The Land of Forgotten Songs is a collective creative collaboration between The Deep Forest Foundation and indigenous amazon communities. It captures moments of the Kaxinawa Huni Kuin, Awa, Kayapo, Matis, Enawene Nawe and Shipibo, who all live alongside the forest. With an ancient myth as a recurring motif we connecting the past and their present. A transcendental journey into the life, rituals and myths of indigenous communities of the amazon forest.
X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.
In this curious and loving documentary, we meet five children aged 5-13: Charli, Nya, Chris, Alia og Milo. They tell their own stories in their own voices. They are stories about being between genders. Some are curiously exploring who they are, some feel that they are something other than what their surroundings expect, and others may be both.
The road holds a promise of freedom. In this 16 mm short it acts a form, metaphor and a cinematic mythology as a phantasmagorical mixtape about being and becoming a truck driver unfolds.
Between 1946 and 1958, the US tested 67 nuclear bombs on the Marshall Islands. Spectators of the blasts said: “It was as if there were two suns in the sky.”
Shot near Marseille in a grotto overlooking the Mediterranean, ‘You, My, Omma, Mama’ depicts a journey through space and time in search of our grandmothers and connections to our past, towards the history of the future. The world Prouvost invents here might perhaps originate with the 11 cm figurine known as the “Venus of Willendorf” as great-grandmother of us all. The artist borrows the story of this stone-age sculpture, reinterpreting and interweaving contextual motifs. Among the many interpretations that fascinate Prouvost is one whereby the figurine, named “Venus” by her finder, might not be a fertility symbol but rather a representation of a wise grandmother.
There are nearly twenty thousand species of them, they have been on Earth for hundreds of millions of years, and they play an indispensable role in many ecosystems. Yet lichens are usually overlooked. Ondřej Vavrečka decided to take a closer look at these fascinating organisms. His view, like the accompanying dialogue between experts Trevor Goward and Curtis Randall Björk, is both scientific and contemplative. For him, lichens represent not only a form but also a way of life. They show that an alternative to the constant expansion and reshaping of the environment can be the establishment of symbiotic communities in which every life has equal weight.
In the wake of cataclysmic regional change in the artist's homeland of Hong Kong, Simon Liu’s Cinema-Strobo-Scopic film features a laborious sequence of analogue darkroom practices and dense shrouds of video processing techniques which actively work to both conceal and reappraise approaches to personal expression in the face of censorship. Times ahead and behind collide - a new linearity is in need of; the glittering lore of the way things were, generations lost to resolution errors. Sifting through new realities of misinformation, digital consciousness, and cultural disappearance, "Single File" seeks new lexicons of disobedience through formal experimentation.
In the spring of 2022, an international tourist group will make a day trip to Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank to visit religious sites. But something is wrong here - the whole city is on strike. The two tour guides, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, do not want to comment on the matter. A murmur goes around about an incident the day before…
Combining low resolution footage, 16mm film and satellite imagery, Efforts of Nature considers the passage of time, processes of change and dissolution from two distant perspectives: the existential level of the body and the planetary level of shifting geological conditions.
In Zenica, a giant steel factory belches toxic gasses into the air day and night, making the city one of the world’s most polluted, and people are dying. Samir Lemes and citizen activists from Eko Forum fight an uneven fight for change against the reckless corporation, the local politicians who focus on jobs, investments, and re-elections, and the EU who co-funds the corporation without enforcing laws and international standards. Instead, they name Zenica ‘A Green City Project’, building bicycle lanes in a city where breathing is a health hazard. A film about financial cynicism, political pragmatisk and greenwashing, in which West European countries play a surprisingly big role.
Invisible People is a multi-layered depiction of the unique Japanese contemporary dance Butoh that flows between revolt, eroticism, trance, prayer, ancestral experience, and physical anonymity. The film gradually drifts away from its core issue and becomes a general portrayal of life itself, with all its unforeseen strokes of fate and strange micro-connections.
A charismatic young woman's intelligent film about making the leap from supporting roles in German TV dramas to play the leading role in her own life. A courageous piece of performative autofiction which invents its own rules as it unfolds.
Three brave women are fighting to expose the corruption and incremental destruction of democracy in Viktor Orbán's Hungary - a white nationalist regime that is the envy of authoritarian movements around the world.