A silent film of collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking between artist Carolee Schneemann and her then partner, composer James Tenney, observed by their cat, Kitch.
In 1998, Semira Adamu, a 20-year-old Nigerian immigrant, died on Belgian soil of suffocation under a police pillow. Twenty years later, two women tell her story in a cry for justice.
Eighty years later, Theo Panagopoulos sheds a bitter light on archival footage. The director builds a dystopian bridge between the harbinger of the Nakba in 1948 and today’s genocide. Where are the plants and the people now? Do they still colour the regions?
Martí arrives in Bilbao for an artistic residency. In his new room, his clothes occupy only a small portion of the enormous wardrobe. But when he meets someone, the wardrobe slowly begins to fill up. Where has the emptiness gone, the free space, the little corner that was his?
A broken phone and the digital memory of a broken queer relationship. Through the careful manipulation of discarnate metal components and the filmmaker’s attentive look at an intimate archive, a fading first love surfaces. Loveboard is a playful reflection on what remains.
Like an animal in one of Eadweard Muybridge’s scientific photo experiments, five undramatic moments in a man’s life are observed by a woman. A study in visual obsession and a twist on the notion of the “gaze”.
A sparing and minimal travelogue of Istanbul. A foreigner meditates on the unraveling of a relationship while moving from hotel room to hotel room. In a city simultaneously devoted to Islam and secular nationalism, she finds refuge in the frailty and severity of rituals.
Every year on the 10th of November, at 09:05 in the morning, individuals across Turkey cease all activities. Cars pull over, and pedestrians stop and stand still, in remembrance of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey), who died on this day and time in 1938. Els Opsomer captures such a moment on film.
Through dancing, The Motherfucker’s Birthday shows the evil of the dictator and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders. The film presents dancing, a universal and uniquely human activity often representing joy, with eerie footage of Saddam and his sons’ torture tools while they dance.
The Hymns of Muscovy is a trip to the eponymous planet, which is an upside-down space twin of the city of Moscow. Gliding along its surface, we look down at the sky and see historic architectural styles fly by—the exuberant Socialist Classicism, aka the Stalinist Empire, the laconic and brutalist Soviet Modernism, and the hodgepodge of their contemporary knock-offs and revivals.
Every form of communication involves deciphering codes. In Before Then, Mengzhu Xue attempts to confess a secret in the form of a letter in English, which she writes out phonetically in Chinese, and asks her grandmother to read out loud.
A wistful but witty account of a trip to Beijing by filmmaker Viv Li, a Chinese art student who has been living abroad for ten years. Her stay with her family mercilessly exposes how uprooted she has become by her life abroad.
Hand-painted watercolours explore bodies, desire, and the tension between both in this experimental animated film. Due to an explosion of colour and movement that escapes classical animation, an unusual sensorial force is achieved. Alternating colours, lines, and density, the drawings question pornography and normative sexuality.
It is sometimes said that if a man places a pearl under the skin of his penis, he will bring the woman the greatest pleasure. He grants her the greatest of all pleasures, while she will give him anything he desires. After a playful love dance, she melts into him, at the cost of losing themselves in each other to arrive at their deepest desires.
On the outskirts of the city, the new modern buildings are silent, and the motorway bridge drones. Birds are circling in the sky, and a young man, concealed by his hoodie, is riding his e-scooter along a park path. The only irritating element is the rifle over his shoulder. Cyclepaths conveys a mood of high alert, even though the disaster has, in fact, already happened.
In Emmanuel Marre’s vérité film, not the filmmaker or his camcorder dictate the mise-en-scène, but an alternating montage of Brussels-based parents styling their children’s hair with whatever they have at hand. Their direct but intimate instructions and the bathrooms, kitchens and living rooms that function as ephemeral hair salons sculpt the decor, rhythm, and imagery.
Blight revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition. What is presented is simultaneously fact and fiction.
In this documentary-cum-survey made in 1979, basic existential questions are asked in the form of a street survey probe. Forty-four selected Poles, representing various professions and ranging in age from seven to a hundred years old, answer three questions: When were you born? Who are you? What do you want (in life)?
Using newsreel footage and a song by Lena Horne, Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez fired off Now!, one of the most powerful bursts of 1960s propaganda. Made almost entirely from existing newsreel footage, the film tackled the pressing political issues of the time, from racism to imperialism.
