The Announcer

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.

Track Two

February 2023 •Finnish

A newspaper clip of a 30-year-old movie makes our middle-aged protagonist in the middle of his peak years to look for his best childhood friend. The journey leads him back to his teenage years in the 1990s depression, over-generational substance abuse and past encounters. This partly essayistic, autobiographical documentary tells the story of friendship and generational experiences while also pondering on the causes and effects of destinies in the judgmental atmosphere of our society.

Forever Yours

November 2011 •Finnish

Forever Yours is a film about children who have been taken into custody. Through the children, their biological parents and foster parents, the film depicts love in everyday life. The film explores the invisible bond between a child and a biological parent. Even when a child is taken into custody, the yearning for closeness to the biological parents and need for their approval never seems to disappear. This longing is a form of loneliness that the foster parents struggle to overcome. The film describes the entire foster care process: a child being brought into a shelter home, a teenager’s everyday life in a foster family, and siblings preparing to return to their biological mother, after five years in a foster family.

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

Under Construction

December 2023 •Finnish

Markku built a house for his family with his own bare hands like a strong man is supposed to do. He worked hard from dawn to dusk, so that his seven children would have a roof above their heads. Unfortunately, the task ended up being too hard and Markku burnt out. One day, he left his family and disappeared abroad. The filmmaker travels to his childhood home to face his father, who he never got to know properly. Together they build a steel gate in front of the unfinished house, and try to create a relationship between each other.

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.

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.

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…

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.

Naalin paluu

January 2023 •Finnish

The film follows two years of the extremely endangered arctic fox's attempt to return to Finnish nature as a breeding species, as well as the people who try to save the species. Kimmo Ohtonen's tireless toil is finally rewarded, when he manages to capture for the first time in Finland the journey of an arctic fox family in almost 30 years, from the start of romance to raising pups. This is the first time that the reproduction of an arctic fox has been recorded on video. There is a unique journey in the foothills of the North, culminating in a historic event.

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.