All Films

The Impressionists: Degas

2003 • 50 min • United Kingdom

Profoundly influenced by the Renaissance painters, Hilaire Degas pioneered precision of line and the use of the human form in space within the Impressionist school. This unique DVD study of his life and times includes delightful new footage of the Royal Ballet, Birmingham, England.

MTV: The Real World: Hook-Ups

2003 • 59 min

When a bunch of good-looking strangers are picked to live together in relative luxury, as they do in MTV's reality show "The Real World," love, or lust, is bound to happen on- and off-camera; witness the series' best and most notorious couplings. Covering the show's entire 13-year run, this riveting and more-than-slightly intrusive "documentary" contains plenty of juicy highlights.

Memory of the Silenced: The Red Dance

2003 • 59 min • Colombia

In the mid-1980s, peace initiatives between the Colombian government and the guerrilla group, FARC, led the latter to disband after two decades of fighting and establish a legal-political party, the Union Patriótica (Patriotic Union). As the UP met with some successs in local elections, it became a target of right-wing death squads and paramilitaries. So far, 3,000 UP members have been murdered or have disappeared, making it a case of political genocide unparalleled in the world. The documentary "The Red Dance" views, through the memories of survivors and relatives of victims, this period of terror and assassination. While FARC has reverted to war, a petition is pending before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) regarding human rights violations by the State of Colombia.

Lectura Brossa

2003 • 36 min • Spain

a one-woman stage reading of a Joan Brossa play

Neko Case: Live from Austin, TX

2003 • 43 min • United States of America

Country chanteuse Neko Case shows off her powerful pipes and topnotch songwriting skills in this intimate concert recorded in August 2003 for the PBS staple "Austin City Limits." The first-rate show features her distinctive fusion of country, gospel and punk sounds. In addition to her original tunes, Case performs several covers, including Bob Dylan's "Buckets of Rain" and Hank Williams' "Alone and Forsaken."

Trace Elements

2003 • 9 min

Another feature of the new digital (and visually inferior) medium is that sound plays a much more prominent role than in most of her films. Trace Elements, Nelson’s latest work, is another “sound video”, despite the fact the camera is more active this time. It feels as though only now Nelson has totally come to grips with her new technique. She approaches the moving image again through highlighting the act of shooting. This way she continues the ever-present indexical tradition of her filmmaking despite the fact that the video is based on the idea that the camera never quite finds its target. I believe the active, searching camera in Trace Elements indicates Nelson will continue making movies for many years to come.

Love Never Dies

2003 • 3 min • Norway

An old man eagerly awaits a visitor.

Guillem

2003 • 52 min

This film follows Sylvie Guillem in its frantic race around the globe and reveals the daily life of this extraordinary dancer.

Discovery HD - Secrets of Future Air Power

2003 • 45 min

Journey into a secret world where aeronautical dreams become military reality. Particle ray beam weapons, quiet supersonic flight, magnetic levitation and hyper-speed engines are all part of the technology that promises cutting-edge aircraft for 21st century combat. Learn how UCAVs - Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles - are poised to take the preeminent role in future air combat with their ability to undertake missions too dangerous for human pilots, striking land and air targets with robotic precision. Without the burden of designing for a human pilot, engineers of these robot planes - like Northrop's radical X-47 - are able to achieve some truly space-age designs. Witness the latest applications of stealth technology in aircraft like the F-22 Raptor, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and Boeing's out-of-this-world "Bird of Prey."

The Lost Film

2003 • 42 min • France, Lebanon

A copy of the filmmakers' first feature film disappeared somewhere in Yemen on the 10th anniversary of the reunification of north and south. A year later, they returned to track down the print, embarking on a journey that would take them across forbidding terrain from Sana to Aden. What they discover is a land of contradictions where film is openly reviled and secretly loved, teaching them much about their status as filmmakers in the Middle East.

Prepared Playstation 2

2003 • 17 min

This video documents one of RSG's self-playing video game consoles, hacked to exploit existing bugs and glitches in the code. In this case, a commercial skateboarding game provides the source. As hard rock, punk, and rap play in the background, the skater protagonist twitches and flails, attempting to navigate the quirky architectures RSG has "prepared." Alex Galloway writes, "I wanted to do something in the same spirit as when Nam June Paik put the magnet on top of the TV."

