An experimental ethnography recorded in the jungle village of Bendekondre, Suriname at the start of 2007. Composed of community-generated performances, re-enactments and extemporaneous recordings, this film functions doubly as an examination of a rapidly changing material culture in the present and as a historical document for the future.
Different versions of different tragic events in the southern rural Black American. For his film, Everson used a rich source of so-called found footage, which he augments with his own material.
Carmo do Rio Verde, in Brasil, is a village which exists thanks to sugar cane exploitation. A company makes alcohol, owns the fields or rents them, and has 2000 works, of which 1200 seasonal workers hired by ‘El Gato’, ‘The Cat’. He gets a 4% share of everyone’s salary ‚Ķ The work starts, and the exploiting. Between sweat and ashes the film unveils, on a poetical manner.
Born with the 1958 World Exhibition of Brussels, the Atomium was supposed to last only 6 months. 47 Years later, it undergoes an important renovation. For a year, Marie-Françoise Plissart placed a camera at the heart of this mythic building to film its uncovering & reconstruction. A film as sensitive as the point of view of an artist can be.
4 Elements consists of four chapters that each show the struggle of mankind with the different elements: ‘Fire’ shows the ‚Äòsmokejumpers’ of Siberia that control the fire but also how they paradoxically make a fire in the basecamp to cook their dinner. ‘Water’ tells the story of the Kingcrabfishers in Alaska and shows the men during the season of four days and nights. In ‘Earth’ two mineworkers crawl like ants between gigantic machines and is shown how they scrub each others back after a long and exhausting day. In ‘Air’, shot in Kazakhstan, astronauts are followed during their heavy physical trainings till the point where they are being launched into space.
731: Two Versions of Hell is both a documentary about Japan’s World War Two biological weapons facility, Unit 731, and a demonstration of the power of historical revisionism. “
It’s now seven months over my mother’s death. I am facing the S. Miguel island sea, the family land in the Azores. Between the newborn babies, I found my Grandaunt, 91 years old, waiting for her moment to part. At night my family speaks to me of God and death. During the day we swim in the island’s volcanic sea, where I find Florence and Beru, a French couple that is crossing the Atlantic in the Balaou, a sailing boat. They invite me to come with them. Divided in three moments and eight lessons, Balaou” is a voyage to accept the oblivion of things. “
A glimpse into a unique subculture: the world of African-American drag racing. Set in and around Charlottesville, Virginia, it is an experimental feature film about the consistent routine of a bank teller (Erin) and a mechanic (John) as they prepare for the sport of drag racing. Once the routine is disrupted, the result of the race comes into doubt.
Destricted invited seven artists to make short films representing their views on sex and pornography. The result is a collection of sexy, humorous, stimulating and provocative scenarios. Destricted boasts a heavyweight line-up of the most acclaimed directors and artists of our time; Matthew Barney, Larry Clark, Richard Prince, Sam Taylor-Wood, Marina Abramovic, Marco Brambilla and Gaspar Noé. These distinctive and entirely uncensored films portray very different points of view, revealing diverse attitudes about how we represent ourselves sexually.
In a world without men, two robots embark on an odyssey across a stark American landscape of haunting, surreal beauty on a quest to become human. A magical, musical, mythic road movie from Daft Punk (the musical style and name of the two directors music band, not included in the film’s music). “
Coney Island, the world`s first amusement park at the lower end of New York was once called the biggest playground of the world. The area has changed surviving through repetitive cycles of self-preservation. Caught in the stasis of an imagine romantic past. S8 mm and DV material shot by the director, found footage and texts by Rem Koolhaas are woven into an insistent tapestry of sound and image.
By processing a handful of shots of casually acquired black and white film material, Kämmerer has a boy incessantly climb and descend the stairs of a house. Dressed in a tie and overalls he seems to be the precocious engineer of a machine which compels him to his escalations. (Thomas Korschil)
When Derek was a young boy, his father called him Elvis. On his birthday he got a white suit and his hair straightened. In his bedroom, posters of Jimi Hendrix hanged on the walls and Derek was playing cowboy, but in the living room, the music of the King was playing. In the end he could’t take it anymore and the father had to die. Now a young man, Derek calls himself Jimi, wears a wild curly wig and looks for a new father. But when this one also dies, Derek asks the dead man a question that his real father never answered: Why Elvis?
At the end of the 1990s Mohammed Fazazi became Imam of the mosque in Hamburg. In January of 2000, during the last few days of Ramadan, Fazazi held a number of ‚Äòlessons’ in the mosque’s prayer room, during which those present were able to pose questions on various aspects of life that they would normally have to submit in writing. These sessions were recorded on video tape anonymously and distributed in the mosque’s book shop, but also outside the mosque. After the attacks of 11/9/2001, it became known that three of the four suicide pilots, but also others ‚ members of the so-called Hamburg Group ‚ had attended the mosque regularly, and were in close contact with Imam Fazazi.
Fouad is a business man of about sixty, of Lebanese origin. He and a colleague are traveling through Styria, a mountainous region in Austria. On their way to a business meeting at a textile factory, they get lost in a village that Fouad knows from his past. Walking down the roads and through the forests, Fouad finds he’s feeling a profound sense of strangeness in these places that are nevertheless familiar to him.
A queer rewriting of the events surrounding the 1968 National Democratic Convention from the point of view of French writer Jean Genet. Along the way Genet will meet, amongst others, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, the Yippies, the Black Panther Party and the Chicago Police force… Ultimately, the video is about the difficulty of aligning political and sexual desires.
An ode to joy amidst poverty, Squatterpunk is the pre-Spanish Philippine part of Khavn’s Black Silence Trilogy (2. Ultimo, 3. The Longest Moment You’re Not Here). Set in the slums of Manila, we follow the lives of the youth as they scavenge the garbage beach for a living while still managing to play around.
In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department photographed men having sex in a public restroom under the main square of the city. The cameraman hid in a closet filmed over a two week period, and the resulting movie was used to obtain the conviction of over 30 men on charges of sodomy. W.E. Jones reedits this footage in Mansfield 1962, a haunting, silent condensation of the original.