The Film That Buys the Cinema

Nina, an art dealer, has her weekly massage appointment and is surprised to find out her usual masseur, Douglas, has sent a replacement named Fitch. The pair develop an easy rapport during the session, with talk about past relationships. As Nina lies topless on the massage table, Fitch also takes time to explain various massage techniques, including those used by Hopi medicine men.

Powerful supernatural forces are unleashed when a young architect becomes pregnant after moving to an isolated and mysterious valley to build a house.

Alex Linden is a psychiatrist living in Vienna who meets Milena Flaherty though a mutual friend. Though Alex is quite a bit older than Milena, he's attracted to her young, carefree spirit. Despite the fact that Milena is already married, their friendship quickly turns into a deeply passionate love affair that threatens to overtake them both. When Milena ends up in the hospital from an overdose, Alex is taken into custody by Inspector Netusil.

Under the pretense of having a picnic, a geologist takes his teenage daughter and 6-year-old son into the Australian outback and attempts to shoot them. When he fails, he turns the gun on himself, and the two city-bred children must contend with harsh wilderness alone. They are saved by a chance encounter with an Aborigine boy who shows them how to survive, and in the process underscores the disharmony between nature and modern life.

Young gangster Chas Devlin seeks refuge from the mob in a basement belonging to a reclusive, fading rock star Turner.

The melodrama of a failing, aging movie star who takes up with an ambitious masseur who takes her home only to show off in front of his former girl friend and her powerful father.

Middle-aged Gerald Kingsland advertises in a London paper for a female companion to spend a year with him on a desert island. The young Lucy Irving takes a chance on contacting him and after a couple of meetings they decide to go ahead. Once on the island things prove a lot less idyllic than in the movies, and gradually it becomes clear that it is Lucy who has the desire and the strength to try and see the year through.

A tale of power, passion and obsession set in a politically torn Eastern European country.

Four 1950s cultural icons who conceivably could have met but probably didn't, fictionally do so in this modern fable of post-WWII America. Visually intriguing, the film has a fluid progression of flashbacks and flashforwards centering on the fictional Einstein's current observations, childhood memories, and apprehensions for the future.

Laura and John, grieved by a terrible loss, meet in Venice, where John is in charge of the restoration of a church, two mysterious sisters, one of whom gives them a message sent from the afterlife.

A pizza chef's death causes his son to reconsider their relationship.

A young Kurdish immigrant tries to assimilate himself into the London neighborhood of Kingsland.

Currently a primary focus for environmental campaigners in the UK, HS2 is a controversial new high-speed rail line being built from London to the North of England. Documenting a single day on the front line of battles against the HS2 construction, The Battle of Denham Ford tells the story of attempts by HS2 contractors to fell a tree that overhung their compound. A protest camp sits adjacent to the compound, and, hearing of the plan, the activists installed a climber in the tree. As the day unfolds, the film documents as a range of private security contractors, with support from the police and emergency services, try to regain possession of the tree. Raising questions about the relationship between private citizens, corporations, and the state, the film places the viewer on the ground, offering a perspective that is as close to the experience of being there as any film could deliver. – Sheffield Doc/Fest

One of the most important English singers of 20th century traditional song, Shirley Collins and her sister Dolly stood at the epicentre of the folk music revival from the 1950s through to the 1970’s. Directors Rob Curry and Tim Plester have created a poetic response to the life-and-times of this totemic musical figure. Four years in the making, and co produced by Fifth Column Films and Burning Bridges, The Ballad of Shirley Collins is the fascinating first release from Fire Films - available to you exclusively through the Lush Player. A captivating study of heritage, posterity and the true ancestral melodies of the people, this heartwarming film revolves around Shirley’s tragic loss of her voice and struggle back to the limelight. And ultimately, it suggests that in these turbulent and increasingly untethered times, we may just need Shirley Collins and all she represents more than ever.

As quintessentially homegrown as a game of cricket or a plate of fish-and-chips, Morris dancing is one of Englands most ancient roots traditions. And yet to your average man on the street, its seen as little more than a national joke. And a bad national joke at that. Something to ridicule. Something to be embarrassed about. A heartfelt docu-ballad in praise of birthplace, bloodline and rural brotherhood, WAY OF THE MORRIS follows Tim on a deeply personal journey from the barleyfields of his childhood to the killing fields of The Somme, as he traces the poignant link between the spirited folk revival of the mid-1970s and the true story of the young Adderbury Morris side so decimated by the carnage of the First World War.

