2000s

In the late 1960s, photographer Takuma Nakahira published the legendary photography magazine Provoke with Daido Moriyama. With this edgy writings and photographs, Nakahira rejected preexisting photographic expression. In 1977, an alcohol-induced coma resulted in a permanent partial memory loss. In the following years, with gradual recovery, Nakahira started photographing stray cats, homeless, and thatched roofs in the neighborhood near his home in a monomaniac manner. This essay-film style documentary is a portrait of the Nakahira’s daily life. Directed by photographer Takashi Homma.Read More »

Author Golrokh Kamali has left her husband and has been living with her parents in the provinces for the past year. When she returns to the capital city, she finds out that her husband has gone bankrupt and that a group of unscrupulous businessmen are threatening to imprison him for debt. Although still angry about her husband’s past infidelities, and in spite of her previous pessimistic views about life with him, she comes to his defense and tries to help him overcome his problem. Starring Mozhdeh Shamsai as Golrokh and Majid Mozaffari as her husband. Nominated for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Female Lead Actress (Mozhdeh Shamsai), Best Male and Best Female Supporting Actors, Best Set Design, and Best Sound at the 19th Fajr Film Festival, where it also won the Audience Choice Award.Read More »

A film trapped between two monologues. A lonely and abandoned wife’s fantasy comes to life when the paramour she invokes springs forth and transforms her reality. Shadows Formless is an interpretation of the Malayalam novella Pandavpuram by the distinguished novelist Setumadhavan from Kerala.Read More »

At the beginning of the Second World War, Maria Werla, the director’s mother, was forced to leave Poland and was taken to a concentration camp in Northern Russia. Thousands of Poles faced the same fate, victims like Maria of the pact between Hitler and Stalin. Lech Kowalsky’s lifestyle and rebellious spirit also meant social rejection in New York. The film establishes a link between those marginalised in modern society and those deported in the 1940’s by drawing a parallel between his own experiences in the New York punk world and his mother’s life.Read More »

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How Little We Know of Our Neighbours is an experimental documentary about Britain’s Mass Observation Movement and its relationship to contemporary issues regarding surveillance, public self-disclosure, and privacy. At its center is a look at the multiple roles cameras have played in public space, starting in the 1880’s, when the introduction of the hand-held camera brought photography out of the studio and into the street. For the first time one could be photographed casually in public without knowledge or consent. Mass Observation used surreptitious photography to record and scrutinize people’s behavior in public places. Mass Observation was an eccentric social science enterprise founded in the late 1930’s in England that combined surrealism with anthropology. Read More »

Anna is the Jewish daughter of a Spanish mother and a Greek father. She has returned to her family’s house in Greece after many of her friends and family members have died over the years. Although she came back to the house in order to sell it, things begin to take a different direction: The house itself, the furniture and other equipment in it seem to become alive for Anna, recalling images of her past, her beloved parents and her friend Max, who once gave her shelter from the raging policemen when she took part as a photo journalist in a political demonstration in Berlin. Anna changes her mind: When some rich, ignorant American couple wondering about if they should buy the house asks for the swimming pool (while the Mediterranean is half a mile away), she simply doubles the charge, and finally puts the “For sale” plate into the garbage can. In the meantime, she has had a little love affair with a young man from the village, found a girlfriend from her childhood days, swum in the sea, and found a way to live in peace with her melancholic memories.Read More »

“Pasolini Pa* Palestine is an attempt to repeat Pasolini’s trip to Palestine in his film, Seeking Locations in Palestine for The Gospel According to Matthew (1963). It adapts his script into a route map superimposed on the current landscape, creating contradictions and breaks between the visual and the audible, the expected and the real. The video explores the question of repetition. For Heidegger Wiederholung ‘repetition, retrieval’ is one of the terms he uses for the appropriate attitude toward the past. Read More »

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The film was shot in live-action, then adapted with rotoscope animation. That process creates realistic scenes of Chinatown — from the lion dance in the Chinese New Year’s parade to senior citizens performing tai chi in Columbus Park to the neighborhood’s open air markets. The shots of the corners, nooks and crannies throughout Chinatown are instantly recognizable to New Yorkers.Read More »

Mike Kelley’s Magnum Opus: Day is Done released as a 2 DVD set (169 minutes). Written and directed by Mike Kelley, with original music by Mike Kelley and Scott Benzel, choreography by Kate Foley

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The first of the projected 365 videos, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene) was shown at the Emi Fontana Gallery in Milan and then in “Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2000. The tape was a half-hour melodramatic play mimicking the look of ’50s TV dramas. With the current series I didn’t want people to get so caught up in the individual tapes; rather, I wanted to create an experience akin to channel surfing.Read More »