Danish Girls Show Everything

A movie by Mika Kaurismaki.

Documentary about Miriam Makeba

A sly riff on the Prodigal Son story, Mika Kaurismaki's latest — about a joyless workaholic concert pianist who ends up on a wild ride with his long-lost rapscallion father — is a funny and cogent analysis of machismo, abandonment issues and the value of reconnecting with one's roots. (TIFF)

Antti "Zombie" Autiomaa does two things well: play the bass guitar and drink. After several months' sleeping on the streets of Istanbul, he returns to Helsinki where he's called into the army but discharged on mental health grounds after adding turpentine to the officers' soup. Zombie lives bleary-eyed in an apartment off his parents' house where his lonely, unemployed father suffers from heart disease. His girl-friend Marjo has taken up with a hairdresser but comes back to Zombie. His friend Harri hires him as a roadie for his band "Harry and the Mulefukkers" then gives him a chance as a bass player. He has his girl and he has a gig, but can Zombie put the bottle down?

Prison guard falls in love with inmate. She wants him to let her escape.

Young Alex Sammako has seen his brothers defy the law in a series of deeds that first land them in jail, and then, after they escape and return to their rural home, land them back in the lap of their locally notorious family. Alex wants nothing to do with them. He is in love with Mirja, whose family is not that different from the Sammakos, but who shares Alex's viewpoints and feelings. Not helping matters is a police department convinced that all Sammakos are bad, and the family itself, pressuring Alex to follow in their murky footsteps.

A documentary film about a tour of three Finnish rock bands around Saimaa lake system in a steam boat in 1981. The bands (Juice Leskinen Slam, Eppu Normaali and Hassisen Kone) are shown playing songs in their gigs and, in between, the members give intimate interviews or just act plain silly and have a good time.

Anna Kelanen is an ex-model, who just has been released from prison. She thinks back on her life, when she was a rather successful model, and on the things that went wrong.

Grump travels to Germany to look for a similar replacement car after his sons sold his old model 1972 Ford Escort.

Documentary on the history of Ryhmäteatteri theatre company.

A Serbian engineer falls for a younger woman, but he is inept at courtship.

To Makavejev, each tombstone plays vicar for its resident spirit; it haunts, roams, and makes conversation.

Socialist work ethic meets youthful exuberance and lightheartedness where backbreaking labor does not ruin anyone's summer vacation.

A Red Army major caught between East and West Berlin finds his wife gone and somebody else moved into his apartment.

A documentary about the famous athlete and movie enthusiast who made Serbia's first sound film, Innocence Unprotected. The Nazi occupation of Belgrade prevented the film from gaining wider acclaim. Director Makavejev intersperses clips of the original film with interviews of surviving cast and crew members, as well as newsreel and archival footage.

Marilyn Jordan, an American, lives in Stockholm with her Swedish husband and family. Her behavior is bizarre, perhaps mad: she poisons the dog's milk and advises the dog not to drink it; she sets the sheets afire as her husband sleeps; she crawls under the dining table to sing. While detained at airport customs for carrying pruning shears, she meets a young Yugoslav woman and goes with her to a Gypsy enclave where she's fought over, takes a lover, helps with the sordid entertainment at a bar, and returns home more dangerous than before. The film also tells parallel stories of Marilyn's daughter becoming a junior homemaker as the young immigrant practices her striptease.

The winner of the Miss World Virginity contest marries, escapes from her masochistic husband and ends up involved in a world of debauchery.

Parade, one of Makavejev’s best-known films, is view into the preparations International Worker’s Day where the director all but ignores the titular parade. The film focuses on the people – those who work and those who wander the streets, sometimes lost among the throngs, shown in a by-the-way fashion and not without humor. Makavejev claims he sought to show, man as he is...

One camera in one setting, one attic and eight young directors – the result is a unique Dadaistic collage of seven short sketches. The original task for each filmmaker was to keep each short under three minutes, to set it in one hotel room, and to include the sentence “I miss Sonja Henie." This experimental film was shot over a single night at the international film festival FEST in Beograd in 1971.