Exposes how companies are desperately rebranding as socially responsible — and how that threatens democratic freedoms.

Filmmaker Jennifer Abbott explores the emotional and psychological dimensions of the climate crisis and the relationship between grief and hope in times of personal and planetary change.

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A Cow at My Table explores Western attitudes towards farm animals and meat, and the intense battle between animal advocates and the meat industry to influence the consumer's mind. Five years in production took Director Jennifer Abbott across Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand to meet with the leaders of the animal rights movement, animal welfare advocates as well as spokespeople from livestock industries. A Cow at My Table inter-cuts these diverse perspectives with archival films, images from modern-day agribusiness and footage of farm animals shot from uncharacteristic vantage points.

The myths of the priapic Black stud and the White woman beauty ideal collide in this rhythmically constructed work about identity and desire. Skinned explores the specific historic, psychological and social implications of relationships between Black men and White women. Using their bodies as a point of juncture, the artists blatantly situate the viewer as voyeur while identifying this physical realm as the arena within which cultural communities and individuals oppose interracial relationships. Ultimately, the multiplicity of images and voices calls into question the validity of definitive truths and the authoritative voice.

The result of over five years of Super-8 and 16mm filming on New York City streets, Lost Book Found melds documentary and narrative into a complex meditation on city life. The piece revolves around a mysterious notebook filled with obsessive listings of places, objects, and incidents. These listings serve as the key to a hidden city: a city of unconsidered geographies and layered artifacts—the relics of low-level capitalism and the debris of countless forgotten narratives. The project stems from the filmmaker's first job in New York—working as a pushcart vendor on Canal Street. As usual, Cohen shot in hundreds of locations using unobtrusive equipment and generally without any crew. Influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin.

"I shot this film with a 16mm wind-up Bolex, and the 25th Anniversary tour of Dutch band The Ex, when they embarked on a 'convey tour' with about 25 performing comrades. If half the battle is getting there and half the battle is joy, then the other half is madness. I thank all of the musicians who float in and out — of the film, in particular, and my life, in general." — Jem Cohen

The film is a domestic portrait of Patti and her son, Jackson. William Blake was invited in the form of a plaster cast of his death mask. Kurt Cobain, (conflicted, fierce, gentle, and another mother's son) was invited as an admirer of Leadbelly. Cats were invited as household saints. The film invokes New York and rural America. It is about picking up guitars and doing dirty dishes.

BENJAMIN SMOKE is the highly acclaimed documentary by directors Jem Cohen (FUGAZI: INSTRUMENT) and Peter Sillen (SPEED RACER) on legendary underground musician Benjamin. BENJAMIN SMOKE follows the crooked path of this fringe-dweller, speed-freak, occasional drag-queen and all-around renegade living in the hidden Atlanta neighborhood called "Cabbagetown," and playing with his band Smoke. This moving, heart-breaking and often funny portrait premiered at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival, won the First Prize Juror's Award at the 2001 Doubletake Documentary Film Festival and had a national theatrical release by Cowboy Pictures, garnering acclaim from critics throughout the country. The DVD edition includes over forty minutes of outtakes and interviews with Benjamin, bonus live footage of Smoke, and performances of unreleased tribute songs by Cat Power and Vic Chesnutt.

A personal, poetic approach to narrative, originally shot on 8mm film and mastered to ¾” video. Created in collaboration with Gabriel Cohen

This film is closely related to my last featurelength project, COUNTING. I take the temperature of a neighborhood. In this case, the place is my New York. I think about street life and its threatened demise – a death ushered in as Big Money relentlessly re-makes cities in ever more categorical ways. I think with the camera, on the move, in fragments. The light seen on a woman’s face in Chapter 3 of COUNTING is blocked by the luxury condo that grows and joins many nearby, as Brooklyn succumbs to gentrification (evinced by a beleaguered postOccupy Wall Street demonstration). Here also is the ever worried, ever renewed hum of the Manhattan crowds which continue to enthrall me. What stays, what gets buried? (Jem Cohen, Viennale 2016)

A portrait of Southend-on-Sea, a town along England's Thames estuary, that includes everyday streets, people, birds, water, mud and sky.

