The Black Screen

Magnicidios Poe

January 2017 •Spanish

The sarcastic account of the assassination of five Spanish politicians between 1870 and 1973 is mixed with the narration of five short stories by Edgar Allan Poe illustrated by five skillful pencil artists. A documentary, a video essay, a collage, a provocative experiment where various pop culture figures and icons perform unexpected cameos. The macabre joke of a jester. Never more.

The Indispensable Practice of Vagueness

October 2014 •Portuguese

By the director: "Ar.Co embodies each person’s geography, it escapes normalisation. Each individual’s experience is his own. This film is my experience, our experience. Pieced together from the school’s archive, from recordings of classes by Manuel Castro Caldas and from conversations at home."

Moving Memories

Invalid date •Portuguese

On April 1st, 2022, my grandfather passed away and i felt lost. I think my path changed when, some days after he passed away, i was offered a small VHS camera. "Moving Memories" is a visual journey that makes the viewer reflect on our momentary presence on earth and questions the nature of memory. Throughout this journey, we get to the conclusion that memories are more than just static photographs in our minds, they're alive and in constant movement, changing while we evolve as individuals. These memories have influence and help us to move on.

A Film Inspired by Real Events

December 2019 •Turkish

Through the footage from his family's Handycam, the director creates a portrait of his family that is falling apart.

Ozu: Passageways

December 2012 •English

People constantly appear walking through passageways in the films of Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu (1903-63). His art resides in the in-between spaces of modern life, in the transitory: alleys are no longer dark and threatening traps where suspense is born, but simple places of passage.

Apple Pie

July 2016 •English

Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes thought-provoking connections between life on Earth and the cosmos, and, ultimately, art and science. Structured around the ten most significant celestial bodies of the Milky Way, Apple Pie’s inquiry begins with the furthest point in our solar system, Pluto, as a lens back towards our home planet and the ‘mechanisms by which certain aspects of scientific knowledge are digested, appropriated and subsequently manifest within the general human complex’. Christopher Francis Schiel’s dry, functional narration brings a network of ideas about our existence into focus, while Hamilton’s visual tableaux, as an extension of his multifaceted practice, veer imaginatively between psychedelic imagery and performance art.

Magritte or the Object Lesson

January 1960 •French

The surrealist painter René Magritte questions the objective reality and emphasizes the arbitrariness of the relationship between an object, its image and its name: the evocation of mystery consists of images of familiar things gathered or transformed in such a way that they no longer conform to our ideas, whether naive or wise.

Visions of Europe

May 2004 •English

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

March 1967 •French

As the city of Paris and the French people grow in consumer culture, a housewife living in a high-rise apartment with her husband and two children takes to prostitution to help pay the bills.

The Making of Transformers the Premake

May 2020 •English

The mind process behind the film, Transformers the Premake, explained by Kevin B Lee himself.

#movieofmylife

July 2017 •English

Premiered at the 2017 Locarno International Film Festival.

What I Learned at the Harun Farocki Residency

June 2017 •English

In this video I share my experience as the first Resident of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin during the winter of 2016-2017. Produced for the Goethe Institute.

Don't Work (1968-2018)

July 2018 •French

A year in the life of Elsa Michaud and Gabriel Gauthier, students of Fine Arts in Paris, lovers in troubled times, overwhelmed by maddening verbal and auditory stimuli, witnesses of a globalized violence more visible than ever in a chaotic digital era, in which the slow execution of simple gestures in a silent performance is an act of resistance.

Jetzt hier, nirgends

June 2020 •German

A short movie about dreams and the personalities we become in an unknown world where everything is possible.

Bruja

June 2019 •German

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

Heimat Is a Space in Time

September 2019 •German

Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a country, of a century.

Blin Cat

July 2015 •Russian

A video essay about a conversation the director had with a friend about a particular picture of a cat sitting in front of a plate of blins.

Fake Fiction

September 2018 •German

October in Madrid

January 1965 •French

Initially a made-to-order documentary on Spain, the film becomes an open-ended work-in-the-making about the creative process. “Settling in the Spanish capital to make a documentary, Hanoun sketches out for us the different steps involved in making a film. The author turns his hesitations, his doubts and difficult working conditions into the constituents of his work”. (Raphaël Bassan)

Zaniklý svět Karla Pecky

March 2000 •Czech