Montage V: How to Play Pinball

Land Without Bread

December 1933 •Spanish

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time. (Silent short, voiced in 1937 and 1996.)

Catalan

January 1984 •English

A short film created for Spanish TV touching on the subject of Catalonia's struggle for independence, interspersed with symbolic images.

Mr Hublot

October 2013 •

Mr Hublot is a withdrawn, idiosyncratic character with OCD, scared of change and the outside world. Robot Pet's arrival turns his life upside down: he has to share his home with this very invasive companion.

The Mirror/Mirror The

October 2022 •English

A socially awkward teen gets caught between a changing friendship and a life-altering discovery.

SAFE

November 2022 •German

A newbie of the criminal underworld is tasked to transfer and extract some mysterious data, but they bit off more than they can chew.

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

June 1896 •French

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

Napoleon Bunny-Part

June 1956 •English

Bugs takes a wrong turn off the Hollywood freeway and tunnels into the headquarters of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Rabbitson Crusoe

April 1956 •English

Crusoe, played by Yosemite Sam, has been living off coconuts for 20 years when Bugs washes up on his island.

Black Is

November 1965 •English

To the sound of a heartbeat and made entirely without the use of a camera, this film projects abstract forms and illuminations on a night-black background and suggests as Tambellini says, “seed black, seed black, sperm black, sperm black.”

Eleven Eleven

September 2011 •English

This is a story about love.

Antoine and Colette

June 1962 •French

Now aged 17, Antoine Doinel works in a factory which makes records. At a music concert, he meets a girl his own age, Colette, and falls in love with her. Later, Antoine goes to extraordinary lengths to please his new girlfriend and her parents, but Colette still only regards him as a casual friend. First segment of “Love at Twenty” (1962).

Muted

September 2020 •English

A young woman is struggling with her mental health, as it begins to slowly push her over the edge.

Forward, Comrades

June 2013 •Chinese

A young girl who treated her pets as comrades and liked to play with construction blocks, experiences her life changing after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

TransTrans (TransformersTransformed)

September 2009 •English

A radical remix of the recent Transformers film, via synthetic collapse and critical revenge on its old & new fascist tropes > celebrating SPEED. NOISE. + DANGER. The fervent declarations & violent poetry of the Futurists are superimposed on the mythic morphology of the Autobot blockbuster’s machine mayhem. Images of death & destruction reign in a delirium of transformations as, to quote Marinetti: “We Decompose the Universe!”

The Wrong Side of Town

October 2018 •English

Jacob, Tony, and Brandon are on a night drive through the wooded outskirts of an unknown city. While his friends sleep, Jacob remembers where he's seen the upcoming overpass, the man standing on the other side of it, and the abandoned parking garage sitting above the road.

Writer's Block

November 2013 •English

The short film is a poetic interpretation of the writer's mental journey during the writing process. The writer, played by Bryan Cranston (AMC’s Breaking Bad), creates a woman in his mind, played by Lela Edgar, while working on his next script.

Arekara - The Life After

February 2013 •Japanese

In February 2012, I went to Ishinomaki, a town North of Tokyo that was half destroyed by the tsunami of March 11th, 2011, to meet the disaster victims who now live in temporary housing. I spent several days in the North, under the snow, listening to these people talk candidly about what they had lived through, telling their own stories without the media as an intermediary. Their testimonies were terrifying, harsh and sad, but at the same time touching, sincere and human. From the pictures and interviews that I collected, I decided to make a film, not to reflect how awful the events were, but to communicate the singular and even surreal nature of each person’s experience. My intention wasn’t so much to focus on this particular event in Japan, but rather to make these stories more universal as a way of paying tribute to all the victims of natural disasters throughout the world.

Video Home System

September 2018 •English

How bootleg video kept the Pakistani film industry alive under censorship in the 1980s and 90s.

Mère Ubu

December 1998 •German

Père Ubu

November 1997 •German