2010s

Isolde, a social worker in a poor district in Toronto, is on her first case assignment; the administrative procedures she follows have us feel the burden of an action that is nonetheless professionally codified – that of helping someone. Her “client” is still behind bars and at first, he only appears in their correspondence and the phone calls she makes on his behalf. Behind its legal meaning, the title underlines this absence: Eric Edwards is averse to appearing in court and seems equally impervious to Isolde’s solicitude. Read More »

Rabo de Peixe is a fishing village in the Azores. Between 1999 and 2001, Joaquim Pinto and Nuno Leonel shot a documentary there about the disappearing traditional fishing methods. The TV channel which commissioned the film didn’t appreciate its critical attitude and broadcasted it only once, in a shorter version. In the meantime, the two directors move to the island, and the industrial fishing methods, supported by Community directives, shake the small village. Fifteen years later, they decide to re-edit the movie following their original intentions, keeping in mind the time that has passed and how their lives have been changed by that place and its inhabitants.Read More »

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Presented at the 2015 Venice Biennale, this short film by Jean-Marie Straub is a fragment of the last reel of his film History Lessons, based on Bertolt Brecht’s The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar and dedicated to the memory and materiality of cinema.Read More »

In a single static shot a man is threatened with death at another’s gunpointRead More »

Lina is a Lebanese Student that just arrived to Paris to continue her studies in a French University in 1993, only to find that the Chaos that was home was no different than what she will witness in the French capital. But Paris will offer her the opportunity to find herself and acquire a new self confidence that she didn’t know she had in herself.Read More »

Pure Virtual Function is an abstract meditation on the representation of violence, the connection of virtual and real agression. The film was made from painted 35 mm film strips and sound recording from Iraq war.Read More »

Directors, relationships, romance, death and lives. Yuichi Kajiwara is a film director in Tokyo and struggling. He is at an impasse when he receives a requisition to shoot a music video. Aoba Harada is an actress who is dating a film director. She watches him commit suicide and stashes the body. Taro Imaizumi is a landscaping contractor and has not seen his brother in years. He receives a call from a girl who says she is dating the brother.Read More »

Lucy is a young university student possessed by a kind of radical passivity. She lets a flip of a coin decide the outcome of a random sexual encounter and she displays an uncomplaining patience when facing the repetitions of her various menial jobs that fund her studies. One day she answers an ad in the student newspaper and interviews for a job to be a lingerie waitress. But she is secretly being initiated into a world of strange new work; one where she will have to give into absolute submission to her clients by being sedated; becoming a Sleeping Beauty. Eventually this unnerving experience begins to bleed into her daily life and she finally develops the will to break the spell by discovering what happens to her while she sleeps. With a fearless performance by Browning, Leigh creates a bold cinematic vision; one where Lucy, both in her clandestine sexual adventures and in her mundane daily existence, lives with the same unflinching and brutal honesty.Read More »

In September 2009 we formed a collective and we called us lacasinegra. We didn’t know exactly how, or in which way, but we just knew we wanted to make films. In our way we did different projects, audiovisual pieces, and a blog in which we thought, argue, and call into question ourselves. Us and the others. Pas à Genève is our first feature film but it is also the conclusion of this path, of the doubts that struck us as a collective, as filmmakers and as members of our generation.Read More »