Experimental

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Lionel Soukaz (1953, Paris, France) at age 20 started making underground short films in Super 8, dealing with homosexuality in line with the Parisian FHAR (Front Homosexuel d’Action Revolutionnaire; Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action), pornography (Ixe) and social criticism (I Live in a Bush World). He worked as an organizer of many gay film festivals such as the Film Festival of La Rochelle in 1977, and the Fortnight of Homosexual Cinema in 1978 in Paris. This last one was interrupted by the Ministry of Culture when Soukaz was arrested. He made Race D’ep, un siècle d’images de l’homosexualité with Guy Hocquenghem in 1979. Since then, he has pursuited a discreet career as a video filmmaker.Read More »

Twenty-five years after the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus still has not returned home. So his son, Telemachus, sets off on a journey in search of his lost father. So begins Homer’s revered epic poem, The Odyssey, the primary narrative reference point for THE NINE MUSES, John Akomfrah’s remarkable meditation about chance, fate and redemption.Read More »

In 1973, five men and six women drifted across the Atlantic on a raft as part of a scientific experiment studying the sociology of violence, aggression and sexual attraction in human behaviour. Although the project became known in the press as ‘The Sex Raft’, nobody expected what ultimately took place on that three-month journey. Through extraordinary archive material, and a reunion of the surviving members of the expedition on a full-scale replica of the raft, this film tells the hidden story behind what has been described as ‘one of the strangest group experiments of all time’.Read More »

Synopsis:
Through raw images of cruel and unusual news items, gathered from journalists and amateur video directors, director Huang Weikai and his film Disorder take us into the chaos of a Chinese society scarred by an overwhelming urbanization. The film is made like a mosaic of singular stories restoring absurd and hopeless situations, in an urban environment where the weakest seem to be out of place.Read More »

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”Blind Loves,” which world-premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Fest, is a film about love between blind people. Love can be soft, love can be silly, love can be blind at all times. To find ones place in this world is not an easy thing to do for people with good sight, but how much more difficult can it be for somebody who is blind The view of blind persons is often pure and essential, and very often witty. It uncovers new dimensions of meaning of happiness.Read More »

“Subconscious Cruelty” is divided in four segments: Ovarian Eyeball – a naked woman is sliced by a sharp blade and an eyeball is removed from her belly. Human Larvae – a deranged man that hates his sister that is pregnant kills her newborn offspring and she during the delivery. Rebirth – a group of naked people rolls around in mud and blood. Right Brain/Martyrdom – religious symbolism associated with gore and sex.Read More »

Rousseau’s first full-length feature, and one of the best documentaries/experimental films of the past few decades, sprung equally from Robert Bresson, Michael Snow, and Jean-Marie Straub (who has called Rousseau one of the three best working artists in modern Europe). Again hard places played against drifting sounds from unseen sites beyond the image; the images and sounds, repeated, become inflections of each other. But this time there are historical inflections; Rousseau’s film, like Straub’s, takes place in a sort of meta-history as characters and ancient sites each become products of outside light and shadow.Read More »

Synopsis
Portabella’s first feature, co-scripted by poet Joan Brossa, became one of the most influential works of the Barcelona avant-garde, although like all his early films, it circulated only in an underground fashion. Eschewing dialogue, the director constructs a non-narrative story in fragments that reveal the daily lives of an adulterous couple interspersed with a cryptic stream of unrelated imagery. The title of this homage to directors including Eisenstein, Antonioni, Bergman, and Buñuel refers to the 29 “black years” of the Franco dictatorship.Read More »

This film is loosely based on Goethe’s Dr. Faustus. It’s the second feature that Gonzalo Suárez made, when he still was a member of the Barcelona School (Escuela de Barcelona). The Barcelona School was a 1960s group of Catalan filmmakers, concerned with the disruption of daily life by the unexpected, whose stylistic affinities lie with the pop art movement of the same years and with the French Nouvelle Vague. Among their members: Joaquin Jordà, Jacinto Esteva, José María Nunes, and also, at the begining of their career, Vicente Aranda and Gonzalo Suárez.Read More »