What does the energy harnessed through orgasm have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dušan Makavejev has the answers (or the questions). His surreal documentary-fiction collision WR: Mysteries of the Organism begins as an investigation into the life and work of controversial psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich and then explodes into a free-form narrative of a beautiful young Slavic girl’s sexual liberation.

The rape of a family in the rural idyll of England. Reconstruction of a true story that took place in the Congo.

A black-and-white documentary which closely follows the rehearsal process of the famous ballet Giselle, originally choreographed by Adolphe Adam. The focus here is entirely on the process by which ballet master Henning Kronstram conveys the spirit and the endless details of the ballet to his dancers.

For two years, director Anne Wivel and her camera followed her husband, the prominent Danish politician Svend Auken. The initial aim was to portray a modern, idealistic politician with great visions for the future. But during shooting, Auken contracted cancer, and the film became a portrayal of the politician, husband and father who feels his life is fading away, even if his work here is not yet finished.

Per Kirkeby's struggle to return to art after an accident. An honest and personal portrait of a headstrong artist.

A daring, artistically courageous portrait of Sųren Kierkegaard's philosophy, not as dead, abstract theory, but as everyday living actuality. Director Anne Wivel invites us to join a group of students and professors as they passionately debate observations by one of the founders of existentialism, while tranquil scenes from nature illustrate the simple life that anti-rationalist Kierkegaard believed might propel us into a necessary "leap of faith." No dry commentary on an anachronistic ethic here: Wivel aims for nothing less than a radical transformation--dialogue made so richly visual, communication becomes moving image.

The film tells the story of how an ordinary police officer can fight with criminals, combat criminal offenses, protect people's lives and property, and maintain social stability.

Chinese short film directed by Zhang Yuan.

A rock musician looks for his girl-friend who left while pregnant, trying to decide whether to keep the baby.

After her mother's lecherous boyfriend reveals she's adopted, incorrigible flirt Dada skips town -- with hopelessly smitten boy-next-door Zhou in tow -- in search of her birth mother.

Often cited as China’s first independent feature film, this low-budget drama, filmed largely in the director’s Beijing apartment, depicts the life of a single mother (a topic considered taboo at the time) caring for her mentally challenged son. Shot with a documentary aesthetic that includes interviews with families of mentally challenged persons, the film helped kick-start the Sixth Generation of filmmakers (including Wang Xiaoshuai and Jia Zhangke) and their ethos of employing documentary realism to depict the true conditions of contemporary China.

In February 1995, after many years of preparation, the modern dancer Venus finally underwent transgender surgery in Beijing. On the eve of becoming a woman, he gave an interview and talked about his determination, aspirations, and good life ideals. The operation was tortuous and painful. After the operation, my father went to the police station to change the gender on the Venus ID card. From then on, Miss Venus was born. In March 2000, Venus once again interviewed her about her many boyfriends in the five years after the operation, her happy life, and her special encounters and adventures. The film allows the audience to see a Miss Venus living in her dream.

The film documents a day in the life of Tiananmen Square in 1994, a mere five years after the crushing of a student-led democracy movement in 1989.

Jiang Jie is famous throughout China: the “Chinese Joan of Arc,” in the words of director Zhang Yuan, a communist heroine executed by the Kuomintang in 1949, on the eve of the revolution. Zhang Yuan’s film, a passionately engaged tribute to the 1964 “revolutionary opera” based on Jiang Jie’s life, follows the original closely...The Revolutionary melodrama plot, not that different from Verdi’s 19th century versions, has of course a completely different resonance today. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) enshrined this kind of “revolutionary opera” — based on traditional Beijing opera, but with substantial stylistic and formal revisions — as the epitome of Maoist propaganda art. In the past ten years, Chinese and Western experts have begun to re-evaluate the art behind the propaganda, to find creativity, and even shocking beauty under the layers of kitsch and repellent politics the works have sometimes embodied. —Shelly Kraicer

A mysterious woman frequents tea shops and other places looking for the right man. A cup of green tea will show you the way to find your true love.

