Mountain Vigil

Spectrum

September 2019 •

A 1963 timelapse recording shows the effects of air pollution during an entire day on Santa Monica Bay in Los Angeles. A machine interpretation of an unstable version of the original file is divided into slits and rearranged in time, giving rise to a time panorama that mirrors an uncertain, abstract future lying ahead of us.

Shoot Me

September 2013 •English

The Iranian filmmaker Narges Kalhor, daughter of a former advisor of Ahmadinejad's, has been living in exile in Germany for four years. When she hears that the fellow Iranian rapper Shahin Najafi, who is also living in exile in Germany, faces death threats and has to hide because of one of his songs, she doesn't hesitate and has to find him. On her search she encounters fear everywhere. Narges Kalhor has to face her inconvenient memories of suppression, hatred and anger for her past in Iran.

Carnet de identidad

May 1970 •Spanish

Untitled (Pink Dot)

January 2007 •Japanese

In Untitled (Pink Dot), Murata transforms footage from the Sylvester Stallone film First Blood (1982) 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.

Genova Genova

April 1984 •French

A song of love to the city of Genoa. The film wanders the streets of the city center and explore the beautiful cemetery and then climb the hills which offer an amazing view over the old town crossed by a highway and port.

Slaughterhouse

July 2001 •English

Documentary about a slaughterhouse in Quito, where hundreds of people and entire families work everyday. The smell of the place is warm and penetrating, the noise is intense, everything is red. Would that much effort and death have an ulterior purpose?

Lost Case

December 2014 •Czech

A completely new story based on existing footage from the series Columbo.

The Day When...

January 1997 •French

Chantal Akerman reads a script detailing the woes that befell her on the day she thought about "The Future of Cinema". The camera continuously rotates 360 degrees around her apartment as she rereads the script at an exponentially increasing speed. At its heart, an homage to Godard.

The Man Who Saved the World

October 2012 •English

During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Soviet Navy officer Vasily Arkhipov refused to launch a nuclear strike and saved the world from nuclear war and total destruction.

Expiration

July 1976 •

Short experimental film.

Closed Beaches

Invalid date •

Beaches are closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the middle class must survive the tropicals.

Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head

January 1991 •French

The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.

45 Days: The Fight for a Nation

September 2021 •English

A feature documentary presented and directed by former Royal Marines Commando Emile Ghessen. The documentary tells the story of the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno Karabakh. In the fall of 2020, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a brutal bloody war. Azerbaijan won, decisively. The feature documentary 45 Days: The Fight for a Nation tells the story of this conflict, from the Armenian perspective, focusing on the human cost of war and its impact on the large Armenian diaspora.

EXPRMNTL

October 2016 •English

Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Festival of Film and the Arts’ in 1949, organised in part by the Royal Cinematheque of Belgium. To celebrate cinema’s 50 year existence, they put together a side program showcasing the medium in all its shapes and forms: surrealist film, absolute film, dadaist films, abstract film,… The side program would soon become a festival in its own right: ‘EXPRMNTL’, dedicated to experimental cinema, and would become a mythical gathering of the avant-garde…

The Cars We Drove into Capitalism

October 2021 •Bulgarian

A cinematic, character-driven insight to what it meant to produce and to own a car in communist times: the Socialist propaganda dreams and the hard reality of living that dream. The freedom that these slow and clumsy vehicles were giving to their owners; the cars as an instrument in the Cold War battle; legends and homemade tune-ups as an attempt to stand at least a little bit off the crowd.

Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung

January 1997 •

Experimental short made by Olivier Assayas for Fondation of Contemporary Art and starring Maggie Cheung.

Notes on the Circus

May 1967 •English

The short film is a montage of sped up clips of The Ringling Brothers Circus in action set to a musical track. The film is separated into four segments, each segment which focuses on different acts within the circus. The later segments often incorporate clips from earlier segments, mostly as background to the featured acts. The speed of the clips match the tempo of the soundtrack music.

Maniac Summer

December 2009 •French

Maniac Summer consists of images and sounds recorded in Paris in the summer of 2009. It is a sprawling triptych without a beginning or end and with no specific subject or topic. The camera is positioned in front of a window and left running. It observes movements, registers noises coming from the street or nearby park, captures Chantal Akerman going about her business in her apartment: smoking, working, talking on the telephone. Fragments from the artist’s everyday life are featured in the installation’s central video, while the adjoining panels are more symbolically charged; in them, various images from the former have been isolated, modified and repeated. These abstract afterimages act as a kind of memory, looking back to the images in the installation’s centrepiece as so many shadows of its reality.

Joanna Lumley: The Search for Noah's Ark

December 2012 •English

In search of the truth behind the story of Noah's Flood, Joanna Lumley and her team examine the theory that Noah's Ark was preserved on Mount Ararat, in Turkish Armenia.

I, Apostate

November 2018 •English

A fantasia of post-indoctrination, immigration, and iconography. A pageant of wanderers and searchers: Mormon missionaries, a pioneer, polygamists, scouts, hunters, church-goers, and an aspiring prophet walk and walk and walk. A pilgrimage of memory, history, ancestry, and place.