In 1954, on a Calais beach, Agnès Varda took a photograph of a man, a boy and a dead goat. Almost thirty years later, she returns to that image, the moment she made it, the way she remembers it (sometimes incorrectly, as she finds out), and the interconnections between past, present and future.
A silent meditation on death depicting bodies lying in a morgue, this is one of the starkest works of body horror in which Brakhage makes the monster our very own perception.
Of the more than eighty moving-image works that Barbara Hammer created, her 1974 film Dyketactics remains her most iconic. A four-minute paean to lesbian sexuality, the film publicly announced Hammer’s blossoming sexual identity.
A tale of first love. Romeo and Polly sit in separate cars outside a pub, waiting for their parents. They're bored until they notice each other—at first, they bicker and play it cool, but by the time they have to say goodbye, the sparks of first love are flickering.
Maryam Tafakory creates an intimate inner world that moves between the concrete and the abstract. Layers of found and original footage are superimposed to fill in some of the cracks, the deletions, the limits of representation. Mast-del is a love song that would never pass through censorship.
Clips sampled from films, newscasts, sporting events, music videos, and citizen videos traverse the twentieth century, focusing on the lives of Black people set against the backdrop of systemic racism and White supremacism. Taken as a whole, Jafa’s montage comprises a poignant, visceral meditation on African American identity and history.
Brakhage’s avant-garde classic is an intimate impression of the birth of his first child. The film features the first contractions, the actual delivery, and the cutting of the umbilical cord.
A little girl is taken on a mind-bending tour of her distant future. An element of childhood whimsy is integral to balancing out the film’s dark absurdism, paving the way for its core theme: life is precious, and the sadness permeating our day-to-day is a reminder to cherish it.
In this Second Wave Feminist pamphlet, Agnès Varda invites women, young and old, dressed and nude, proletarian and upper-class, to answer the question: What does it mean to be a woman?
With a 16mm Bolex camera, French-Peruvian filmmaker Rose Lowder developed her own unique way of filming. In her cinema of perception, she interweaves time and space. Her famous “Bouquets” consist of a series of one-minute compositions whose 1440 frames are interlaced so that each bouquet of flowers also becomes a bouquet of images.
Filmmaker António Reis (with the help of Margarida Cordeiro, his wife) portrays the life of Jaime Fernandes, a peasant diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. They focus on the artistic legacy he left behind.
Joris Ivens films Amsterdam during a rain shower. This poetic city symphony, a “cine-poem” per the film’s opening title cards, shifts moods, following the gradual transformation from sunny Amsterdam streets to raindrops in the canals and on windows, umbrellas, and trams, until it clears and the sun breaks through once again.
A day in the life of a camel, endlessly walking in circles in a sesame mill: a gloomy, small space. But this remarkable film also has humour. Those who wish to can see a parallel between the emotional life of the dromedary and that of censored filmmakers in Sudan. Both dream of freedom.
In this expression of gendered pain, joy, and hardship, Chick Strand collaborates with five women who share their experiences through direct, frank stories. Throughout these testimonies, Soft Fiction considers the identification and representation of womanhood, and the sense of possession and dispossession through consensual and abusive sexuality.
llusions is a gripping critique of cinema’s power to shape perception, exploring the myth of racial identity. Julie Dash’s drama shows the instrumentalisation of Hollywood during wartime.
This bittersweet film from Jean Renoir, based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, is a tenderly comic idyll about a city family’s picnic in the French countryside and the romancing of the mother and grown daughter by two local men.
This short animated film seems playful only at first glance—in fact, it tells the story of a life on the margins of society in a no less disturbing way. While the filmmaker is reading quotes from conversations with an invalid man from eastern Germany, a mechanical ballet of light switches and plastic dolls is set in motion.
Everything in Anticipation of the Night is shown in a multitude of aspects, at varying speeds, with crucial changes in lighting and graininess. This film bids farewell to the protagonist’s last dying thought and to all the primitive “point of view” tricks of narrative cinema.
Made in 1993, when the Bosnian War was at its apex, this film compresses untold hours of action into two minutes. A static photograph is revisited once and again. Hail, Sarajevo is a morsel of history in and of itself.