Alex is 16, a misfit, a drop-out, a failure. She uses drugs; she cuts herself. She has been sent by her despairing adoptive mother to a farm in northern Germany. At first, Alex hates this remote place and the demanding job of looking after the horses. But under the tutelage of Nina, a 30-something taking a break from city life and her partner, Christine, Alex gradually comes to form a bond with the animals in her charge. Then Kathy arrives at the farm to take a holiday, bringing her own, beautiful horse with her. Alex takes an instant dislike to this privileged newcomer. Slowly, though, the barriers between the two are broken down and Kathy finds herself smitten by the streetwise and energetic Alex. The pair starts horsing around, larking about on the mudflats, until one weekend, when they’re alone at the farm, things spiral out of control.

Against the backdrop of Taiwan's turbulent presidential elections in 2004, TIGERWOMEN GROW WINGS portrays three women of different generations. Noted opera singer Hsieh Yueh-hsia, internationally renowned writer Li Ang, and 23-year-old film director Chen Yin-jung are featured in this documentary, which focuses on the changes taking place in the lives of women in Taiwan's youthful democracy.

Four women filmmakers examine sexuality in this anthology. Segment 1 is entitled "Let's Talk About Sex" and is the story of an aspiring actress whose day job is as a phone-sex operator. Tiring of listening to callers' fantasies, she finds a caller who is willing to listen to hers. Segment 2 is called "Taboo Palor" and tells the story of two lesbians, who, for variety, pick up a man for sex. He ends up getting more than he bargained for. Segment 3 is "Wonton Soup." Here an Australian-Chinese man tries to rekindle his affair with a Chinese woman by returning to their roots: both in the kitchen and in the bedroom.

A feature-length documentary on Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, award-winning artist and human-rights activist who has gained international recognition for her work with street children in Rio. The film recounts how a woman turned her back on a wealthy lifestyle, driven into action by the execution of 8 streetkids by military police in 1993. In subsequent years Yvonne's struggle to better the lives of endangered and abandoned children has led her to found "Projeto Uere" ("Children of Light") a radical project committed to protection and education of kids who live in the streets and slums of Rio which has brought her into conflict with Brazil's wealthy elite.

DIDN'T DO IT FOR LOVE is a documentary portrait of Eva Norvind, a.k.a. Mistress Ava Taurel, born Eva Johanne Chegodaieva Sakonskaya in Trondheim, Norway. The film follows Eva's many careers, from her time as a showgirl in Paris to becoming Mexico's Marilyn Monroe in the 1960s to establishing herself as New York's most famous dominatrix in the 1980s. Using clips from Norvind's Mexican films, stills from various periods, and interviews with friends, partners and family, Treut's documentary traces Eva's search for the wellspring of her obsessive and dark sexuality.

Wanda is a dominatrix who runs a gallery in a building on the Hamburg waterfront, where audiences pay for the privilege of watching her humiliate her slaves. She is a business woman who smashes sexual stereotypes and social taboos with icy self-possession and an enigmatic smile. As artist she specializes in the staging of elaborate BDSM fantasies and her affairs transgress the usual boundaries of personal and professional life. Along the way she leaves her German lesbian lover, a shoe fetishist, for an American "trainee," and does more than step on the toes of the male performer who has broken the rules of the master-slave relationship by falling in love with her.

Bondage was made from, among other things, footage Monika Treut filmed in New York with women of the LSM(Lesbian Sex Mafia/ Lesbian Sado-Masochists). The statements of Carol form the core of the film. She speaks about her sexuality, her love of bondage, her desire for pain, which she shows in front of the camera. Her talking is interrupted by assembled impressions: intersections and subways pass through a chained female body

The late German film, theatre and opera director Schroeter is a self-proclaimed dinosaur from another age when people dreamed of ultimate freedom in film". Filmmaker Treut visits him on the set of his feature "DEUX" in Paris, and in Düsseldorf during the production of the opera "Norma". World premiere: FCMM October 2003. Screened at International Documentary Filmfestival Thessaloniki March 2004. Currently on the international filmfest circuit.

Monika Treut explores the worlds and thoughts of several female to male transgendered individuals. As with Treuts first film, Jungfrauenmaschine, Gendernauts, enters a minority sector of San Fransisco culture. The characters in this film have a lot to complain about, and they do. They are people whose physical appearance (female) does not match their inner sexual identity (male). The subject is pinpointed in the film independant of sexual orientation. Leave your conservative hats at the door, this is going to need your special attention.

