HoLy Cycles

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

July 1987 •English

The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.

Transfer

January 1966 •English

A psychiatrist and his needy patient discuss their relationship in a snow-covered field.

Thlípsi

December 2018 •English

A man who is paranoid and deluded by his own conspiracies that someone out there is after him must come to terms with the root of his suffering.

The Game

January 1962 •

In this child's game, a live-action boy and girl draw characters and compete who is better. The girl draws a flower and the boy draws a car that runs it over. Then a drawn lion chases a drawn girl, until it all becomes frightfully serious.

Death of a Stag

January 1951 •French

Russian emigré Dimitri Kirsanoff’s film, alternatively titled Death of A Stag and Une chasse à courre, is a post-war study of a traditional stag hunt. The pursuit of the animal finds a cross-cutting parallel in the felling of a tree in the forest.

Freedom & Independence

April 2015 •English

Against the backdrop of an unfathomable megalopolis, in a story that follows the associative qualities of a dream logic, the protagonists quote from concepts of neo-liberal elitism, and a mix of religious delusions and hallucinations of the apocalypse. The film begins in a sacral space, where Randi, a figure that references Ayn Rand, transforms a parapsychological medium into two digital clouds and sends them on a journey through a megalopolis in full growth. There they materialize as two bodies, which go by the names of Mr. Freedom and Ms. Independence.

Silvester Home Run

August 2008 •German

Runner's High

Invalid date •English

Grappling with the burden of loss, a drifter becomes engulfed in the reckless lifestyle of a group of bohemians. Through a series of events, he is forced to confront his trauma as his haunted past and unconventional present collide.

Children of Our Time

April 2019 •

Three kids are trying to stand strong. In a world where you don’t know for what you want to stay strong. Full of sexuality and the need to define their identity. “We are the children with no obligations, the most possibilities, with the most liberated freedom. We are children who build words. Children who give birth to children. We are children of our time, free from guilt.”

Bruja

June 2019 •German

A story of diaspora. The film criticises the myth of Swiss neutrality, which violently masks structural, systemic, and social passivity.

Marital Rape Is Real

April 2016 •English

Marital Rape Is Real is a short film adapted from several published essays on marital rape by Shanon Lee.

Alpsee

October 1995 •English

For a young boy, ordinary facts and things of daily life seem to have great importance.

American Torso

January 1975 •Hungarian

The film depicts the lives of veterans of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution in the American Civil War, based in part on an Ambrose Bierce story. The whole film was re-edited using his own method called "light editing" in order to make it resemble a damaged silent film from the late 1800s.

BARE BONES

September 2020 •English

BARE BONES is an experimental short film written, directed and scored by DEBBY FRIDAY. Conceived during the Covid-19 lockdown and shot in Vancouver, BC on 16mm, the film tells the story of a young woman who swallows a bee and begins to undergo a hallucinatory and transformative experience. Abstract visual sequences depict time and space fracturing around her as she succumbs to wave after wave of pure feeling.

O'er the Land

January 2009 •English

A meditation on freedom and technological approaches to manifest destiny.

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

September 2016 •Dutch

An experimental docu-fiction short from hours of collected material shot by the director. Different scenes, from drunk parties with friends to shots of the Dutch landscape during a train ride, are cut together to see if a narrative story can be constructed from nothing but randomly shot footage.

Normality

January 2014 •Norwegian

Normality is a human state of good intentions, empathy, caring and wanting to do the best for those we love and the world at large.

The Journey

April 1992 •Spanish

A young man living in a cold southern village in South America, decides to start a trip looking for his father. By doing this he discovers unexpected facts about his Latin American essence.

Beijing Bicycle

January 2002 •Chinese

A seventeen-year-old country boy working in Beijing as a courier has his bicycle stolen, and finds it with a schoolboy his age.

The Image Burns

November 2013 •Spanish

Lois Patiño dissects the movement of a fire, analyses its fleeting ephemeral forms, and transforms them with sound to enrich the meaning of the images. The Image Burns begins as a reflection on our perception and becomes an intense interaction between the parts, between the images and the spectator. We look at the fire and the fire looks back at us.