2010s

Immobile in a home where the sands of time fall to the rhythm of the rural Azerbaijani sounds, a mother waits for her son. When he arrives, their conversations circle around existential questions and news from afar. Unrest cloaks the world outside. Mother and son grow closer, silence melts into words, and life springs between them. The son leaves, and winter settles in to the forever-outdated house in which temporalities blurs and past and present beat to the rhythm of the same clock.Read More »

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Opening with torch-wielding villagers and a wall bleeding oil, this experimental film attaches vivid scenery and strange characters to the wonderful melodic wavelengths of the band Animal Collective, revitalizing the lost form of the “visual album.”Read More »

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“after – image” is an art-science project by Grayson Cooke, exploring material memory and forgetting. It features time-lapse macro-photography of photographic negatives being chemically destroyed.

This project was produced in consultation with scientist and artist Amanda Reichelt-Brushett and with sound by Matt Hill.Read More »

Cesta Ven tells a story of a young Romani couple, Zaneta and David, the parents of little Janicka. Their efforts to live a decent and dignified life run up against the “Romani social trap,” which is racism, the society’s prejudices.Read More »

An unusual J-horror film written and directed by Hiroshi Takahashi, best-known internationally as the screenwriter of The Ring. A day in a group meeting of a Bolshevik cult in a warehouse in present day Japan. Members confess their past transgressions as ways of summoning the dead and bringing about revolution, and perform prayers and group exercises to the spirits of Lenin and Stalin.Read More »

Being shelved for four years over censorship issues sounds like a death knell for any film, and yet in the case of Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land, it may actually have been a considerable boon : indeed, the four-years delay meant that the film came out after the comedy Lost In Thailand, which starred two of the leads of No Man’s Land (Xu Zheng and Huang Bo), and thus became positioned as their follow-up to what is still the all-time highest-grossing Chinese film in China. It did however lose its potential status as China’s very first modern-day set western – with Gao Qunshu’s Wind Blast having been released in the meantime – though in truth it is closer to a film noir than a western, with moody voice-over and a cynical outlook on human nature. It tells of an arrogant big city lawyer (Xu Zheng) who travels to the far west of China to plead the case of a falcon trafficker (Togbye), then tries to rush back to the city to close a book deal on that very case.Read More »

Lonesome, middle-aged virgin Antonio Farfán is picked on and ridiculed as a matter of course, whether by coworkers or his bullying mooch of a brother (who only calls when he needs money). An employee of a notary’s office, his status improves a bit when his new boss—and strangely affable doppelganger—takes an interest in him. But Farfán’s deep-seated shyness and insecurity are only partly assuaged. And when he joins a self-improvement group, he slowly confirms what the undulating lines of this sly, involving rotoscope story suggest: everything is in motion, and change is inevitable. The question becomes what use one makes of it.Read More »

In the Soviet Union of the 1960s, some technologists saw computers as machines of communism and cybernetics as an answer to the difficulties of a waning centrally planned economy. After Scarcity is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks these Soviet cyberneticians in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future.Read More »

An old man is haunted at a movie theater where he works as a janitor.Read More »