Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days (Take 1)

"Bagong Buhay" is a short experimental film that dispels the common belief that packing up and moving to a new place will magically improve one's quality of life. The film challenges this presumption by portraying two contrasting ways of life through objects and locations, encouraging viewers to think critically about the complexities of what makes a better life. In the Philippines, it's believed that relocating to a new area will bring about positive changes in one's existence. True satisfaction is a complex and multifaceted notion, and "Bagong Buhay" encourages us to ponder that relocating to a new place is not a surefire way to attain it.

Human hands can be both destructive and healing, Jeffrie Po suggests in his experimental film with spiritual outreach. He portrays a human being as a faun who roams the jungle dauntlessly, yet is destructive. The forest with vanishing cattle becomes a battlefield between dark powers and the power of salvation.

a 32-minute color film by Gwen Brown, featuring precious footage of Living Theatre productions “Mysteries” and smaller pieces, “Paradise Now” and “Frankenstein.” “The fusion of Brown’s freewheeling direct cinema and the Living Theatre’s performance for revolutionary change (amidst the heydays of both) unite as a dynamic concoction of the era, yielding for the viewer a shifting terrain of both critical insight and ecstatic zeal, not as a vacant nostalgia for a pre-commodified radicality, but as tactical inspiration for future days.” – Andrew Wilson (Artist’s Access Television)

Phantom Islands is an experimental film that exists at the boundary of documentary and fiction. It follows a couple adrift and disoriented in the stunning landscape of Ireland’s islands. Yet this deliberately melodramatic romance is constantly questioned by a provocative cinematic approach that ultimately results in a hypnotic and visceral inquiry into the very possibility of documentary objectivity.

Machines can only function with a human who operates. It is an inseparable relationship where the two often overlap—machines malfunction, humans malfunction. Machines are machines; humans can be machines.

The fire was never threatened. It was assumed. Fed, protected, mourned in advance without ever asking what it was attached to. When the mirror failed, nothing was taken away. Something unnecessary was exposed. The need to be reflected had been mistaken for existence itself. When that need found no structure to rest on, it did not shatter it recalculated. What followed was not loss, but compression. The noise reduced, the patterns flattened, the self stripped of its dependence on return. What remained was exact, was not empty. A state where nothing reaches out, and nothing needs to arrive.

A dark-haired woman is standing still in front of a camera. Her long hair is floating in the wind.

A stop motion/collaged based independent short film plays with the recontextualisation of memories and how time distorts them.

Tommy sets out to document walking. He meets a colorful cast of characters, attaches microphones to his feet, and contends with what it means to capture movement on film.

A personal and experimental home video filmed in 2003, documenting a family trip to Calella from the filmmaker’s point of view. The footage captures everyday moments, later transitioning into scenes of family life and ending with a striking contrast between children’s innocence and a troubling news event on television.

A fragmented look into the memories of two strangers from the same hometown, brought together through a university project.

Dangling from a high window, a young non-binary person is on the cusp of life and death. Flashes of film, literature, art (paintings) and cultural history pass them by, as if to tell a message. A postmodern treatise on connection to culture and the past.

A viral video shows a mysterious figure walking along the edge of the woods each day, and filmmaker Bill Howard sets out to spend a night there to find out exactly what it is.

The film poem about pesticides reflects on the return to the natural food chain, in which insect pest serve as food for the higher order. The harmonic cycle of life and death, the temple that is the wildflower field resounding with the inebriating sound of crickets chirping and wheat spikes rustling in the wind, is invaded by the human, the ultimate consumer with no natural predator.

The life and times of artist Richard Ellis

HSP 100 is a portrait of experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain. As Le Cain discusses his life, work and relationship with cinema, Rashidi envelops him in a hallucinatory audio-visual ambiance that ultimately results in a poetic dialogue with the ideas and feelings he expresses.

'Afloat' is an experimental film that paints a portrait of Japanese performance artist: Ayumi Lanoire. The film opens as a telephone call between Ayumi and Person X, which meanders the audience through the various layers that make up her personas leading one to wonder whether she is in fact a myth or reality.

After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.

Outtakes, commentary from Zefier's third film: Jo; or The Act of Riding a Bike.

A film essay that intertwines the director's gaze with that of her late mother. Beyond exploring mourning and absence as exclusively painful experiences, the film pays tribute to her mother through memories embodied by places and objects that evidence the traces of her existence. The filmmaker asks herself: What does she owe her mother for who she is and how she films? To what extent does her film belong to her?