In the late '90s Balazs's family is falling apart front of his brand new VHS camera he got for his 8th birthday.
Mom
Grandma
Balázs
Doctor
In Razor Blades, Paul SHARITS consciously challenges our eyes, ears and minds to withstand a barrage of high powered and often contradictory stimuli. In a careful juxtaposition and fusion of these elements on different parts of our being, usually occurring simultaneously, we feel at times hypnotised and re-educated by some potent and mysterious force.
A sexual reverie unfolds over the course of one ethereal night. Characters wander through an erotic maze of love and lust, blurring the lines between wet dream and lucid nightmare as a macabre, erotic stage performance sends a ripple of lustful desires through its audience and performers.
The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.
Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.
This is the only feature directed by the famed French painter and sculptor Martial Raysse. In keeping with the revolutionary spirit of the time, the movie has no plot to speak of and appears to have been largely made up on the spot. We follow the cat man into a bizarre fantasy universe presented in negative exposure that reverses color values (black is white and vice versa) and written words. The cat man steals a car and then picks up a young girl he promises to take to “Heaven.” Heaven turns out to be a country chateau inhabited by several more animal mask wearing weirdoes...
Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive
Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.
In the final days of the American Civil War, an emigre Hungarian military officer attempts to map the situation of the enemy. Many veterans of the 1848 War of Independence in Hungary fought on the northern side. Experienced Fiala, Boldogh who struggles with homesickness and the reckless Vereczky all experience their enforced emigration in different ways and news of impending peace elicits different reactions from them all.
A Japanese salaryman finds his body transforming into a weapon through sheer rage after his son is kidnapped by a gang of violent thugs.
A personal, subjective journey into the mind of Greta Thunberg, before realizing her calling as a climate activist. While struggling with mental health issues and bullying because of her Aspergers, she also grapples with the sense of impending doom due to the climate crisis. These same struggles and fears drive her to make change and become the person she is today.
Playtime’s cosmopolitan spectacle, presented in a kaleidoscopic montage across seven large screens, interconnects the lives of its archetypical characters—hedge fund managers and art world players in London; a photographer in Reykjavik; and a Filipina houseworker in Dubai—each of whom is based on a real-life individual directly affected by the market collapse.
Set in the dark depths of a strange and mysterious power supply complex, ELLIOT tells the tale of a conflicted humanoid (Elliot) struggling to maintain his reality and understand his true identity. Elliot is thrust into a disconcerting downward spiral of despair in which he is forced to recognize the perils of his own cognition and constructed ideals in a crumbling universe where the lines between fantasy, simulation, and reality are blurred, and the fibers of Elliot’s fragile existence are ruptured.
A short film recounting the travels of a lonely astronaut confronted by the unknown. Unfolding as a mystery, it becomes a carefully subtle, autobiographical examination of the feeling of loneliness and the existential issue of not understanding life on earth and ones place among it.
Marguerite loses her wallet, and it's found by Georges, a seemingly happy head of family. As he looks through the wallet and examines the photos of Marguerite, he finds he's fascinated with her and her life, and soon his curiosity about her becomes an obsession.
A man and woman embark on a sexual journey to detach mind from body. The relationship slowly grows into one of emotional domination, physical disease, abandonment and the creation of personal pornography.
Hermitage, defined by Bene as "a rehearsal for lenses", beyond any literal rendition - its narrative trace comes from one of his anti-novels, Credito Italiano V.E.R.D.I - displays his immediate attitude to thinking a cinematic language completely based on actor's movements and actions, and more specifically, on his presence and his schemes. Camouflaged or naked, still or moving, his body seems to play and be played at the same time, shifted by objective and subjective tensions, both metaphorically and visually speaking.
A Hollywood actor grows tired of making the same corporate movies, so he moves to Argentina to find more experimental and meaningful work.
An attempt to bring the work of surrealist artists to a wider public. The plot is that of an average Joe who can conjure up dreams that will improve his customer's lives. This frame story serves as a link between several avant-garde sequences created by leading visual artists of their day, most of whom were emigres to the US during WWII.