A confrontation with Camille Paglia, the infamous author.

At the end of the 19th century, somewhere in the outskirts of the Russian Empire, a doctor administers a lethal overdose of ether to a young woman – the object of his desire. After getting away with his crime, he finds employment in a fortress, where he continues his experiments with ether to manage pain and manipulate human behaviour. Despite his evilness, it is not too late for his soul to be saved from eternal damnation…

A Polish ambassador (Zbigniew Zapasiewicz) finds his life falling into ruin following the death of his wife.

Henry Kesdi is a silenced classical composer and a survivor of the Holocaust. He is coaxed out from retirement by an inspired musicologist, Stefan, who convinces him to compose a complex symphony on his neglected piano. As a help Kesdi gets his new musical secretary. His loyal wife reluctantly accepts her as his young lover.

In this adaptation of an historical play by Pope John Paul II, painter Albert Chmielowski decides to devote his life to helping the homeless.

An idealistic scientist is encouraged by his wife to use his good looks to get ahead, but his new job carries with it temptations and traps.

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.

Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi once more explores the dilemma of intellectualism at the expense of humanity in 1982's Imperative. The story concerns math professor Robert Powell, who feels that there is something lacking in his ever-so-precise life. What is missing is truth, specifically philosophical truth. Thus he philosophizes at great length, allowing director Zanussi plenty of room for didactic but little room for warmth. Leading ladies Brigette Fossey and Leslie Caron occasionally melt through the cold logic of Imperative.

In what appears to be an inexplicable incident, a man drives up to a resort hotel in midwinter, throws away his car keys, enters, and proceeds to agitate everyone he meets with his urgency -- a message he is somehow unable to communicate. Then he leaves, disappearing in the snow. Later, the people he appeared to have upset have gathered to search for him and find him frostbitten, but alive. Visiting him at the sanatorium to which he has been taken, they gradually discover what was really happening.

Esmeralda is married with 5 husbands at the same time, so she has to explain to the judge why she has done this.

Berenice (Navarro) is a woman with a mysterious past. A scar crosses her face and nightmares of fire and horses fill her lonely nights. She maybe killed her husband but nobody can be sure. In the present, Berenice lives with her godmother (Roldán) a money lender so fragile that she's always resting in her bed. The two women live in an almost perpetual seclusion, except on Sundays when they go to the church and to the movies. One day, the godmother's doctor dies and she asks Berenice to go to his velatory. There they meet Rodrigo (Armendáriz Jr.) the doctor's son, a handsome and free-spirited young man for whom Berenice falls in love.

Jorge and Aarón, two young boys growing up in a quiet town often miss classes to go together to the cinema matinee. One day they are kidnapped by robbers while traveling in a truck. After the disintegration of the band, they begin to participate in the robberies until the adventure turns into something more sinister and dangerous.

The sexual misunderstandings caused by the real identity of a rich woman serve Hermosillo to satirize the moral and social hypocrisy of the provincial that every Mexican carries inside.

Two single women share an apartment, work together, and sometimes swap boyfriends. None of their romantic attachments seem quite as stable or enduring as their friendship.

Adult brothers compete for pateral affection and for control of the family estate.

Young woman with romantic problems puts her trust in the wrong person to help her solve them.

A pair of macho private detectives pose as a gay couple to gain access into the world of a perverted wealthy widow, Doña Josefina, also known as “Mrs. Open Mind.” The widow’s summer home, it seems, is a legendary lightning rod for scandal because of mysterious and evil incidents that occur there.

Sebastian meets Antonio and it is love at first sight. But the obstacles do not wait.

The presence and tortuous inner life of a film student stimulate the creativity of Jaime Humberto Hermosillo and promote the making of a film, Rencor. A combination of fiction and behind the scenes.

Mani Kaul's diploma film shot at Ajanta Caves

A documentary story told through images, poetry and the Dhrupad, a vocal genre in Hindustani classical music, said to be the oldest still in use in that musical tradition.

A documentary on the role of women in India.

Taking an experimental approach to the relationship between the written text and moving image, Mani Kaul has a series of texts read aloud in voice-overs (poetry, essays, and stories), while the characters within the texts walk through real or imaginary landscapes.

