OLO, the Boy from Tibet

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Carnet de identidad

May 1970 •Spanish

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.

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.

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.

Karmapa - Two Ways of Divinity

March 1998 •English

The main characters of the film are two small boys who share the throne of Karmapa, the highest office of one of Tibetan Buddhism's main sects and the third in line after the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama. As with the Dalai Lama, Karmapa is the same soul which reincarnates in each successor to the office, who is identified by omens, portents and other signs. The Karmapa line actually pre-dates the Dalai Lama's, and their respective importance has alternated in the course of history with either the Karmapa or Dalai Lama holding precedence. Only one of the current Karmapas lives in Tibet, who is recognized by the Dalai Lama but controlled by the Chinese government for political ends. The second Karmapa lives in New Delhi, India and was selected by a Tibetan group in exile. The film was shot in India, Nepal and Tibet and features the Dalai Lama as narrator, providing an incisive spiritual and political view of occupied Tibet.

Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung

January 1997 •

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

Jelena: Unbreakable

Invalid date •English

The remarkable story of Jelena Dokic – an elite tennis star who beat the best in the world with a mental toughness few could match. Jelena survived the turmoil of being a refugee, the pressure of centre court, and the burden of a volatile father.

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?

Wann wird es endlich wieder Sommer

February 2018 •German

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.

Sky and Ground

November 2017 •English

Three generations of the Nabi family flee their home in Aleppo and try to make it to safety in Germany where some members of the family have already settled. Along the way they suffer countless setbacks and heartache.

Lost Case

December 2014 •Czech

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

One Second in Montreal

September 1969 •English

A silent succession of black-and-white photographs of the city of Montreal.

Pelle vegetale. Un'intervista

May 2019 •Italian