Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

Video Album 5: The Thursday People

January 1987 •English

The comings and goings of the late underground filmmaker, Curt McDowell—and the people and activities that came and went along with him—are the themes that run through this existential diary of daily life. McDowell was dying from AIDS-related illnesses during the production of the diary. “An elegy for McDowell, the videowork captures Kuchar’s mournful remembrances of his long-lasting friendship with the young filmmaker. But it also has the inquisitive charm, perverse humor, and quirky candor that places Kuchar’s visual expressions in a gritty niche all their own.”

And in shallow waters, then i learned not to swim but to lie

October 2018 •Spanish

Footage from summer of 2018 that explores the passing of time regarding the little things in life.

Vukica Djilas – Home Movies

January 2006 •Serbian

It compiles more than twenty years of passionately recorded “pictures from life” captured on super 8, that Vukica Djilas shot from 1970 to late 1990s.

La deuxième femme

November 2008 •French

Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.

Ventana en Carrer de Badajoz

September 2021 •Spanish

In the Land of Giants and Pygmies

January 1925 •English

IN THE LAND OF GIANT PYGMIES, a diary of Aurelio Rossi's 1925 trek into the immense Belgian Congo, preserves a long-gone-Colonial-era wonder at natural resources, "primitive" tribes, customs and costumes in Europe's cast African possessions, and implies that the "dark continent" could benefit from the "civilizing" influences of home.

beer cans under my bed

March 2024 •English

This short, started early on into sobriety, finished about nine months in, is a collage of diaries and notes, collected from within addiction and into recovery.

Fale Comigo Verão: O diário de um cineasta amador

June 2023 •Portuguese

For years, together with his partners from the production company O Quadro, he has been betting on cinema as a tool to explore the typical issues of youth. In this film, Evandro Scorsin turns the cameras on himself as he deals with the dilemmas of the passing of time and the imposition of adulthood. In an exercise in autofiction where cinema and life merge, the film is also a cinematic love letter to the beloved masters (especially Nicholas Ray). Coming and going between two countries and times, it records the vertigo of displacement and the reinventions inherent to an immigrant experience.

Birth of a Nation

August 1997 •English

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.

Urute vv

May 2024 •Portuguese

An intimate glimpse into 3 years of serene moments, compiling video, polaroids and other things that were lying around when editing.

Heart of a Tiger

January 2009 •French

Somewhere between a diary and a filmed letter made while Caroline Champetier was shooting Benoît Jacquot's film L'Intouchable in India.

Mathilde

January 1985 •French

An old man comes across a fascinating archive, then meets a woman who introduces him to the life of a banker, patron and philanthropist. A moving essay that is part documentary, part film diary.

Oliva Oliva

July 2005 •French

A filmed diary which chronicles two visits to the Olivas, a family of Spanish beekeepers from Salamanca, at the time of the honey harvest, in August and September. Their work and their itinerant life are seen from a friend's point of view.

June

June 2024 •English

A letter of love to my past self who discovered himself.

Erasmus Diary

March 2023 •English

The director goes to the city of Cuenca in Spain, Castilla-La Mancha for Erasmus. In this process, he records his experiences, days, and trips with a digital handheld camera and Super 8mm. A visual diary of the director is documented by witnessing the 2022 spring period in Spain and Portugal with images.

Eautopsie

August 2024 •English

A glimpse of life through movement and memory, negotiating a narrative through images and sounds both personal and found, private and public, recounting four years of the filmmaker's life, relocating from Iran to the US.

Begins (โผบิน)

September 2024 •Thai

The untold state of mind dealing with an incurable disease. One is wondering if there's still a dream to achieve in life. One is running as if this free spirit of mine has never been taken away.

Notes before the Wind

January 2020 •

A loose collection of scenes in Hong Kong shot over a five-year period, this film begins with the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and ends right before the summer of 2019, when large-scale social unrest and violent resistance erupted. The everyday scenes capture the ambience and the landscape of change in the city, standing as a quiet prelude to the ensuing conflicts.

Return to Khodorciur—Armenian Diary

January 1986 •Italian

Raphael, Yervant Gianikian's father, survived the Armenian genocide in 1915 in Eastern Turkey. In April 1988, while living in Venice, he sat for his son's camera and read an excerpt from his memoirs, translated from Armenian into Italian.

As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

October 2021 •English

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.