Oliva Oliva

Crash 'n' Burn

January 1977 •English

Crash 'n' Burn is an experimental film shot in and named after Toronto, Ontario's first punk rock club. (Not to be confused with Peter Vronsky's similarly titled 1977 documentary on the Toronto punk scene made for the CBC television network.) The film, shot on 16mm black-and-white stock, features performances by Dead Boys, Teenage Head, The Boyfriends, and The Diodes".

The Basque Ball: Skin Against Stone

October 2003 •Spanish

An attempt to create a bridge between the different political positions that coexist, sometimes violently, in the Basque Country, in northern Spain.

Piaf intime

October 2013 •French

Las sinsombrero III: exiliadas

March 2021 •Spanish

When Spanish Civil War ends in 1939, some of the women who played a leading role in the creative and literary boom known as Generation of 1927, stay in Spain, sacrificing the spirit that had enlightened them; but many others take the hard and long path of exile.

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.”

Marisol: llámame Pepa

May 2024 •Spanish

A portrait of the actress and singer Pepa Flores, an incarnation of the recent history of Spain, who, in just twenty-five years of intense career, went from being Marisol, child prodigy of the Franco dictatorship, to being one of the first communist militants, icon of the Transition; an idol of the masses who became a discreet person after having claimed her right to remain silent.

Dr Tscharniblues

June 1979 •German

Bern, 1979: a tower block called Tscharnergut. A group of friends get together to make a film about their experiences growing up in suburban Switzerland.

Far Away

April 2024 •Spanish

A landscape is only a landscape until we know what lies beneath. Pozo Ibarra, in the Central Mountains of León, is a mining complex full of significant architectural attributes, and also the imposing and ruinous remnant of a painful past that passed the ideas of freedom, literally, through the stone, turned into a great mass grave. Now, when the sun goes down, the souls that inhabit it rise up, refusing to forget.

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.

Tscharniblues II

January 2019 •German

Bern, 1979: a tower block called Tscharnergut. Together with a few friends (among them famous Swiss actor Stefan Kurt), director Aron Nick's father and uncle shoot the idealistic Super 8 film "Dr Tscharniblues" ("The Tscharni Blues") – a wild, unvarnished self-portrait of their generation. 40 years later, Nick gathers the friends at Tscharnergut and asks what has happened to them and their ideals in the meantime. What have the achieved? What have they lost? Past, present, and future clash and form a journey of personal disappointments, hopes, and a collective search for identity. In "Tscharniblues II," Aron Nick discovers a kind of friendship that can weather anything.

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.

Las sinsombrero II: ocultas e impecables

March 2019 •Spanish

When Spanish Civil War ends in 1939, some of the women who played a leading role in the creative and literary boom known as Generation of 1927, stay in Spain, freely or not, sacrificing the spirit that had enlightened them, adapting themselves —or pretending to do so— to the new feminine role imposed by the victors, who were determined to cage these free souls at home, to live just as wives and mothers.

Song 5

March 1964 •English

SONG 5: A childbirth song (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).

Night Lunch

December 1975 •English

This is Poe and Král's first effort, shot on small-gauge stock, before their more well-known endeavor The Blank Generation (1976) came to be. A "DIY" portrait of the New York music scene, the film is a patchwork of footage of numerous rock acts performing live, at venues like Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the dive bars of Greenwich Village and, of course, CBGB.

El instante decisivo

July 2022 •Spanish

Spain, 1997. The story of twelve days in July during which Basque society left indifference and fear behind and faced the threat of the terrorist group ETA.

The Scars

March 2019 •Basque

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

The Pollinators

August 2019 •English

Our complex food system rests on the wings of the honey bee and the commercial beekeepers that move them from farm to orchard, pollinating the crops that we eat.

Ventana en Carrer de Badajoz

September 2021 •Spanish

Archive of Life

June 2024 •English

This documentary short-film follows the story of The White Bus Cinema based in Southend-on-Sea. They keep the process of projecting real celluloid film alive by showing films from their archive of over 3,000 films, ranging from Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm prints. The film argues why it's important to continue the shooting and projection process of film in our current age of digital shooting and projection in modern Hollywood, amidst the chaos of studios removing films from their streaming services.