The Life

2003 • 10 min • South Korea

A tale of growth as father and son have the mission to climb a totem.

Sicherheitsalarm

2003 • 2 min

A disaster film. Danger is omnipresent, but vague and concentrated on its verbal invocation. From a total of 417 minutes of material from a seven-part science fiction production, Björn Kämmerer and Karoline Meiberger have distilled the quintessence of the command structure. Like in a piece of concrete music, appellative signal words (« General », « Sir! », « Commander! ») accelerate, culminating in the coda: « Catastrophe! ». New territory of retroactive science fiction: the directors' cut. »

At school

2003 • 60 min • France, Italy

The film to show a school in Naples, in an area where schooling is given no value, as is perhaps, the case in problem areas in other large Western cities.

Deliquium

2003 • 15 min

Hidden among the pounding of animal hides, All tamped into maps, their shapes Explicit replicate butterfly wings, lie the motives of Lír. The king who paid improper attention to his children. From that first fascination And it’s lascivious gaze, Came the gorged desire for substance, Among the skins, Nets, shadows and milk bottles Pried from the stomachs of metal fish, Steam, smoke and things that won’t stay, Speared, dangled, measured, divined. All dreamed through wallpaper, Or dowsed from something they drowned in long ago. Snowed in on either side, The swans, Lír’s beloved children, Begin their 800 year journey. From lake to sea A thousand more. – JM

The Scissors

2003 • 12 min • France, Morocco

Always concerned with freedom of expression, which for him is essential, mounir fatmi also considers sex, and does so with great delicacy. To make this jewel of a film, fatmi edited together censored love scenes (literally cut with scissors) from Une minute de soleil en moins. With Les Ciseaux, fatmi has produced a threefold work of memory: first of all, he preserves Ayouch’s original film, to keep it from being forgotten; secondly, he delivers a frontal critique of censorship, to keep that too from being forgotten; and thirdly, it is a discourse on love, to keep us from forgetting. Furthermore, in Les Ciseaux fatmi achieves a juxtaposition or, rather, a shifting between bodily embraces and the dreams that go with them. The memory of the lovers plays the role of the video maker, and in Les Ciseaux we go from intertwining bodies to inner images.

Behemoth

2003 • 6 min • Brazil

A sinister black magic ritual turns into a nightmare with disastrous consequences for one of its participants.

One Forty: An Intimate Portrait of the Chnoborov Brothers

2003 • 19 min • Canada

Mockumentary of the films and process of Russian-Canadians Zep and Zudo Chnoborov.

Miss Philly’s Valentine

2003 • 18 min

A "grand dame's" delirious daydream blooms like a voluptous blossom in spring.

A Onça da Mão Torta

2003 • 17 min • Brazil

A popular story from Brazil.

Zimbabwe Countdown

2003 • 55 min • France, Zimbabwe

Once touted as Zimbabwe's saviour, Robert Mugabe has become synonymous with bad government and misrule. But where did it all go wrong?

Autumn Rush for Kurt Kren and Winter and Spring and Summer

2003 • 6 min • United Kingdom

A close up observation of trees in Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, filmed in single stop frame motion on a clockwork Bolex using a 75mm and 25mm macro lens, where alternating pulsations of 24 still frames per second in image time, translate into optical syncopation. Each reel consists of over 3,500 images with mathematically planned sections, improvised cross rhythms, variations in colour, density, tree species and shape, with sequences following the Fibonacci series (Kren’s ‘Golden Section of film’) and countered with staggered 2:3; 4:3 rhythms. Part scored, part random and rough edged echoing the Japanese musical phenomenon. "wind in the trees"…

Bulrushes

2003 • 3 min

Short film by Helga Fanderl from the FRAGIL(E) DVD.

Sesame Street: Cookie Hood

2003 • 54 min

Cookie comes to Gordon and Sidney, who are using some cookies for a game of "Guess What's Next." They run out cookies and head to Hooper's Store to get some more, telling Cookie Monster not to eat their patterns while they're gone. Cookie doesn't notice a mysterious, furry hand swipe all the cookies away. Gordon returns and sees all the cookies gone, then blames Cookie Monster for eating them. Cookie claims he's innocent, but they don't believe him. He smells cookies somewhere else and follows the scent.