Instrument is a documentary film directed by Jem Cohen about the band Fugazi. Cohen's relationship with band member Ian MacKaye extends back to the 1970s when the two met in high school in Washington, D.C.. The film takes its title from the Fugazi song of the same name, from their 1993 album, In on the Kill Taker. Editing of the film was done by both Cohen and the members of the band over the course of five years. It was shot from 1987 through 1998 on super 8, 16mm and video and is composed mainly of footage of concerts, interviews with the band members, practices, tours and time spent in the studio recording their 1995 album, Red Medicine. The film also includes portraits of fans as well as interviews with them at various Fugazi shows around the United States throughout the years.

This surreal art-movie/live-performance hybrid is comprised of New York filmmaker Jem Cohen's original 16mm and DV movie footage combined with concert clips of Vic Chesnutt and members of Silver Mt. Zion, among others.

Cohen shot Little Flags in black and white on the streets of lower Manhattan during an early-’90s military ticker-tape parade and edited the footage years later. The crowd noises fade and Cohen shows the litter flooding the streets as the urban location looks progressively more ghostly and distant from the present. Everyone loves a parade—except for the dead.

EDITH LOOPS is a reflection upon all things Edith Swan Neck and her role as the great visionary and Pagan Queen to the muddled British Isles in the wake of The Battle of Hastings 950 years ago.

In 1972 a family are on their way for a holiday in Essex. The parents argue and the son swears, making obscene gestures. So the father throws him out, drives on and crashes the car. The grandmother flags down a car with three men in it. Too late she recognises one as the man who shot a neighbour...

FORGOTTEN THE QUEEN is a short animated film that digs into themes inspired by the life of Edith Swan Neck. Eden’s drawings and collages are brought to life by Glenn Whiting and tossed into the time-line like flotsam from a demented passion. Meantime Edith’s eyes fix on the man-shadows overhead, resplendent in their didactic belief systems and stupid hats, which seem to have blighted women since the beginning of time. King Harold would not have approved because despite the fact that time itself can touch you like a feather, stupid men keep firing their bloody arrows.

As families enjoy the May Day sun at a funfair in a south-east London park, overlooked by the skyscrapers of the financial district, Martin Donegan reads philosophical quotes from Mao Tse Tung on the future of society.

These pinhole photographs are taken by Anonymous Bosch and document a 108 mile walk in 5 days from Waltham Abbey to Leonards-on- Sea.

In a hinterland within the 'elsewhere', a lone character meanders in search of meaning and understanding. Hither and dither doth he wander reflecting upon all things that came before and all things hereafter. The work is a companion piece to Kötting's latest feature film LEK AND THE DOGS and was shot in the Atacama desert in Chile.

Raw HD time-lapse sequences made for the feature film SWANDOWN re-edited and manipulated.

A companion piece to the film IT’S ALL IN THE MIND commissioned through Channel 4 for their RANDOM ACTS strand. This time however we are not land-locked, we are all-at-sea. Eden Kötting’s drawings and collages are aquatically themed featuring fish, boats and stars. The work is a moving image celebration of the collages that Eden has been making with her father Andrew for the last five years.

'I’m not moaning, you don’t hear me moaning!' These are the words spoken by Gladys Morris, the artist’s dead grandmother, that form, along with other snippets of her conversation, the soundscape for moving image artist Andrew Kötting’s latest work 'The Woman of Kent', a short film that acts as an intervention in the cinema space at Kino Digital in Hawkhurst, Kent. The Woman of Kent interrupts the cinematic experience like an explosion. The words of Gladys are laid over tiny sections of archive moving image showing a Kent that no longer exists, edited together at high speed and interspersed with contemporary pinhole stills of the cinema as it is today. The film will be shown exclusively at the Kino, before regular screenings. The audience may notice the accompanying poster designed by Kötting in the foyer, advertising it as ‘remarkably confusing’ and ‘a forgettable classic’, but other than this will receive no indication of what they are about to witness.