In a poetic hour and a half, director Mani Kaul looks at the ancient art of making pottery from a wide variety of perspectives.

Chitrakathi is about the folk artists of western India who narrate with the help of leather puppets. Mani takes us to the sleepy Konkan coastal village and introduces us to the family that has preserved this unique art for several centuries.

Based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "The Meek One", Nazar is the saga of a Bombay-based antique dealer-cum-money lender (Shekhar Kapur), who at the age of 40, marries a woman (Shambhavi Kaul) who is 17, and brings her home to his spacious flat in a multi-storied building with a magnificent view. Their marriage is not a happy one, even though he hopes it will get better. But the bride, who had until her wedding lived her life in an orphanage, is immersed in her own thoughts, and at one point even holds a revolver against her husband's head while he slept. The film explores their complex life in a manner unusual for Indian cinema.

A very clever parrot lives in a Hindu palace, surrounded by many beautiful girls, but the parrot escapes, and is trapped far from the palace. One day, when its new owner is sleeping, the bird convinces a young boy to open the cage door. In return, it shows the boy a secret passage to get into the palace.

This film suggests a network of hierarchical relations between people through sometimes subtle and at other times blunt illustrations.

A 'filmscape' on the Kashmir valley.

A man decides to perpetrate a series of killings and publicise them as political acts in an attempt to protest against nuclear armaments.

'Ang.: Lone' is a sort of social realist 'rebellious teen movie'. It tells the story of a troubled, emotionally confused, and defiant 16-year-old girl called Lone. Lone runs away from a girls' home in Jutland and travels to the home of her foster parents. Her visit quickly gives rise to a conflict so she travels onward to Copenhagen. In Copenhagen she enters into lower and middle class milieus and the hippiesque underground, but she runs away from each of these because she manages to start conflicts with most people by acting aggressively aggrieved. Lone finds a boyfriend and becomes pregnant during the couple of months she spends in Copenhagen before she is found and placed in a mothers' home which she eventually runs away from in order to have an illegal abortion.

Time-lapsed film from the perspective of a train moving slowly down the railroad tracks.

A portrait of a deserted fisherman's village in Northern Norway called Børfjord - a place with an incredible personality in the middle of a magnificent Arctic nature. The 12 minute short film was filmed in 70mm Super Panavision, using a specially developed "nature animation" technique. The result is a magic flight in one single shot, along the remains of an internal village road. At the same time a whole year passes by at 50 000 times normal speed! Most of the year, the village of Børfjord lies empty with virgin snow between cold houses. People show up only during a short and hectic summer season. But the cycles of nature go on as they have always done, totally independent of what people might do.

A magic journey along the remains of a 100 year-old narrow-gauge railway. Another "moving time lapse" work by Morten Skallerud similar to his "A Year Along the Abandoned Road (1991)".

Computer programmer/beekeeper Jacob gets a "television" implanted in his brain by a race of telekinetic bees, which causes him to experience severe hallucinations. (Includes: Mesopotamian bees, souls living inside weapons, the land of the dead in the Moon, Cain, the Trinity site, the tower of Babel, and a planet TV transmitting the dead of the future inside the Garden of Eden Cave which are giant bees, a Supranormal Film Society trying to capture the dead on film in the 1920's, the letter X, missiles turning into flying saucers, a beekeeper who is murdered by his own bees, and the cities of the dead)

An expansive research project that takes us in a flashback to the reconstruction of a lost film production in Manchuria, the doomed epic entitled The Lost Tribes. (M HKA)

The third volume in a cycle of features that wrap around The Telepathic Motion Picture of the Lost Tribes. Announced in a recent email.

The first volume in a cycle of features that wrap around The Telepathic Motion Picture of the Lost Tribes. Announced in a recent email.

“Volumes E + F of “The First Movie On The Internet” are now a thing,” says director David Blair in a Patreon announcement. “They are both very long, but then so is Jeopardy, or its’ precursor, the CBS Television Quiz of 1941” – Volume F is reported to have a tentative length of 24 hours!

