All Films

Hokus Pokus is a work about the constant cycles of life and death, about the 4 seasons, the sense of coming to life and a philosophical skeleton that builds a portal to enter a parallel reality. If you were thinking of becoming a wizard, perhaps you have been one all along.

The film is shot inside a prayer hall of a Buddhist temple. In the background of its single tableau shot, we see an enormous gold-framed reproduction of an untitled painting by Jeff Koons that is displayed frontally on the left side of the screen. Beside it, toward the right side of the screen, there is a reproduction of a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, which is encased in a matching gold frame equal in size to the one framing Koons's work. In the foreground, there are several rows of lively spectator-figures, children and neatly dressed older women - including Araya herself - all of whom are sitting with their backs to the camera on a fandango pink carpet facing the two reproductions. A figure stands next to the framed reproductions and faces the camera. He is a Buddhist monk who delivers a humorous, didactic sermon on the third Buddhist precept, the prohibition of sexual misconduct, using the images as visual aids.

On their rite or passage journey, life-long friends Chu'a and Kele set off into the forest unaware of an ancient being that awaits them in the dark.

faded pink super 8 film print - library copy of select scenes from Jaws - from Lorain, Ohio public library - treated with black fabric dye enriched with heavy metals: iron and zinc vitamins, celluloid grated with stone, whipped with hair headbanging, impressed with thumb and pink prints devil ears.

Documentary combining eyewitness testimony and expert interviews with original archive material to explore the story of lawyer Hans Litten's public attempt to challenge Hitler.

Performance for El Museo's Bienal: The (S) Files 2011, in Time Square, New York.

In all the borders of Iran, smuggling of fuels is so prevalent that many people are engaged with it. The type of equipment for carrying the smuggled cargo is based on the geographical situation, but in all situations human beings play the most important role. The reasons for smuggling also vary, based on the existing situation in these areas. This film follows smugglers who work on the boarder between West Iran and Iraq (Kurdistan). It accompanies people who don’t talk to anybody during the day, seeing their daily lives and the jobs related to smuggling. Their cargo is taken over mountains and valleys, eventually reaching their final destination in Iraq. Here they find a kind of traditional café that allows the labourers to rest.

"Breaking the Wall of Silence" is a documentary that depicts a brave, peaceful, vulnerable culture fighting against an aggressive neighbor. It is a story of personal sacrifice and strength of soul. Tibetan monks, risking their lives, are trying to overcome the Himalayas and return to their native Tibet. The authors of the film create a compelling portrait of the Dalai Lama, the leader of the Tibetan spirit. The film begins with the Voice of Tibet, a small radio station that broadcasts independent news to Tibet. China is trying in various ways to stop the operation of this radio station.

Behind the strike that killed Osama bin Laden last week was one of the U.S. military's best-kept secrets: a covert campaign that officials have credited with taking out thousands of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. A six-month investigation by FRONTLINE has gone inside the military's "kill/capture" operations to discover new evidence of the program's impact, and its costs.

Lou Reed at Lou Reed at the Vieilles Charrues Festival, France. July 17, 2011

Enter the multidimensional maze of the Ethereal Chrysalis, where the doors of perception become the annihilation of all rational thoughts.

In early May of 1941, an unemployed Woody Guthrie and his wife, Mary, packed their three children into a battered Pontiac and left southern California for Portland, Oregon. All he had waiting for him in the Northwest was the job of writing songs for a documentary film about the dams being built on the Columbia River. This film details the thirty day contract Woody had as a temporary worker for the Bonneville Power Administration.

In 2003, Rosler announced an open call for a live re-staging of her 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen, to be held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, for A Short History of Performance, Part II. Twenty-six women — actors, artists, curators, and museum staff among them — participated in a rotating performance of the work. On three sets stocked with kitchen utensils, the participants enacted the work in front of an audience, while their performances also appeared on monitors throughout the gallery. At the end of the performance, the three groups of women came together to present the last few gestures of the video — including its final shrug. Semiotics of the Kitchen: An Audition documents the preliminary rehearsals with Rosler and the public event, the “audition.”

Pharmaceutical companies were granted a six-month patent extension in 1997 for any drug that was tested on children. I went to a park to stage a body politic art/protest pop-up, critical of the US Department of Health and Human Services’ support of for-profit pediatric research. The kids at the park take over!

Revisiting the relationship between comics and cinema, architecture and space, sounds and movement.

Contemporary ambiguities on the Jersey shore: the look is secular, the lifestyle capitalist, the religion orthodox. 40,000 Syrian Jews have moved into a landscape previously occupied by Irish, Italian, and the quite different sect of Askenazi Jews. The “unmelted pot” of America’s small towns is set within memory and contemporary oppositions. What does it mean to have class in America? What does it mean to be Jewish? I think of conflicts between Israel and Palestine, Serbia and Bosnia, India and Pakistan: neighboring families and races split apart by religion. Extreme poverty enforces the tribal, while extreme wealth maintains it. Surf and Turf provides no easy answers but raises issues that have too long stayed behind closed doors: what do we say when we think no one is listening?

Documentation of a performance art piece about the artist’s mother, incorporating video, audio recording, and photography; performed live in Studio 9 at the San Francisco Art Institute.

In 2010, an interactive animation based on Zdeněk Sklenář's illustrations for the book The Monkey King (Czech 1961) was created for presentation at the EXPO in Shanghai. One of the co-authors of the animation was Martin Búřil. The basis of the video Monoscope no. 3 is the basis of the flat animation of the stories of The Monkey King, from which all graphic data of the original illustrations has been removed. His fights with the Jade Emperor are converted into collisions of colored rectangles of a generic monoscope, a calibration pattern that automatically replaces missing data in the After Effects software. Búřil's Monoscope is a technical ready-made and an animated film of pure form devoid of content. If the original Monkey King was an extension of Sklenář's drawings with a media superstructure, Monoscope is a pure manifestation of this superstructure, everything that was added to the original artistic content.

Rukani (Yamazaki), a middle-aged man with a cosplay fetish, tries to shoot an adult video featuring a woman named Karinpa (Komoda) as his model. However, whenever things start to get erotic, a mysterious red bat suddenly appears out of nowhere and gets in the way.

With special access to the site of the San José, Chile, mine, the mining engineers and the miners families, NOVA chronicles the miners 69-day ordeal and the work of a global team of engineers who struggled tirelessly around the clock in a desperate bid to bring the trapped miners safely to the surface.

This was the first work I shot using stop-motion photography on 8mm film. I was conscious of not wanting to create any predictable movement between each frame.

A documentary about simultaneous interpreters. Two interpreters sit in a booth. Using headsets, they listen to prerecorded English interview passages (these "originals" are inaudible to the viewer), which they simultaneously translate into German. The source interviews are conversations with translators, translation scholars, interpreters, politicians, philosophers of language, neurolinguists, and others. Approaching the process of translation from a great variety of perspectives, the film also allows the viewer to become part of that process.

An alchemy of one man’s image and another man’s words. A portrait that maintains its right to stay a mystery. A song, a riddle, an owl, frozen shoreline, urban savannah: fragments of brief encounters with wild and urban creatures and tender gestures in unsettling environments. A tribute to men full of secrets.