A site specific performance piece for camera, filmed on location at Beachy Head, a metaphor for our collective headlong rush over the edge when it comes to our dealings with the environment. But rather than a decisive leap off the cliff, the piece has a much slower, more erosive pace with Paris and Hill gradually sinking in a deep fissure near the cliff edge. Seemingly oblivious, they chat bravely on mixing the banal with specific personal fixations on environment. Time-lapse cinematography marks time passing, clouds and shadows moving as the women slowly descend into the earth. They are very positive, very upbeat, but their sinking is inevitable. They keep talking until they are no longer visible; the last sentence breathed out through a crack in the earth and carried off in the wind. Then they are gone without a trace, and the viewer is confronted with the precipice, which in their absence becomes the foreground rather than the background.

Baldwin’s “pseudo-pseudo-documentary” presents a factual chronicle of US intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate far-right conspiracy theory, combining covert action, environmental catastrophe, space aliens, cattle mutilations, killer bees, religious prophecy, doomsday diatribes, and just about every other crackpot theory broadcast through the dentures of the modern paranoiac.

A non-narrative film of science-related found footage.

This kaleidoscopic, amphetamine-paced tour de force uses a barrage of found-footage images and rapid-fire narration to trace a history of Zaire since its independence in 1960.

Coronado's ill-fated expedition across what is now the American Southwest is examined in a mix of found footage and live-action.

BooBoo, a young telepath, and her father, Yogi, are revolutionaries pitted against the "New Electromagnetic Order". Their story, set in the year 2007 in a blighted Nevada outpost, is interwoven with a history of the development of electromagnetic technologies, from X-rays to atom bombs, from television to the Internet.

Armed with S8 camera and sound-person, Craig Baldwin runs both recording devices continuously through single-take raids on a series of SF Market St. grindhouse theaters. Rushing past box offices and through front lobbies, he captures the chance scenes and sounds on screen at the time, then flees out the rear exit doors to reunite with the reality of the street.

Within days after the release of Negativland's clever parody of U2 and Casey Kasem, recording industry giant Island Records descended upon the band with a battery of lawyers intent on erasing the piece from the history of rock music. Craig "Tribulation 99" Baldwin follows this and other intellectual property controversies across the contemporary arts scene. Playful and ironic, his cut-and-paste collage-essay surveys the prospects for an "electronic folk culture" in the midst of an increasingly commodified corporate media landscape.

The mythic nature of cowboy masculinity is deconstructed in this scathing montage of re-contextualized sounds and images culled from advertising, television, arcade game footage and other pop culture iconography.

A radical hybrid of spy, sci-fi, Western, and even horror genres, Craig Baldwin's Mock Up On Mu cobbles together a feature-length "collage-narrative" based on (mostly) true stories of California's post-War sub-cultures of rocket pioneers, alternative religions, and Beat lifestyles. Pulp-serial snippets, industrial-film imagery, and B- (and Z-) fiction clips are intercut with newly shot live-action material, powering a playful, allegorical trajectory through the now-mythic occult matrix of Jack Parsons (Crowleyite founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab), L.Ron Hubbard (sci-fi author turned cult-leader), and Marjorie Cameron (bohemian artist and "mother of the New Age movement"). Their intertwined tales spin out into a speculative farce on the militarization of space, and the corporate take-over of spiritual fulfillment and leisure-time.

An exploded view of a ballistic issue, Bulletin is a 6-minute mish-mash-up of a mid-’60s media-archeological marvel.

A haunting ghost story set against the backdrop of a busy winter sales period in a department store, following the life of a cursed dress as it passes from person to person, with devastating consequences.

Day in and day out, lovers Cynthia and Evelyn enact an elaborate sadomasochistic fantasy as mistress and maid. But as their ritual of domination and submission begins to turn stale, Cynthia yearns for something more conventional, while Evelyn tries to push their taboos even further.

In Astoria, Queens, in 1980, young Greek-American Nondas is determined to jump-start his electronic music career by doing what has been previously impossible: using new music tech to make his own demo in his bedroom & basically hand delivering his freshly pressed singles to DJs, radio stations, and anyone who can help him.

