The six-decade transformation of a block of houses, shown by means of artfully featured archival shots, highlights the beauty and sadness of human-made decay. In the blink of an eye 66 years pass by and a savings bank replaces a church.
A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice– whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.
In Untitled (Pink Dot), Murata transforms footage from the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood (1982) into a morass of seething electronic abstraction. Subjected to Murata's meticulous digital reprocessing, the action scenes decompose and are subsumed into an almost palpable, cascading digital sludge, presided over by a hypnotically pulsating pink dot.
A French documentary or, one might say more accurately, a mockumentary, by director William Karel which originally aired on Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. The basic premise for the film is the theory that the television footage from the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and actually recorded in a studio by the CIA with help from director Stanley Kubrick.
A retrospective documentary about the groundbreaking horror series, Friday the 13th, featuring interviews with cast and crew from the twelve films spanning 3 decades.
An alien narrates the story of his dying planet, his and his people's visitations to Earth and Earth's self-made demise, while human astronauts in space are attempting to find an alternate planet for surviving humans to live on.
Directed by Richie Mehta, executive produced by Ridley Scott and powered by Google, India in a Day is a new form of non-fiction filmmaking that uses footage shot by millions of people in India on one single day to assemble a lyrical portrait of modern India.
American religious extremism collides with independent filmmaking when Harmony Hope Bryant sets out to create a cautionary movie about the dangers of roleplaying games.
In December 1993, a luxury condominium tower block collapse after ground erosion from the neighbouring hillside. About 50 people lost their lives and to this day has become one of the darkest and saddest tragic incidents in Malaysian history. Twenty years later in 2013, a group of documentary filmmakers venture into the remaining two blocks that is left standing to do a ghost hunting expedition. What they discovered is not for the faint-hearted.
One man's journey into the world of the so-called 'Bloodline' conspiracy, at the heart of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, where a secret society, the Priory of Sion, claims to have guarded evidence of the marriage of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ, their children and their descendants down through the centuries.
This special 10th anniversary edition of the Found Footage Festival finds curators Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher in a nostalgic mood, delving deeper--perhaps too deep--into some of their favorite VHS finds from over years. But Volume 7 is also jam packed with newly unearthed treasures, featuring singing rabbis, petulant news anchors, coughing snake handlers, bodybuilding clowns, and two body parts never before seen in the festival! It's a celebration of a decade of Found. Record over and you'll die! Taped live at The Grey Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina.
In April 2013, a fishing vessel was attacked off the coast of South Africa, killing all on board. A TV crew documented Marine Biologist Collin Drake as he worked to determine the predator responsible. His discovery is presented in this shocking footage.
A dystopian southern sludge that transgresses even the gothic sensibilities that exist just below the surface of the social fabric of the deep Louisiana culture visible here. Following the sudden death of their friend Shep, Kristopher and Ryan quickly grow less attached to reality. As they wander the southern landscape of Louisiana, they descend into a state devoid of hope and order; a place where life and death are one and the same; a land where we are all doomed. The aesthetic artifacts of the video tapes and the vernacular wanderings caught on them present a rip-it-up-and-start-again style montage of life caught in the vise of western culture at the dead end of of the first world.
A real initiatory journey that, through the discovery and the story of myths, legends, inexplicable events and macabre details, will lead the viewer and the conductor to confront each one with their own fears.
A nightmarish essay film on the history of the doorbell, tracing its invention and constant reinventions through 19th century labor struggles, the nascent years of narrative cinema, and contemporary surveillance cultures.
Rough Cut, the debut feature from London-based artist Jamie Shovlin, explores the re-making of an exploitation film that never was. At its dark heart is Hiker Meat, an archetypal 1970s slasher movie imagined by Shovlin, complete with hitchhiking heroine, charismatic commune leader and a group of teens who disappear one by one. This tantalising film-within-a-film serves to both deconstruct and pay affectionate homage to the often-maligned exploitation style. Having created a full screenplay, score and cut-and-paste prototype for Hiker Meat, Shovlin filmed key sections and a full trailer in an intense shoot in the Lake District in summer 2013. Rough Cut contrasts these re-made sequences with on-set footage and insights into the development of Hiker Meat’s script, soundtrack and design, to create a compelling mash-up of self-referencing processes, behind-the-scenes viewpoints and time-honoured slasher tropes.
During an audio message sent to his daughter, a father reflects on how the recent discovery of dusty reels and scratchy VHS tapes capturing childhood moments has propelled him on a journey of ancient memories and forgotten dreams . Using a blend of personal, public domain, and freely available footage, the film deconstructs reality and reimagines the past, questioning where memory ends and imagination begins.
It is summer, a day in the life under the blistering heat. This is an archival journey through different pairs of eyes and different layers of skin - all in the hopes of finding someplace to sit and do nothing, while the world around you always wants you to do something.