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15 titles
- DirectorJoshua BonnettaJ.P. SniadeckiAn immersive experience of the Sonoran Desert on the U.S.-Mexico border.
- DirectorDeborah StratmanAn inter-generational tribute to feminist icons of experimental film, and to the complexities, quandaries, and doubt involved in art-making.
- DirectorDeborah StratmanStarsJohn SteinsEldo EnnsSteve BadgettThe urge to relieve a winter valley of permanent shadow and find gold in alluvial gravel is part of a long history of desire and extraction in the far Canadian north. Cancan dancers, curlers, smelters, former city officials, and a curious cliff-side mirrored disc congregate to form a town portrait. Shot on location in Dawson City, Yukon Territory.
- DirectorJoshua Bonnetta"The closing titles say THE TWO SIGHTS was "collected" on various islands of the Outer Hebrides from 2017-19, but what does the film gather? There are the images, captured on a 16mm camera, which survey all this ravishing landscape contains, taking in its rocky cliffs, beaches and plains, alighting on its flora and fauna and the houses and ships sprinkled over it, picking out currents, reflections and shifts in light. Then there are the sounds, recorded with the mic visible in the first shots, keening birds, the roaring wind, the crashing, gurgling, trickling of the water. In voiceover, a whole anthology of tales can be heard, narrated in both English and Gaelic, stories of dog skeletons, drowned villages, and family members passing away, although songs, silence and the shipping forecast are just as at home there. But like any great collection, it's not about the individual elements, but how they overlap, about how the crow hanging on barbed wire conjures up another story never told, about how the ripples seem to reverberate along with the woman's harmonies, about how each anecdote floats over the rushing air. Sight by eye, sight by ear, two sights that ripple and flow together."
- DirectorDeborah StratmanStarsRaven Wolf C. Felton Jennings IIJoshua FriemanAnna ToborgAn experimental documentary comprised of regional vignettes about faith, force, technology and exodus. Eleven parables relay histories of settlement, removal, technological breakthrough, violence, messianism and resistance, all occurring somewhere in the state of Illinois. But the state is a structural ruse, and its histories are allegories that ask what belief might teach us about nationhood. In our desire to understand the inscrutable, whom do we end up blaming or endorsing?
- DirectorXiang HuangJ.P. SniadeckiRoutao Xu'Yumen' combines ghost stories and the 'ruin tourism' to form a celluloid psychocollage of wandering souls, seeking connection to each other and a lost collective history among the frozen remnants of the abandoned oil town of Yumen in China's north-west Gansu province.
- DirectorLisa MalloyJ.P. SniadeckiA SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME is a borderlands Western that follows Sundog, an eccentric recluse who lives off the land in the Sonoran Desert. As Border Patrol surveillance encroaches on his relative freedom, he becomes increasingly unnerved and ventures beyond the confines of his survivalism. With an unsettling fantasy of eco-terrorism, and with the first cinematic depiction of smoking a Sonoran toad's psychedelic venom, the complex figure of Sundog raises provocative questions about environmental justice and human survival amidst the specter of global collapse.
- DirectorDeborah StratmanStarsJoaquin de la PuenteA night flight through hysteria and police surveillance in suburban America.
- DirectorLucien Castaing-TaylorVerena ParavelAlmost hallucinatory images of unidentified sleeping figures float across the screen to the accompaniment of increasingly unnerving monologues, the "dream narratives" of Dion McGregor, an aspiring Broadway lyricist who may have been performing for his roommate actively recording these sessions. In somniloquies, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor discover a dark, forked path to the unconscious in the ranting, sleep-talking voice of an obsessive and possibly deranged individual whose racist, misogynistic and xenophobic fears are unleashed with propulsive force and screeching climaxes.
- DirectorEmma DaviePeter MettlerStarsDavid AbramPeter MettlerA palpably rendered audiovisual essay draws together the distinct sensibilities of filmmakers Peter Mettler (The End of Time) and Emma Davie (I am Breathing) and philosopher David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous) to forge a path into the places where humans and animals meet.
- DirectorDaniel V. Villamediana
- DirectorSimon LiuThrough processing a year of bewildering news and images from my home in Hong Kong, I've come to question the significance of dear memories and personal joy in the face of things falling apart. As the days teeter toward an uncertain future, Happy Valley cinematically probes the role of the so-called "little things". A rendering of the perseverance of spirit in Hong Kong - an attempt at irony that can't help but be emotional.
- DirectorWerner HerzogStarsWerner HerzogJörg Schmidt-ReitweinEdward LachmanHerzog takes a film crew to the island of Guadeloupe when he hears that the volcano on the island is going to erupt. Everyone has left, except for one old man who refuses to leave. Herzog catches the eeriness of an abandoned city, with stop lights cycling over an empty intersection.
- DirectorAna VazIt addresses the genocide of the Waimiri-Atroari people in 1970s. Illustrations about the period, created by the indigenous population reveal a traumatic history, referring us to the present day.
- DirectorSayaka MizunoA glimpse at a tiny bar in Kawasaki, Japan, where men spend their time drinking, chatting and betting on the races at the nearby cycling track.