Nearly 3 hours of LGBTQ and Coming-of-Age short films and music videos await you in the debut of Altered Innocence’s cinematic mixtape supreme! Films from established auteurs like Peter Strickland, Cam Archer, João Nicolau, and Yann Gonzalez join fresh new voices such as Alexis Langlois, Shaun Hughes, Caroline Poggi, and Jonathan Vinel. Cruising, dancing, naked wrestling, trans terrorism, first love, bullies, femme fatales, band practice, and more is in store!

Short film by Peter Strickland.

Instead of using tape splices 16mm wide, this film was edited by turning the splicer sideways to reveal the sprockets and the soundtrack. The long cuts run diagonally across the screen and, as the filmstrip slides by, the highest jumper shows the way to the herd.

A feature-length anthology film. They are known as myths, lore, and folktales. Created to give logic to mankind’s darkest fears, these stories laid the foundation for what we now know as the horror genre.

A 16 mm narrative short shot in New York with Nick Zedd and Warhol Superstar Holly Woodlawn

From a mind unlike any other, Biophilia Live chronicles the multidimensional concert centered on the eighth studio album of avant-garde Icelandic artist Björk. Nick Fenton and Peter Strickland, unique voices in their own right, film Björk live in performance and punctuate her music with evocative animation and science and nature footage. The infinitely creative journey presents a culmination of work that represents one of the most original musical endeavors of a generation.

ASMR-infused sound design, shot on 8 and 16mm film. Commissioned by London Short Film Festival 2020.

Charting the beginnings of the time, through the descent of man, on to an uncertain future - all shot throughout the seasons in the garden of S, who lives in the wilderness and builds contraptions.

“A meditation on the illusion of filmmaking, shot behind the scenes on a film being made on the otherworldly beaches of Sidi Ifni, Morocco. The film depicts strange activities, with no commentary or dialogue; it appears as a fragment of film, dug up in a distant future—a hazy, black-and-white hallucinogenic world.”—Ben Rivers

A film by Ben Rivers

A hand-processed portrait of Jake Williams – who lives alone within miles of forest in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Jake always has many jobs on at any one time, rarely throws anything away, is an expert mandolin player, and has compost heaps going back many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders.

A film by Ben Rivers

This new work is developed from footage collected during a trip to the remote and beautiful sub-tropical island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. In March 2015, after Rivers’ visit, Vanuatu was devastated by Cyclone Pam, laying waste large parts of the islands. River’s 16mm lm material has become a record of a place that has irrevocably changed. Filmed on 16mm and then digitised, island imagery of active volcanoes, underwater WW2 debris, children playing, and wrecked boats transform into intangible digital recollections of the island. Images of the eroded land merge with eroding lm and deteriorate until they are no longer recognisable.

Set in a deserted, silent at, laden with mementoes and artefacts belonging to a now departed inhabitant. The film pieces together an elusive biography of a traveller to far flung destinations. There is a heavy stillness in the deserted space, the inhabitants faded memories are retraced by Rivers, but remain inescapably unresolved; narratives flicker and then disperse in succession; the immateriality of life is reflected in the material left behind.

A portrait of Astika, who lives on an island in Denmark. He has lived in a run down farm house for 15 years and his project has been to let the land around him grow unchecked, but now he has been forced to move out by people who prefer more pristine neighbours.

Bogancloch will continue the ongoing project between the flmmaker and Jake Williams, a man who has lived in the middle of Clashindaroch Forest for the past four decades. The flm will fall somewhere between fction and documentary, showing quotidian aspects of his life, alongside constructed episodes of a more fctional and even dream-like nature, with other characters showing up, such as a singing group of ramblers. It will begin in a classroom, with Jake teaching a cosmic looking science experiment, and end moving out into the cosmos. Along the way there will be fre, snow, rain, roadkill and other unexpected things, flmed on b/w 16mm and 35mm flm, hand-processed. This technical aspect fts with Jake’s environment, being physical, open to accident and chance, and dirt.

short film by Ben Rivers

A girl group playing beautifully written pop at the end of the seventies, Dolly Mixture were almost ignored when the Slits' more angular approach was in vogue, yet became an inspiration to the Riot Grrl scene of the nineties.

