Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive
Normality is a human state of good intentions, empathy, caring and wanting to do the best for those we love and the world at large.
Colossal explores the complexities of grief and the process of grieving as understood through the myth of a Man as he ventures through shifting landscapes ruminating.
As a family struggles to survive in rural isolation during the Great Depression, their daughter's secret affair begins a journey into the unknown.
An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.
Experimental film following a cycle of seasons as well as the stretch of a single day as a man and his dog slowly ascend a mountain.
Russian emigré Dimitri Kirsanoff’s film, alternatively titled Death of A Stag and Une chasse à courre, is a post-war study of a traditional stag hunt. The pursuit of the animal finds a cross-cutting parallel in the felling of a tree in the forest.
CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...
Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.
Teens P.J. and Goose get their thrills on BMX bikes, performing hair-raising tricks all across Sydney, Australia. Along with their new friend Judy, they discover a box of walkie-talkies -- and find out that a gang of criminals intends to use them to monitor police signals during a bank robbery. When the young trio snatches the devices, it propels them on a hair-raising adventure in which their pedaling skills might just save their necks.
In this avant-garde look at a series of unique or eccentric men and women, director Stavros Tornes has created a film that is visually engaging, but too obscure in many points to be understood. The main protagonists are a young taxi driver -- a man who has had some very unusual, puzzling, and inspirational experiences -- and a middle-aged painter he gains as a new friend. The two men are complemented by a few tough women (all played by the same actress), a pair of verbose politicos, and a handful of other distinctive characters. By the end of the movie, transformations are in store for the pair of friends, reflecting the tenor of the film throughout. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread. Shifting the focus from character to interior, Ben Russell and Rhyne Piggott mine the landscape of a beige-carpeted ranch style house for new insights into the architecture of suburban alienation.” - Anne Reecer, Cinematexas
A psychiatrist tells two stories: one of a trans woman, the other of a pseudohermaphrodite.
Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound , finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.
A boy and his older brother go on a cycling trip to bond over the loss of their mother.
Three kids are trying to stand strong. In a world where you don’t know for what you want to stay strong. Full of sexuality and the need to define their identity. “We are the children with no obligations, the most possibilities, with the most liberated freedom. We are children who build words. Children who give birth to children. We are children of our time, free from guilt.”
A story of diaspora. The film criticises the myth of Swiss neutrality, which violently masks structural, systemic, and social passivity.
A visually experimental adaptation of the classic Frank Stockton short story.
BARE BONES is an experimental short film written, directed and scored by DEBBY FRIDAY. Conceived during the Covid-19 lockdown and shot in Vancouver, BC on 16mm, the film tells the story of a young woman who swallows a bee and begins to undergo a hallucinatory and transformative experience. Abstract visual sequences depict time and space fracturing around her as she succumbs to wave after wave of pure feeling.
Contemplates the notion of "identity" through the experiences of a Puerto Rican woman living in the US. In a wonderful mix of fiction, archival footage, processed interviews and soap opera drama, the film tells the story of Claudia Marin, a middle-class, light-skinned, lesbian Puerto Rican photographer / videographer who is attempting to construct a sense of community in the US. Confronting the simultaneity of both her privilege and her oppression, this experimental narrative becomes a meditation on class, race, and sexuality as shifting differences.