2011-2020

Lech Kowalski returns to Utica (New York), where he grew up. He decides to document the struggles of his fellow citizens by offering to pay to hear their stories.Read More »

After a devastating earthquake, Nga, an old elephant and probably the last of its species, and Sanra, his mahout, are about to embark on a journey to find the mythical elephant’s graveyard. The group of poachers following them will die one after the other under mysterious circumstances and spells.Read More »

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Shot in Grand Teton National Park, this immersive film essay draws together the distinct sensibilities of filmmakers Peter Mettler and Emma Davie and philosopher David Abram to encounter the spaces where humans and animals meet. Images are overlaid with a soundscape of shivering leaves and animal murmurs, rushing rivers and electronic voices, insects and automobiles. In order to capture all this Becoming Animal embraces the sensory tools of cinema. Various tableaus of the wilderness and urbanity are set up: inquisitive antelope and digital billboards are seamlessly contrasted, Buffalo block traffic, moose clash antlers, and a snail’s body becomes a landscape of its own. Conscious of their own complicity with the animal world, the filmmakers invite us to explore this ‘more than human world’. The viewer is given permission to navigate this exquisitely intricate system in which everything is alive and expressive, humans, animals and landscapes are inextricably interdependent, and there is no such thing as empty space.Read More »

I Want to Live is a documentary on the lives of Kurdish Refugees from Syria, living in refugee camps in Kurdistan. Shot on location, it is set against the Syrian civil war and the ISIS (Islamic State) attacks upon Kurdistan. Told through the eyes of a young boy, Shndar, living with Thalassemia disease, he searches for an immediate treatment as he ages without losing hope, leaving his home amid simmering ethnic and religious hatred to live the life of a refugee. The film tells stories of daily life on the camp and outside of it. More than being a film on the life of refugees, it is an intimate character study and gripping tale of innocent lost amides wars, a meditation on life, death, war, peace, and tolerance.Read More »

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When Shakespeare Must Die, a Thai film adaptation of Macbeth is banned by the Thai government as a threat to national security, the film’s producer treks through the corridors of power to un-ban his Shakespearean horror movie–from the Cultural ministry to the Senate and the National Human Rights Commission, all the way to the Administrative Court where he is suing the government for abuse of power. Wherever he went, amidst political upheaval, his director followed with a camera. The resulting reality cinema is the living story of a struggle for justice and human dignity, for freedom of expression, which Thai filmmakers do not have. A dark cinematic record of democracy in action, in all its farcical, obscene and heartbreaking details.Read More »

Over a trio of summers, a caretaker for luxury condominiums relies on her resourcefulness and her eye for opportunity to take advantage of whatever comes her way as her employers are caught in major corruption scandals.Read More »

Synopsis
Turtle Rock is a tiny mountain village of seven households with uncontaminated natural beauty. But grandma, her son and grandson, being isolated from the modern world, are experiencing evolving dilemmas and struggles…Read More »

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How do the vicissitudes of contemporary notions of nationhood alter our relationship with cultural patrimony? It’s a question obliquely suggested by Amit Dutta’s latest film. As a camera explores the architecture of a museum, we hear a description of a painting we never see. Eventually, we leave the building behind and examine the remains of a temple, exposed to weather and war. Sensual and rigorous, THE GAME OF SHIFTING MIRRORS reaffirms Dutta’s place as India’s most accomplished experimental filmmaker. (Michael Sicinski)Read More »

A woman poses. A man with a camera zeros in on her and takes a picture. But very soon, the shoot degenerates. Each click of the camera sounds like a machine gun. No-one speaks; the editing is disrupted, and with it, the images, the spaces and the timing. The woman escapes. In an abandoned building, a man, as mute as she is, shrinks from her gaze. It is he that the film now follows: he explores a museum exhibiting the history of Africa, its suffering and its external interferences.Read More »