This is Tomorrow is the third film of 'A London Trilogy, the films of Saint Etienne'. A History and reconstruction of the Royal Festival Hall, interviewing surviving architects and designers including Leonard Manasseh and Robin Day. The film also documented the hall's complete refurbishment from 2005-2007, which has once again made it London's cultural centre.

A dedicated Hendon Fotball Club fan dresses up as the club mascot for fun. He narrates the history of the club, while the visuals present the current state of the football club, the players and fans.

Shot during the summer of 2005, this enigmatic film was the second collaboration between Saint Etienne and director Paul Kelly. It follows a young paperboy's adventure across London's last remaining wilderness in the Lea Valley on the eve of the Olympic development. A poetic ode to a metropolitan hinterland that has been forever changed by the impact of the 2012 Olympics games.

London has always been a source of influence, inspiration and curiosity - Finisterre tries to identify the dreams that London holds for so many. Presented and scored by Saint Etienne, the film enraptures with a journey through the ultimate city of possibilities - from John Nash and Berthold Lubetkin to Hendon FC and Hampstead Heath via the New Piccadilly cafe. A genuinely moving meditation on the capital in all its tawdry glory, with extra features and deluxe booklet

As lead singer of 1980's British indie band Felt, Lawrence acquired a cult following. In the 90's he went on to form Denim and later Go Kart Mozart. Paul Kelly's intimate documentary film follows Lawrence between Go Kart Mozart albums. He appears as, perhaps, he always has: a man out of time, and a confused, confusing genius.

Documentarian Paul Kelly returns to the festival with his latest collaboration with the band Saint Etienne, following the loose trilogy of London films Finisterre, What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day and This Is Tomorrow, all recently published on BFI DVD. In the decade since Finisterre Kelly has built a reputation as a distinctive voice in British cinema, developing a lyrical style that draws on the psychogeography and people of the city and its culture. How We Used To Live is effectively a prequel to Finisterre, a meditation on London life today and a glance back at a receding Britain. Using colour footage from the 1950s to the 1980s, taken from the BFI National Archive, the film covers the ‘New Elizabethan’ age from the optimism of the post-war era to the dawn of Thatcherism. Soundtracked by Saint Etienne’s Pete Wiggs and scripted by the band’s Bob Stanley with Travis Elborough, the film is for anyone who has ever tried to understand their city. (Source: LFF programme)

Drawing from a passage from the Rosh Hashana Service, “Who shall live, who shall die… who by water, who by fire,” this short film deals with that which has been preordained—a future history that will in time unfold before us as the faces of passengers on a ship forces us to contemplate our own fate.

'Just Ancient Loops' employs high resolution scans of ancient nitrate footage, as well as newly created CGI renderings of space to depict different views of heaven.

Using the discarded, deteriorating remnants from seven silent film titles, filmmaker Bill Morrison braids a story of intertwining love triangles that pivots between the accounts of two women.

This is an excerpt from the 60-minute film commissioned for Conrad Cummings's opera of the same title, which was produced by Ridge Theater and staged at La Mama, NYC, in June, 1992.

A city symphony inspired by New York

The true history of a collection of some 500 films dating from 1910s to 1920s, which were lost for over 50 years until being discovered buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool deep in the Yukon Territory, in Dawson City, located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

An adventure from the point of view of a fly.

B/W visualization of the highway during the night.

A short film made during lockdown.

A short film made during lockdown.

Belfast, it's a city that is changing, changing because the people are leaving? But one came back, a 10,000 year old woman who claims that she is the city itself.

Abbas Kiarostami is the most acclaimed Iranian film director whose films have won prizes all around the world. In this film he gives a rare and frank interview about his work, and journeys out of Tehran to meet Babk Ahmadpoor the now grown up star of his famous trilogy which started with Where is the Friends House. On the journey Kiarostami picks up the camera himself, producing images of pure poetry.

As he prepares for surgery to restore his vision, Mark Cousins explores the role that visual experience plays in our individual and collective lives. In a deeply personal meditation on the power of looking in his own life, he guides us through the riches of the visible world, a kaleidoscope of extraordinary imagery across cultures and eras. At a time when we are more assailed by images than ever, he reveals how looking makes us who we are, lying at the heart of the human experience, empathy, discovery and thought. He shares the pleasure and pain of seeing the world, in all its complexity and contradiction, with eyes wide open. As the COVID-19 pandemic brings another dramatic shift of perspective, he reaches out to the other lookers for their vision from lockdown, and he travels to the future to consider how his looking life will continue to develop until the very end.

