulrike’s brain into. At the same time, her arch-rival, Detlev Schlesinger, an extreme right-wing ideologue, arrives at the conference with the ashes of Michael Kühnen, the former German neo-Nazi leader and infamous homosexual who died of AIDS in 1989. When the two Frankenstein’s monsters of the extreme left and the extreme right meet, chaos ensues.
In Ger(wo)many, when an army of radical females is preparing for a final revolution and a utopian world without men, a young male soldier arrives seeking refuge at the convent.
A young zombie named Otto appears on a remote highway. He has no idea where he came from or where he is going. After hitching a ride to Berlin and nesting in an abandoned amusement park, he begins to explore the city. Soon he is discovered by underground filmmaker Medea Yarn, who begins to make a documentary about him with the support of her girlfriend, Hella Bent, and her brother Adolf, who operates the camera. Meanwhile, Medea is still trying to finish Up with Dead People, the epic political-porno-zombie movie that she has been working on for years. She convinces its star, Fritz Fritze, to allow the vulnerable Otto to stay in his guest bedroom. When Otto discovers that he has a wallet that contains information about his past, before he was dead, he begins to remember details about his ex-boyfriend, Rudolf. He arranges to meet him at the schoolyard where they met, with devastating results.
Also Directed by Lulu Wang
Mr. Fix-It, his wife calls him. She felt safer with him at home, and he helped look after the children, especially the baby. He lingers at the door before leaving the house to meet Sarah, whom his wife knows but does not suspect, and with her go to a house on a lake his wife knows nothing about.
A headstrong Chinese-American woman returns to China when her beloved grandmother is given a terminal diagnosis. Billi struggles with her family's decision to keep grandma in the dark about her own illness as they all stage an impromptu wedding to see grandma one last time.
An elderly Chinese immigrant's cultural ignorance gets him in irreversible trouble in a public restroom. Despite his harmless intentions, he struggles with his son and the legal system to make the context of his behavior understood.
After false reports of his demise put him and his work on the map, an artist decides to continue the charade by posing as his own brother. Soon, a reporter enters his life and has a profound effect on him.
Coltdogster rises to the top of the Twitter underworld to become the boss of the Fact Account family. His life takes a tumultuous turn as he faces tragedy, multiple trials and a prison sentence.
A Chinese New Year legend reimagined as a contemporary coming-of-age story, Shot on iPhone 12 Pro Max. Directed by Lulu Wang and created by the team behind the Golden Globe nominated film, The Farewell.
Explores the family dynamic between an introspective teenage girl and her single mother
Also Directed by Amy Davis
Commissioned for the 2019 30th Anniversary shorts omnibus, 30/30 Vision: 3 Decades of Strand Releasing.
Also Directed by Roddy Bogawa
SOME DIVINE WIND - a rough translation referring to Japanese Kamikaze pilots (on 'God's wind') - is the story of Ben, an American-born young man of mixed parentage, whose father was part of a bombing mission that destroyed his Japanese mother's village and killed her entire family during World War II. Although his father discovers this horrible coincidence when he meets his wife after the war, he keeps this realization secret. Eventually his father has a breakdown, confessing his tragic story, forcing Ben to be torn between his love of his parents and internal feelings of betrayal by his own fervent efforts to assimilate.
This documentary chronicles the long and storied career of Storm Thorgerson, the most famous artist you've never heard of -- the brilliant photographer who created scores of iconic album covers for bands such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.
Filmmaker Roddy Bogawa reflects on his childhood in Hawaii and his involvement in the Los Angeles punk scene of the 1970s.
A literal/metaphorical "map" of anecdotes, jump cut interviews, incorrect "talking head" shots, and hit-and-miss quotations. The film follows the route of a delivery driver encountering various characters, such as the glaucoma-stricken elderly owner of a bed and breakfast and a doctor's office receptionist who steals drugs for her father, a Hollywood producer.
Also Directed by Andrew Ahn
Eight-year-old Cody is spending the summer in an unfamiliar setting with his mom Kathy. Though he can’t relate to the neighbourhood kids, things take an unexpected turn when he develops an unusual friendship with grouchy old Del from next door.
Described as a modern day take on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” the film will center on two best friends embarking on a weeklong vacation to Fire Island — the historic gay escape off the southern shore of Long Island — with the help of cheap rosé and a cadre of eclectic friends.
A young Korean-American man works to reconcile his obligations to his struggling immigrant family with his burgeoning sexual desires in the underground world of gay hookups at Korean spas in Los Angeles.
A gay Korean-American man yearns for a family life just out of reach. Nick is a gay Korean-American man living in Koreatown, Los Angeles with his partner Brian and their dog Chloe. When Nick attends his baby nephew's 'dol,' a traditional Korean first birthday party, he finds himself yearning for a life just out of reach.
A six-year old boy discovers what it means to be a man.
Also Directed by Elisabeth Subrin
An exhausted, workaholic actress, Anna Baskin, 44, abruptly extricates herself from a successful but mind-numbing TV role, returning to her past life in New York to reinvent herself.
A film by Elisabeth Subrin.
Elisabeth’s short for 30/30 Vision is a tribute to the French actress Maria Schneider.
Sweet Ruin is an experimental adaptation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s unrealized script, Technically Sweet, written in the late '60s, but never produced. Set in the Amazon and Sardinia, it was to star Jack Nicholson as T., a disillusioned journalist obsessed with guns, and Maria Schneider as "The Girl." In two screens paralleling the dual plots of his script, Sweet Ruin imagines the ruins of Antonioni's work, as if it somehow actually filmed, but then lost and forgotten.
Elisabeth Subrin’s masterful film is a shot-by-shot reenactment of an unreleased 1967 documentary portrait of SAIC student Shulamith Firestone, who, a few years later, would become a central figure in the rise of radical feminism. Through its meticulous staging, the film expresses in Subrin’s words, “the residues of the past,” and the resonance of issues around gender and class today. (Gene Siskel Film Center)
In 1983, French actress Maria Schneider gives an interview for the TV show Cinéma Cinémas. The conversation takes an unexpected turn when she challenges film industry practices and is asked to talk about the controversial film Last Tango in Paris (1972).
The Fancy is a speculative, experimental work that explores the life of Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), evoked by the published catalogues of and about her photographs. Structural in form, the video radically reorganizes information from the catalogues in order to pose questions about biographical form, history and fantasy, female subjectivity, and issues of authorship and intellectual property.
An evocative collage about a young girl caught in the throes of anorexia and depression, deviance and disintegration.
Also Directed by Abu Bakr Shawky
A chronicle of Egypt's modern history through the eyes of one middle-class family.
A Coptic leper and his orphaned apprentice leave the confines of the leper colony for the first time and embark on a journey across Egypt to search for what is left of their families.
Filmed in Cairo during Egypt's revolution in 2011, this short documentary captures the dramatic events from the heart of Tahrir Square during the last days of Mubarak's presidency.