1. Arktis - Zwischen Licht und Dunkel (Arktis - Zwischen Licht und Dunkel)
Arktis is a poetic approach to the bizarre landscape of ice, rock, and water; a journey to the arctic ocean and surroundings, with images and sounds. Seventy one-second scenes of the arctic serve as the original material, which is then transformed in its texture, time lapse, color and light qualities to create a material reminiscent of landscape painting. The sound collage uses fragments from sounds of nature and samples from a piece of music for violin and song, which are also transformed in a manner similar to that of the visual pictures.
2. The Grass Dwellers (Los habitantes del pasto)
Juan Méndez Bernal leaves his house on the 9th of april of 1936 to fight in the imminent Spanish Civil War. 83 years later, his body is still one of the Grass Dwellers. The only thing that he leaves from those years on the front is a collection of 28 letters in his own writing.
3. Hit Him on the Head with a Hard Heavy Hammer
Hit Him on the Head with a Hard, Heavy Hammer departs from the handwritten memoir of the filmmaker’s father and his experience of displacement during wartime. Referring to the notion Thomas Hardy termed ‘The Self-Unseeing’ in his eponymous 1901 poem, the film returns to childhood and the matters that harden us: upbringing, social status, education, labour, and familial bonds. The memoir weaves into the film as both a contemplation on mortality and an illustration of fading memory, reflecting on how we pen our pasts and how they can be re-told.
It has an average vote of 4 on TMDB.
4. Pacho's visual archive (Pacho, el archivo visual)
After the death of my only brother I found rolls of undeveloped film. This documentary is a reenactment of those stills and an exploration of the aspects of my brother's life that I didn't know.
5. Panoramic Images of a Loving Home
A documentary short created by Olivia Lancaster while moving into a new home, 08/31/23.
6. Memory (Memory)
Memory is a collaboration with musician Noah Lennox , exploring the relationship between a musician and filmmaker and their personal reflection on memories. From Super 8 home movies and entirely handmade, this film explores familiar memories, the present moment combined with past experiences and how it all seems to evade from our present memory.
It has an average vote of 4 on TMDB.
7. Acoustic Ocean
Acoustic Ocean is an artistic exploration of the sonic ecology of marine life in the North Atlantic. Located on the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway, the video centers on the performance of a marine-biologist diver who is using a life-size model of a submersible equipped with all sorts of hydrophones and recording devices. In this science-fictional quest, her task is to sense the submarine space for acoustic and bioluminescent forms of expression.
9. ZION USA
An intimate portrait of Salt Lake City and its surroundings. Shot on 16mm film.
10. Here We Are (Here We Are)
A housekeeper received a film made by her daughter. It's a film that combines found footages of Thailand during the Cold War with the present days images of Bangkok. Through these images she tells a story of the house owner and her own story of coming to the capital.
11. Dominion
Landscapes, things, men, women and children taken by an "evil eye" more than a century ago haunt the present in this jagged reverie. A persona voicelessly narrates, via captions, going through colonial photographs, digresses to eating fruit and entering a cave on a tropical vacation island.
12. Kewaaj (কেওয়াজ)
The word kewaaj is colloquially used to explain chaos, noisiness or annoyance. "Kewaaj" is an audiovisual attempt to give you a glimpse into how the people of Dhaka function in one of the most unliveable cities, according to the Global Liveability Index. Dhaka is fast, dense, intense. Yet the people try to find their peace in it.
13. Echo
A reframing of the classic tale of Narcissus, the director draws on snippets of conversation with a trusted friend to muse on gender and identity. Just as shimmers are difficult to grasp as knowable entities, so does the concept of a gendered self feel unknowable except through reflection. Is it Narcissus that Echo truly longs for, or simply the Knowing he possesses when gazing upon himself?
14. Shadows (Schatten)
Hansjürgen Pohland's short documentary is an audiovisual study that captures events and people on the streets on film. The special feature of the work is that the people and objects are portrayed exclusively through their shadows.
It has an average vote of 6 on TMDB.
15. He Who Dances Passes (El que baila pasa)
A being from the beyond returns to Chile in 2019, embodied in a worker who dreams of social upheaval. Viral videos intertwine with fiction to narrate the experiences of a polarized country that wanders between drama and absurdity, illusion and failure.
16. Canale grande (Canale grande)
A young woman is fed up with the usual consumer's television and begins to make her own television, or more correctly, closevision. She is now a reporter who wanders around Berlin with her camera and 'telecasting apparatus' on her back. Her livingroom has been transformed into a studio and here the different programs are assembled and aired: statements, interviews, realistic and phantastic programs.
17. Prelude (Preludio)
In a dreamlike journey through the memories that formed him, Sergio's past comes to life before his eyes. With his grandparents' house in ruins as a vehicle of memory, he will question his first 10 years of life and why he considers them his Prelude, the foretaste of what his life and work would become. Among ghosts, he will have to make peace with his memory, his reflection and his name to find the color among the ashes and stop fearing the future.
18. The Tuba Thieves
A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.
It has an average vote of 8 on TMDB.
19. Origins of consciousness
Experimental meditation on land, complexity and evolution, consciousness, interconnection, and artificial intelligence. Shot in the Okanagan and West Kootenays of British Columbia, Canada. Original music by Jack Brintnell.
20. Untitled (Pink Dot) (Untitled (Pink Dot))
In Untitled , Murata transforms footage from the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood 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.
It has an average vote of 7.5 on TMDB.