Mark Cousins invites film actors and directors to watch major scenes in their career to date, and to talk us through them.

A young man's swirling thoughts as he contemplates the murder of filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini shortly after the deed takes place.

Film maker Mark Cousins visited northern Iraq in the summer of 2008. This is a snapshot of what he found there. An imaginative, soulful reflection of a beautiful complicated place.

In Kino Klassika’s first film commission, British filmmaker Mark Cousins imagines a conversation between D.H.Lawrence and Sergei Eisenstein. This playful film essay carries forward Mark’s film dialogue with Eisenstein from his feature film about Eisenstein in Mexico ‘What is this film called Love?’

The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.

Orson Welles trained as an artist before he become an actor and director, and continued to draw and paint throughout his career - character sketches, storyboards, set designs, pictures of the people and places that inspired him. These artworks are a sketchbook of his life, and most have never been seen outside his family and close friends. For the first time, award-winning director Mark Cousins has been granted access to this treasure trove of imagery, to make a film about what he finds there - the story of Welles' visual thinking, never before told. An exclusive new perspective on one of the 20th century's greatest creative figures, whose art and life continue to fascinate audiences today.

As told through clips from 183 female directors, this epic revisionist history of the cinema focuses on women’s integral role in the development of film art. Using almost a thousand film extracts from thirteen decades and five continents, Mark Cousins asks how films are made, shot and edited; how stories are shaped and how movies depict life, love, politics, humour and death, all through the compelling lens of some of the world’s greatest filmmakers – all of them women.

Content is an ambient 21st-century road movie, an associative film essay inspired by driving’s trancelike state rather than any linear unfolding of the road.

Asylum is a film very much derived from chaos, expressing implicitly the ideas conjured up by its title. A strange mix of both documentary and fiction, where in the future a group of people are looking back at the twentieth century. A virus has wiped out most of the culture of the twentieth century, leaving just fragments of a project called 'The Perimeter Fence' to be pieced together. These fragments make up a documentary about an exiled group of disparate yet similar minds.

An American in West Berlin finds himself caught up in murder and intrigue after his associate is killed and a diplomat's daughter is found dead in his room.

While on vacation at a resort hotel in the West Indies, Miss Marple correctly suspects that the apparently natural death of a retired British major is actually the work of a murderer planning yet another killing.

A filmmaker sets out to make a voyage of discovery on London's orbital motorway, the M25. He enlists the help of several others to film the motorway from several points, drive endlessly around it and dig up stories and potential beauty behind the motorway.

Set in 1970s Britain, a man drives from London to Bristol to investigate his brother's death. The purpose of his trip is offset by his encounters with a series of odd people.

In this enigmatic thriller, Susannah (Tusse Silberg) is suddenly herded out of an apartment in the middle of the night and brought to a police station for extensive questioning about why she was in a place that belonged to a known criminal. What the police do not know is that Susannah has been somehow involved in the death of a woman and has reunited with her sister Julie (Lisa Kreuzer) in Berlin. Julie herself has some rather unusual friends -- including Eddie Constantine the American-born French actor and singer who plays himself. It is these characters and their dialogue and asides, and even background action and scenery, that form the real body of this specialized film -- not the plot. For these reasons, this type of film is best limited to those who are more interested in avant-garde than in commercial cinema.

A re-edit of Petit’s Radio On (1980)

‘The Cardinal and the Corpse' marks the beginning of Petit’s loose partnership with writer Iain Sinclair. There’s a nod towards narrative here involving a book-search launched by graphic novelist Alan Moore and a dealer (the dapper but barking Driffield), but it’s little more than an excuse to showcase a number of authors and other miscreants.

A short film detailing the ways that TV has failed as a creative and expressive medium in the UK through various sped up and slowed down clips of football, have I got news for you, diana's funeral and footage from chat shows.

Experimental film of black & white Rorschach voids by Liz Harris of Grouper that accompanied the book 'Divide'.

