Shelly Silver
Art is in the eye of the beholder, they say. Shelly Silver’s beholders range in age from seven to nineteen years. They focus their attention on artworks in the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts. Their spon-taneous interpretations of the works allow for resonances: both, the paintings as well as their young reviewers, reveal different things about themselves, depending on the point of view.
Science fiction and desire collide when an American researcher meets a Japanese translator. Clouds drift beyond the towering high rise blocks; down below, nature suffocates in a Tokyo river.
In 1959, Jean Seberg stares into Raoul Coutard’s 35mm camera lens and then turns – the closing frame of Godard’s Breathless is the back of her head. For the film it is a closing. For her character it is less clear. Is it a refusal? A denial? A shying away from? An admission of guilt or not caring? A disappearing act? In 2017 on the streets of Berlin, twenty-three women, friends and passersby, reverse Seberg’s action.
A disturbing intrusion into the luxurious homes of Silicon Valley. Using an aggressive soundtrack and a full frame often fractured into small rectangles covered by text, Silver reveals a deafening violence behind the glittering beauty and deceptively calm of this suburban landscape. There is no human presence, but the homes seem to contain a memory of disturbing events, to bear the traces of a savagery just offscreen.
The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was an unsung member of the Dada Movement. The Baroness was a poet, artist, vaudeville performer, runaway, rabble rouser, crossdresser, and all around public provocateur. As with many women artists throughout history, her cultural legacy has been obscured.
A man returns, after fifty years, to Chinatown to care for his dying mother. He is a librarian, a cataloguer and recorder, a gay man, a watcher, an impersonator. He passes his time collecting images - his witnesses and collaborators. Sitting in the dark, we look at them and share his cloak of invisibility, both a benefit and a curse.
You live somewhere, walk down the same street 50, 100, 10,000 times, each time taking in fragments, but never fully registering The Place. Years, decades go by and you continue, unseeing, possibly unseen. A building comes down, and before the next one is up you ask yourself 'what used to be there?' You are only vaguely aware of the district's shifting patterns and the sense that, since the 19th century, wave after wave of inhabitants have moved through and transformed these alleyways, tenements, stoops and shops. 10 square blocks, past, present, future, time, light, movement, immigration, exclusion, gentrification, racism, history, China, America, 3 languages, 13 voices, 152 years, 17,820 frames, 9 minutes, 54 seconds, 9 questions, 5 lessons, Chinatown
in complete world is a feature-length documentary made up of street interviews done throughout NYC. Mixing political questions (Are we responsible for the government we get?) with more broadly existential ones (Do you feel you have control over your life?), the film centers on the tension between individual and collective responsibility. The film can be seen as a user's manual for citizenship in the 21st century, as well as a glimpse into the opinions and self-perceptions of a diverse group of Americans. It is a testament to the people of NYC in this new millennium, who freely offer up thoughtful, provocative and at times tender revelations to a complete stranger, just because she asked.
suicide is a feature-length fiction of a woman's voyage through the malls, airports and train stations of Asia, Europe and Central America, chronicling her fiercely hopeful and desperate search for a reason to continue living. Shot to resemble a personal diary film, and starring Silver herself as the fictional filmmaker heroine, suicide is edgy, dark and funny; an audacious act of flirting with the revelatory autobiographical. It is a wild ride, as the heroine, slipping ever further into the shadow areas between the real and the imagined....
documentary about what it means to be German at this particular moment in history. For forty-five years, residents of this divided city lived radically different lives, both in terms of ideology and everyday experience. Silver questions the very notion of a shared language, focusing on changing definitions of words for political and economic systems - democracy, freedom, capitalism, socialism - as well as words used to describe nations and identity - nationality, Germany, history, foreigners, home.
Out of Darkness: The Mine Workers' Story is an electrifying documentary by Academy Award-winning director Barbara Kopple (Harland County, USA) and award-winning video director and editor Bill Davis. Historical film footage and photographs are integrated with first-hand accounts of Mine Workers' history and of the recent battle with the Pittston Coal Group. Accompanied by a moving soundtrack created by Tom Juravich, this 100-minute film presents real life stories with a powerful, dramatic touch.
Explores the relationships among grandmothers, mothers and daughters in a changing Japanese society.