In a shopping mall, two women sing about their favourite items but are quickly pursued by a masked cannibal who is intent on forcing his way to their love. Possibly in Michigan is an operatic fairy tale of cannibalism and dread in America.
In this documentary essay, Harun Farocki shows that the famous Lumière brothers’ sequence of the same title already carries within itself the germ of a foreseeable social development: the eventual disappearance of this form of industrial labour.
A poetic amalgam of Yuri Norstein’s memories, hopes, and fears for the future. Tale of Tales depicts his post-war childhood, remnants of the personal tragedies of war, and the little wolf character in the lullaby his mother used to sing.
Mothlight was created by painstakingly collaging bits and pieces of organic matter—moth wings, most notably, as well as flowers, seeds, leaves, and blades of grass—and sandwiching them between two layers of clear 16-mm Mylar editing tape.
Ousmane Sembène’s first film uses a mixture of documentary and fiction techniques to tell the story of a young cart-driver in Dakar. The Wagoner illustrates the continent’s poverty, showing that independence has not solved the problems of its people.
This postmodern retelling of Karen Carpenter’s affliction by anorexia enraged her family and initially got the film banned. Blending archival material, artificial talking heads, and Barbie-doll reenactments, Todd Haynes criticises the objectification of female celebrities.
Mati Diop’s experimental documentary Atlantiques is a precursor but also a narrative sidestep to what would become her feature debut, Atlantics, ten years later. A group of young Senegalese men discusses a possible attempt to cross the ocean to Spain.
Spacy elaborates the concept of ‘infinite regress’ through a zoom-in to a grandstand on which animated photos show a zoom of the same stand, ad infinitum, with reverses and variations. All its components—location, illusion, and time—are strictly combined in an endless cycle, like a Möbius strip or an Escher film, in a Japanese tempo, from slow to fast.
Norman McLaren applies the principles used to animate drawings or puppets to animate live actors. Neighbours is a parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a flower. The political context shifts depending on the viewers’ personal positions.
A polemical, avowedly personal video documentary on the American Black gay experience. Marlon Riggs celebrates Black men loving Black men as a revolutionary act.
Marguerite Duras takes us on a nighttime car ride through an unpopulated Paris in mid-August, in a single, uninterrupted shot from inside the car. From the end of night till dawn, a depopulated Paris soothes itself with Duras’ affecting voice-over, accompanied by cello accords.
A girl from a shantytown travels to the city to become an itinerant newspaper vendor. Mambety’s richly textured view of urban life fuses fiction and documentary, displaying the rampant poverty and endemic misogyny in the modernising capital of Dakar.
What is Senegal exactly? Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen is a film about its people and, at the same time, a reflection on the conventions of ethnographic cinema. It shows the mechanisms of manipulation in the seventh art form.
As a heavy fog shrouds the wild woods, a helpless hedgehog starts wandering in the powdery mist. Will the young visitor find his way home? Hedgehog in the Fog has generated its own lore, and there is even a monument to the hedgehog in Kyiv.
On a lonely planet, a musical is enacted in a modern marketplace. The employees of various commercial venues, portrayed as anthropomorphic animals, cope with boredom and existential anxiety by performing cheerful showtunes.
In the Oscar-winning The Wrong Trousers, the kind-hearted, cheese-loving bachelor and inventor Wallace rents out his loyal and intelligent anthropomorphic dog’s bedroom to a penguin.
In the dream-like narrative of At Land, a woman, played by filmmaker Maya Deren herself, is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey, encountering other versions of herself. Deren described the film as about the struggle to maintain one’s personal identity.
In Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia, Hollis Frampton presents 12 pictures and reminisces about them. After about a minute, the photos catch fire and burn to ashes. Memory and anticipation merge.
At the outskirts of a city, a group of people stands around a lorry. Naked men, women, and children are herded in through the rear door of the vehicle. Once the door is locked, a gentleman takes a hose and connects it from the exhaust pipe to the lorry’s interior.
In 1967, Agnès Varda was living in California when one of the Black Panthers founders, Huey P. Newton, was arrested during a traffic stop for killing a police officer—a clear case of racial injustice, according to the Panthers. The following summer, Varda took her 16mm camera to a “Free Huey” demonstration in Oakland.
