Experimental

from Pan Asian Film Festival 2014
(page link)
Portraying a character struggling to make sense of her life as it threatens to spin out of control, Nawapol’s brilliant second film creates an inventive narrative of an uncontrollable life through a brilliantly modern artistic concept: to adapt a Twitter stream into a fictional film.

The director used 410 real Tweets from an anonymous girl as a springboard to create a fantasy world of a contemporary Asian teenager, and the results are funny and strange, a conflation of modern Thai teenage life, Wes Anderson-esque humour, and the possibilities for escape offered by the digital world.Read More »

Synopsis
At the end of the war, Odysseus, the wandering hero, with his companions begins his sail back home to the Mediterranean. The conclusion of his adventure is delayed by many natural obstacles and he takes an internal journey of fleeting memories of his childhood, his parents, love for a beautiful girl, nostalgia for the past, regret for what he did, and the deep silence that envelops everything. He confronts the most terrible loneliness following a shipwreck in which all the comrades perish.Read More »

Quote:
HEDONISTIC COMMUNICATION / IRM ED SOMMER / KONTAKTE / ICH DU UND ICH is the title of this super obscure experimental short film including also explicit sex.
Very raw and primitive, it features a great soundtrack made of amazing psychedelic abstract electronic music (the song is “I Of IV” by electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros), which is probably what makes this short some kind of mesmerizing experience.
We can only suppose the short is german, since the only information besides the title is the name of the “actors” involved, and they sound german (F. Scherz, Gabi Kaa, Hartmut Kaa).
Read More »

“This film is above all about my mother, my mother who is no longer with us. About this woman who arrived in Belgium in 1938 , fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the violence. This woman who is only ever seen inside her apartment. An apartment in Brussels. A film about a world in motion that my mother does not see.”Read More »

“This film is above all about my mother, my mother who is no longer with us. About this woman who arrived in Belgium in 1938 , fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the violence. This woman who is only ever seen inside her apartment. An apartment in Brussels. A film about a world in motion that my mother does not see.”Read More »

This is a story about people in love with cinema, and a country going through its most difficult times. A group of friends, who met sometime ago in a movie theatre, get together to see one of them off to Belgrade. So their journey begins: from personal memories to the remembrance of their country, out of a small dark room to the mystery of Kiev’s night. Their last stop – the farewell party where reality and cinema once again become a single whole.Read More »

Jean-Marie Straub pushes this musicality of blocks to a paroxysmal extreme, mixing blocks of time (40 years separate the various extracts that are going to be used, and what is to be filmed), blocks of text (Malraux, Fortini, Vittorini, Hölderlin) and blocks of language (French, Italian, German), and from this ruckus emerges the history of the world, yes, History with a capital H, and from the same movement, the political hope of its being overtaken. So this is an adventure film, about the Human adventure, still one that is always, in the end, overtaken by Nature.Read More »

Randy Greif is best known as an experimental musician, perhaps most notably as the creator of the six-hour Alice in Wonderland project. Subtitled Adventures in Psychotica, his first film is a disturbing, surrealistic cinematic fantasy combining elements of Lewis Carroll with a big helping of “the cinema of transgression.” Think Luis Bunuel’s Belle du Jour, David Cronenberg’s Crash, Jonathan Weiss’ The Atrocity Exhibition and Andrew McElhinney’s Story of the Eye. Other possible influences: Georges Bataille, Octave Mirbeau, Anais Nin, etc. The film is the only recent example of a truly kinky, but still very artistic erotica film I can think of. The soundtrack is amazing, and features lots of post-industrial experimental heavyweights, including Nurse With Wound, Lustmord, SPK, Illusion of Safety and Muslimgauze.Read More »

The title Lingchi refers to a photograph taken by an unidentified western anthropologist according to some, and by a French soldier at the beginning of the 20th century, according to others by others. It shows the execution of a condemned man by Lingchi, a slow torture involving more than a thousand cuts made on the body of the condemned person before death. If he died earlier the executioner was himself put to death. This punishment was practiced in China for thousands of years and was not finally abolished until 1905. A large crowd would gather for the execution, not only to witness the extraordinary spectacle but also to collect blood and strips of flesh from the body, to be used for medical purposes. The photo immediately started to be circulated, especially amongst westerners passing through China and in particular in a set of postcards Les supplices chinois. It was later published in France in Louis Carpeaux’s Pekin qui s’en va in 1913, and then by Georges Dumas in his Traité ! de psychologie in 1923. It was, however, Georges Bataille, who came into possession of a copy in 1925 and for whom, according to his own statement, it was of decisive importance in his life, who introduced it with greater authority into the imagery of western culture when he used it at the conclusion of his last study of eroticism, Les larmes d’eros, published a year before his death in 1961, to demonstrate the identical nature of contraries and in particular of religious ecstasy and extreme horror.Read More »