The fourth volume in a cycle of features that wrap around The Telepathic Motion Picture of the Lost Tribes. Announced in a recent email.

A videotape about places neither here nor there, neither there nor here.

The second volume in a cycle of features that wrap around The Telepathic Motion Picture of the Lost Tribes. Announced in a recent email.

"Volumes E + F of "The First Movie On The Internet" are now a thing," says director David Blair in a Patreon announcement. "They are both very long, but then so is Jeopardy, or its' precursor, the CBS Television Quiz of 1941" - Volume E is reported to have a tentative length of 30 hours!

"Between 1995 and 1997, I lived in Tokyo, where I began to work on a movie about Manchuria. [...] Volume G is the beginning of that movie from then, set in a place that the Communist Chinese called Fake [or Maquette] Manchuria at one time. [...] When I was younger, I had the habit of reading very long novels, liking those in a list like Murasaki or Wu or Pynchon or Herodotus or Fuentes or Blish or Sterne or Murakami, and this movie reminds me of that..." - (David Blair)

Summer by the sea. Young Nadja is about to learn how to swim. In the swim-school she is by far the best at swimming on dry land.

Swedish drama based loosely on a true story. Marten Klingberg plays Peter, an engaged man who finds himself attracted to a gay man called Nassim (Pjotr Giro). Peter's life is suddenly transformed from one of married domestic routine to one of passionate lust and longing for his new gay lover. However, things take a tragic turn when Nassim is discovered dead and Peter is accused of his murder.

Golden Girl is a film about the forces at play around Frida Wallberg, WBC world champion. It's about putting it all on the line in a deadly sport. About rosy dreams that crash into a nothing less than brutal reality.

Susanna Edwards' follows Christina Sanchez, Spain's most successful female bullfighter, in this intimate, intense documentary about what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated sport.

Cities (Territories & Occupation) thematize "the city" divided into districts, neighborhoods, zones and domains, marked by inner-city borderlines. The film investigates how cities emerge and change through migration, decay, destruction, demolition, relocation, displacement.

"The photonovel FIASKO is based on and named after Kertész’ novel. He describes his absurd attempt of a new beginning – after Auschwitz and Buchenwald – in the Budapest of the Stalin area. Our photonovel transfers Kertész’ literary method into a visual language: the joining of fragmentary elements of the past and of the present, finding a trace that links experience and remembrance. From 2008 to 2010 approximately 800 colored medium-format photos were taken. The sequential photos have been taken on the original locations. The remainders of the past systems are rendered via multiple exposures, pictures shown in their ambivalence, mirroring etc. The literary text and the photographies remain independent from one another, however they enter into a dialog and open up space for associations. The course of movement caused by the juxtaposition of multiple still images is continued when one turns the pages (see chronophotography)."

"The theme of the film HIDDEN CITIES is personal urban perceptions, which we call 'the city'. The city, as a living organism, reflecting social processes and interactions, economic relations, political conditions and private matters. In the city, human memories, desires and tragedies find expression in the form of designations and marks engraved in house walls and paving slabs. But what the city really is under this thick layer of signs, what it contains or conceals, is what we are researching in the HIDDEN CITIES project. The source material for the film are 9 sequential photo works created by Gusztáv Hámos between 1975 and 2010. Each of these 'city perceptions' depicts essential situations of urban experiences containing human and inhuman acts in a compact form. The cities in which the photo sequences have been made are Berlin, Budapest and New York – places with a traumatised past: Wars, dictatorships, terrorist catastrophes."

A battle-tested cosmonaut and hero is sent to Mars.

A portrait of the American Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) based on never-before-seen footage from his visit to Denmark in October 1983, and from his later years in Lawrence, Kansas. After having spent more than a quarter of a century outside of the United States, in Mexico, Tangier, Paris and London, Burroughs returned to New York in 1974. Shortly after, he began touring and reading his work to new generations of readers and thus establishing himself as a cult figure. The film focuses on Burroughs' unique talent as a performer, and on his later work, especially what is known as The Last Trilogy. In addition to the historic footage there are new interviews with friends and colleagues.

A portrait of the American artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995), based on a personal interpretation of Johnson’s avant-garde strategies, using the telephone and the internet as primary sources for sound and image.