Documentary

In their debut documentary Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor take as their point of departure the compelling 18th Century figure, Ambrose O’Higgins – father of Bernardo O’Higgins, the first leader of Independent Chile – and attempt to retrace his remarkable journey from Ireland to Chile. Having long dreamt of making a biopic of O’Higgins, this wayward and wry documentary is the filmmakers’ attempt to realise this dream through a personal voyage into the idea of the cinematic location. However, as they speculate on the idea of place and what O’Higgins embodies, the filmmakers continually get sidetracked by a competing story of immigration and displacement. A story that began with a newspaper cutting from 1937, concerning an 11 month old baby who travelled unaccompanied, by ship, across the Atlantic from New York to Cobh. Gradually, and not without humour, these intertwining narratives uncover ideas about the transformative powers of travelling, as looked at through the peculiar prism of the Irish experience.Read More »

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Grace and Virginia are young San Diego twins who speak unlike anyone else. With little exposure to the outside world, the two girls have created a private form of communication that’s an amalgam of the distinctive English dialects they hear at home. Jean-Pierre Gorin’s polyphonic nonfiction investigation of this phenomenon looks at the family from a variety of angles, with the director taking on the role of a sort of sociological detective. It’s a delightful and absorbing study of words and faces, mass media and personal isolation, and America’s odd margins.Read More »

Commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices Festival as an exploration into the globalised shipping networks, liminal territories and spaces of trade and labour that converge on the port city of Laem Chabang in Thailand.

AND Festival 2021 commissioned artist and filmmaker Tulapop Saenjaroen to create a new short film exploring themes of globalised networks, territoriality, and parallel spaces of trade and labour in a port city Laem Chabang, Chonburi Province, Thailand.Read More »

The conceptual rigidity of Adamczewski’s film recalls the formal experiments of structural film in the 1970s. The care with which the film-maker handles her material has become rare in the digital age and for this reason deserves special attention. The tight cinematic framework into which Adamczewski forces the vigour of her research makes this film an extremely intense experience. It is the product of a generation determined to resist the right-wing movement in German society.Read More »

The Song of Ceylon was originally commissioned as a series of short travelogues, but spawned an ambitious film transforming travelogue (exotic animals, eye-catching scenery, quirky customs) into a dreamlike film poem. Critics have since argued every possible position on the film’s portrayal of colonialism and its subjects. Only during editing did the film find its intricate design, a documentary ‘song’ in four movements. The first, ‘The Buddha’, is an impression of religious and cultural practices. ‘The Virgin Island’ is the most factually informative, featuring fishing and agricultural scenes. ‘The Voice of Commerce’ highlights the film’s most controversial aspect, its ambivalence towards British imperialism. The final section, ‘The Apparel of a God’, returns to ritualistic images, as if synthesising the verse and chorus of Ceylon’s ‘song’.Read More »

The Buddhist concept of reincarnation, while both mysterious and enchanting, is hard for most westerners to grasp. UNMISTAKEN CHILD follows the four-year search for the reincarnation of Lama Konchog, a world-renowned Tibetan master who passed away in 2001 at age 84. The Dalai Lama charges the deceased monk’s devoted disciple, Tenzin Zopa (who had been in his service since the age of seven), to search for his master’s reincarnation.Read More »

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In the film Battle for Ukraine Andrei Konchalovsky, the famous Russian director, analyzes how Ukraine, a former part of the Soviet Empire and present big European country, struggles to escape from the close embrace of the former big brother, Russia, and not to become one of the American satellites. This extensive study lasted for almost three years. Many Ukrainian, Russian and American historians, politicians and journalists took part in this study, as well as the ex-President of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski, the ex-President of Slovakia Rudolf Schuster, the ex-President of Georgia Eduard Shevardnadze, the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, the ex-Prime Minister of Russia Viktor Chernomyrdin, and the businessman Boris Berezovsky.Read More »

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KOCHUU is a visually stunning film about modern Japanese architecture, its roots in the Japanese tradition, and its impact on the Nordic building tradition. Winding its way through visions of the future and traditional concepts, nature and concrete, gardens and high-tech spaces, the film explains how contemporary Japanese architects strive to unite the ways of modern man with the old philosophies in astounding constructions. KOCHUU, which translates as “in the jar,” refers to the Japanese tradition of constructing small, enclosed physical spaces, which create the impression of a separate universe. The film illustrates key components of traditional Japanese architecture, such as reducing the distinction between outdoors and indoors, disrupting the symmetrical, building with wooden posts and beams rather than with walls, modular construction techniques, and its symbiotic relationship with water…Read More »

Filmed in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, Lebanon, shortly before the infamous massacre of 1982, this Syrian documentary’s principle reference is dreams, and not lived reality. It plays in this way on a double register, whereby women, children, the elderly, and combatants each recall the reality of their everyday, transposed eerily into their dreams, nightmares and premonitions.Read More »