All Films

A documentary about the most important modern Iranian poet and intellectual icon. Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou talks about his poetry, the world of poetry, and his life. Filmed over a two year period from 1996 to 1998.

Elise is a quiet and solitary woman who works as a museum attendant. Nothing really happens in her life. And in a life in which nothing happens, no moment is devoid of meaning.

This is a half-hour short composed of zombie attacks with a little bit of plot and laughs thrown in for good measure.

The highway of the title is a 2,000 mile dirt road in Kazakhstan. Along this route, a traveling family circus journeys in their crowded hand-cranked bus, stopping in villages. The filmmaker accompanies the Tadjibajevs, capturing their quarrels, performances, and intimate moments.

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill are two of Australia's most prominent experimental filmmakers. The Cantrills are well known for their 'colour separation' films. To create these works they shoot a scene three separate times on black and white film stock, using a different colour filter each time. In the lab, they combine these three films onto a single Eastmancolour print. This process creates dramatic transitions in colour that the Cantrills liken to the vibrancy of Technicolor. Though the footage here was shot in the mid-’80s, it was only last year that they edited it into this fifteen-minute movie. Structurally it’s simple enough: just a series of views of various parts of inner Melbourne, from panoramic wide shots to close-ups of the sides of buildings. The soundtrack blends and warps familiar urban noises – cars, buskers, the ringing bells of trams – into a kind of musique concréte.

Documentary looking at the life and work of soul and pop diva Dusty Springfield.

Lúcia, a blind woman, helps Raul to escape of a running over. Then, Lúcia and Raul initiate one complicated relationship.

16mm film (b&w/color)

A retrospective based on an introspective vision, this stream of still pictures, unfolding to the rhythm of the voice-over (delivered by Steve Reinke), portrays a man who visually exposes his psychological “faults.” Recounting eighteen decisive moments in his life, and dissecting both his genetic and cultural heritage, the work delimits a transitory space in which each image crystallizes one of these indistinct marking points. Bringing together a number of collectively shared experiences, Damaged presents a series of significant events — some pleasant, others less so — evincing the complexity of the stages of life and offering models of childhood, sexuality and adulthood that denounce the transmission and acculturation of stigmatized identities. —Karl-Gilbert Murray, FIFA Catalogue

Light and Darkness of New York metro.

A number of quirky characters find themselves invited to a soiree being thrown by Mister Smile. Along the way we get a sneak peek into the mysterious lives of the invitees

The Boaro, a solitary farmer from Raboia (magic land of Boaria), is in love with savoy cabbage, but when someone steals it from him, he transforms into a bloodthirsty psychopath!

From the cover: President Brigham Young tells about how the testimony of a humble teacher helped him become converted. The story is told in flashback as Young preaches to a General Conference congregation in 1852. It relates his confusion as he hears eloquent orations by one missionary, followed by how he was spiritually touched by the faith inarticulately expressed by Eleazer Miller.

There is nothing more useless than an organ wrote Antonin Artaud in 1947, by the way he gave a name to a new kind of existence : the Body without Organs. The film is divided into three parts, following the division of the poem The Divine Comedy, the chronology of Dante’s trip through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise is respected. During this travel his human body is reconstructed and reorganised into a new body freed from his organism and from his organs. This new body, in touch with Beatrice, and by his ascension, becomes point of circulation of flows and intensities of all kinds.

In Cold Pieces, Cho focuses on water, drawing from this broad theme an extended investigation into the mutability of pure form; water, after all, has no particular shape or size, only infinite variation. Characteristically, Cho's images telescope in scale, from rain-droplets on a puddle to endless ocean-swells rolling in from the horizon. His intricate and complex processing is analogous to the motion of the water; the screen fragments into rolling "waves," roils upon itself, and dissolves into layers.

This film illustrates a recurring theme in the work of Dominik Lange: the opposition of nature and city. The film explores various different aesthetic options. Lange begins by filming a bare tree, magnifying it and giving it the plastic seductivity of a watercolour in movement. The shots of the tree, either gently caressed by the artist's camera or exploding in a multitude of trembling and scratched forms, alternate with a series of shots of depressing new public-housing tower blocks. Lang revitalizes these buildings by clustering them together and/or blurring their contours. At a certain point, a building site appears; we see the buildings under construction, with construction workers busy at their task. Were these shots filmed later, or did the film-maker choose to show them later? It doesn't really matter; the alchemical phenomenon which mutates vegetation (nature) into the depressing uniformity of tower blocks is conveyed with sensitivity.

A trainee apprentice meets a girl during the crossing the Tagus crossing and they live an adventure of suspicious smiles, misunderstood sentences and occasional robberies.

Along the thematic thread of time, this Y2K special is a mash-up of new footage and old to cover a lot of ground. From the beginning of the universe, various animal groups and human tribes that live in ancient ways.

In musical terminology, the term " study " designates pieces to approach a specific problem : study for arpeggios, for the left-handed etc. The question here is how to merge dancing footage with elements of fiction. What is the right tone, the golden proportion to tell/dance the stories without resorting to techniques of a musical or a ballet ? New ways of telling a story: this is, without a doubt, a critical challenge for dance today. Twenty-one micro fictions by four Cie Michèle Anne De Mey dancers in witch the educational aspect of experimentation soon gives way to the pleasur of joyful poetics: an original blend of tender insolence and srtict elegance.

Two men struggle underwater. Do they struggle with love or with each other?

From the Khorassan Ballroom, Larry Matysik takes us back to the glory days of professional wrestling. This unique 1999 documentary covers the story of KPLR's hit TV show, "Wrestling at the Chase" and the men and women who lived it.

The film's narrative is based on a traditional Estonian fairytale, telling the story of a group of mosquitoes that challenge a horse to a contest of strength. As the film begins, it evokes an almost documentary sensibility, in part through its use of voice-over narration (in English). Though the film might at first seem to be a relatively traditional work, it is not long until this impression changes, and drastically. The character design and voice recording, along with fantastically unrestricted cinematography and editing, combine with folk songs (sung in Estonian, with English subtitles) that might be described as 'quirky' or maybe just 'really odd.' Some dialogue is presented in 'word bubbles' printed on the film as well. So much is going on, on so many levels, that the film defies its viewer to look away -- and who would want to? It's all wonderful. The Mosquito and the Horse clearly demonstrates how successful a film can be operating outside the classical Hollywood model.

Y2K is a logic bomb because of the way the date was originally entered onto the computer (it assumed the year would be 19-- ). Hal Linden and Cliff Ford explain the problem and its repercussions, and solutions being offered.