This journal entry of a film describes a young artist in the midst of over two years of shoe-free peregrinations, with a spare, mesmerizing narration that reflects a landscape ranging from the slimy underbelly of dirty Chicago to a hitchhiker’s perch in the back of a dusty pickup truck.

A wolf dog’s restlessness prompts a pilgrimage from the burly sprawl of Chicago to investigate the myth of San Francisco. A hitchhiking triumph–even with the enormous canine companion, the camera-toting traveler never waited longer than 5 minutes roadside before ‘strangers in the brotherhood of hitchhiking’ furthered the pair down the long road west. The narration showcases the filmmaker’s gift with words as well as images. Viewing the film, we become hitchhikers as well, drawn into the mesmerizing, flickering story. Highlights include encounters with famous beatnik writers and the acquisition of a Holy Grail that has since influenced Renwick’s bright career–a copy of James Broughton’s Seeing the Light, purchased, perfectly, at City Lights Books.

The Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, with its 499-foot tall cooling tower that loomed over its otherwise bucolic Columbia river setting, is the only commercial nuclear power plant ever built in the state of Oregon, at the cost of $450 million in the 1970's economy (almost 3 trillion dollars in today’s money). [...] "Portrait #2: Trojan" is a sublime representation of the surrounding environment leading dramatically up to the moment of demolition. Sam Coomes’ flawless score provides stunning sonic context for the happy ending of the Oregon nuclear skyline. The film is an effective prescription in prevention of politically-triggered anxiety and depression in post-modern Cascadia.

Vanessa Renwick's mesmerizing stare at the most efficient grain terminal at the port of Vancouver, B.C.

"Renwick recounts a sad time in her life, when a friend was dying and she suddenly became aware of the presence of crows. The dark birds in turn point her to the practice of counting crows, which is both a children's rhyming game and a form of divination in which the number of crows suggests events in the future. Eight crows augur death: nine crows reference a secret. Renwick combines these fragments with glimpses of imagery - a bed, the crows captures as silhouettes, a man's twisted body - to craft a lyrical and moving essay that works its magic through poetic accretion rather than narrative logic." -Holly Willis, L.A. Weekly

Things are fucked up. Even before Covid! Get your panties untangled with some geologic time. "Realism, compassion, hostility, Mother Nature, rage, spirituality in your very unique hard working tough no apologies way making art Herstory Energystory. Really gnarly" -Chris Johanson

Short by Vanessa Renwick.

NO HANDS! NO BRAKES! NO CLOTHES! The True Story of the of the Yodeling Lesson, By Moe Bowstern, bicyclist: I was recently arrived in Portland from Chicago and always on my bike, delighted by this rainy city of manageable size and climate, generous, well-paved streets and hills! After the endless flat grind of the prairie city, hills were a daily thrill. I began teasing my way no-handed down Mississippi Hill, venturing further and further before seizing my handlebars. One morning I threw my leg over my bicycle with a bad case of the f*ckits, heading to the train station to bid a dear friend farewell, and I decided I just did not care. I stuck my chin into the wind and kept my hands off the handlebars all the way down. By the time I arrived exhilarated at Union Station, I no longer cared about my departing comrade; I could ride no-handed down Mississippi Hill! I was going to be fine! ...

Ivan Besse managed the Strand movie theater manager in Britton, South Dakota during the Depression. Besse owned a 16mm camera and used it to shoot people at their various activities around town during the day. He screened the local footage before feature films and newsreels as a lure to entice paying customers into the theater.

This video was made for the re-release on LP of the cassette of "Music and Poetry of the Kesh", a soundtrack that Todd Barton and Ursula K. Le Guin made to accompany her book "Always Coming Home".

What are the conditions for self confidence, self-consciousness? How do you raise a girl, or even encourage girls to be brave and defiant?

Her Noise was an exhibition which took place at South London Gallery in 2005 with satellite events at Tate Modern and Goethe-Institut, London. Her Noise gathered international artists who use sound to investigate social relations, inspire action or uncover hidden soundscapes. The exhibition included newly commissioned works by Kim Gordon & Jutta Koether, Hayley Newman, Kaffe Matthews, Christina Kubisch, Emma Hedditch and Marina Rosenfeld. A parallel ambition of the project was to investigate music and sound histories in relation to gender, and the curators set out to create a lasting resource in this area.