Bufo Alvarius – The Underground Secret

Chumlum

December 1963 •English

Ron Rice's Chumlum is one of those films in which the conditions of its construction are integral to the experience of watching it. It is a record of a cadre of creative people having fun on camera, playing dress-up, dancing, flirting, lazing around.

Day Tripper

January 1966 •French

A woman walks, loves, eats and washes herself, dances. It all takes place in a bedroom. At times flashbacks, or visualizations of previous or following scenes. Unless her life in the bedroom becomes an obsession, she lives through the other scenes.

Homeo

November 1967 •English

Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.

Chromo sud

January 1968 •English

One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,' depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. - Experimental Film Club

Smoulder

November 2021 •English

Fresh off a relationship, Briar finds a waning comfort in an old script, and a new friend.

Alone in a Valley

May 2017 •English

A creative director of an Advertising Agency, going through an experience that he has never encountered before, where time has stopped.

Highway

January 2021 •English

A man suffers from the effects of a mysterious psychedelic in a seemingly endless forest.

New Old

November 1979 •French

"Chronicles of the Present Times" - An experimental trilogy. New Old flows together footage from more than a decade of his wandering between scenes, sets, and drugs, an accelerated world tour through various iterations of the counterculture.

Green is Neutral in a Purple World

October 2023 •English

A queer poet navigates heartbreak through writing, techno, and self-destruction.

Under The Rainbow

June 2015 •English

Vivi finds herself in a mysterious world and must face an ominous Queen to unlock the secrets of this mystical world, as well as her own existence. Under the Rainbow is a psychedelic dark fantasy/horror adventure.

Fungimentary: The Magic Mushrooms of Balingup

October 1995 •English

Tongue-in-cheek investigation into the impact of the sudden discovery of magic mushrooms growing in an 'enchanted forest', near the tiny rural town of Balingup, in south-West Australia.

The Forgotten Imperial Army

August 1963 •Japanese

Oshima exposes the fact that many wounded soldiers cannot receive compensation from the Japanese government because of their Korean nationality, while questioning if this is a just way for the Japanese to act. The documentary uses TV to problematize the apathy of the Japanese people. According to Oshima’s 'The Idea of Evil and Cruelty' and Sato Tadao’s 'History of Japanese Documentary Film', the actual situation was much more serious and harsher than the documentary depicts.

Batata

January 2022 •Arabic

In March 2012, Syrian migrants began flooding many parts of the world, including the impoverished Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, searching for work and a temporary respite from the beginnings of civil unrest. Ten years and over six million refugees later, the ongoing displacement of Syrians remains the largest human-forced migration crisis of our times. Shot over an unparalleled decade, Lebanese-Syrian director Noura Kevorkian follows the plight of Maria and her community of Syrian migrant workers who, after toiling for decades in Lebanon's fertile Bekaa Valley, find themselves unable to return to their hometown of Raqqa, Syria. Unique among the numerous refugee stories to date, Batata showcases Kevorkian's keen eye and unrelenting commitment, capturing an entire decade of marriages, births and deaths. What is documented is not just the age-old conflict between Syria and Lebanon, but more importantly, the unbending spirit of a woman who puts family and community ahead of all else.

Autopsie d'une intelligence artificielle

October 2022 •French

A Parked Life

January 2022 •Bulgarian

A Parked Life is an intimate portrait of Petar Bonchev, one of the hundreds of thousands of Eastern European truck drivers who work in the west.

Dubai Road Express

Invalid date •English

In 1976, Scania commissioned a film to document the maiden trucking journey between Norway and Dubai on a route called the Dubai Road Express.

Monika

October 1975 •German

Lee Strasberg: The Method Man

July 1997 •English

Documentary about the life of Lee Strasberg and the creation of Actor's Studio and the introduction of The Method in the USA.

The Tuck Rule

February 2022 •English

Without the Tuck Rule, Tom Brady wouldn't have won his first playoff game – and who knows where his destiny might have gone from there. But whether what happened on January 19, 2002 was the right call or a terrible call, divine providence or deep conspiracy, one thing is certain: The life of Tom Brady, as well as the life of the Hall of Famer who hit him on the play, Brady's college teammate Charles Woodson, was forever changed that night.

Miracle on 19th Street

November 2021 •English

Nothing captures the magic of Christmas like a visit to Santa Claus. This beloved NYC store Santa, after nearly 30 years, is heading to the North Pole, leaving behind an indelible mark on generations of children and families. To them, he is the real deal.