All Films

Rev

1997 • 12 min

Cho continues his examination of identity within an urban environment, envisioning the frenetic dissonance of an urban landscape that is at once alienating and poetic. Cho's aggressive observation of pedestrian traffic is portrayed with a blurred and highly saturated aesthetic. A candle's flame methodically waves back and forth, suggesting the private time within the accelerated urban experience.

Lou Odyssée

1997 • 43 min • France

The Traditional Clothes of Raisinay Village

1997 • 34 min • Taiwan

After restoring their Ceremony of Ancestral Spirits, the Atayal people of the Raisinay Village, Miaoli County, were distressed by the absence of their traditional garments. Yuma Taru, a researcher of Atayal folk costume, decided to trace back their history by conducting interviews with the elders, learning weaving techniques from them. This documentary captures the passing down of the weaving art, and the younger generation’s yearnings for revival of their traditional clothes.

The Kavalan: Past and Present

1997 • 43 min • Taiwan

In the 1920s, a Kavalan family took refuge in Hualien. 70 years later, the filmmaker, a third-generation member of the family, embarked on a self-searching journey to recover his lost identity, producing the first documentary ever made by a Pingpu descendant. Through depiction of traditional Kavalan ceremonies and collective memories, the film asks us to recognise Pingpu peoples’ place in Taiwanese history, as well as their suffering and feelings of inferiority during years of forced migration.

Playback

1997 • 23 min

A trap awaiting the killer Yuki, who longs for the life of an ordinary woman.

Call Waiting

1997 • 13 min

'Call Waiting' (1997) is a superb representation of Simpson's adeptness at playing with race and relationships through cinematic depiction. 'Call Waiting' portrays a series of phone calls between several different people of varying ethnicities, discussing their romantic lives and dilemmas.

Homage to Kurt Kren

1997 • 2 min • Austria

A homage to the Austrian experimental filmmaker Kurt Kren, his two films "1000 Years of Cinema" and "Snapspots" and his way of working; and that with a slight wink.

Tomboy

1997 • 5 min • United States of America

A girl’s determination to follow her own hoop dreams makes her a college basketball star and the publisher of the first ever women-in-sports magazine. Using personal narrative, still photography and stop animation, Donna Carter’s 1997 short film Tomboy is an imaginative autobiographical account of an African American tomboy’s journey to success and self-acceptance.

Englewood Cottonwood

1997 • 4 min

Pseudo-hyper-stereoscopic view of one tree over three years. Shimmering life in flexible time, an antenna alert to whose vibrations?

Suicide Box

1997 • 25 min • Japan

An improvised film study starring Kumiko Watanuki's solo play in an empty room.

Winter Square

1997 • 22 min • Japan

A Hundred Sweethearts

1997 • 28 min • Japan

In A Hundred Sweethearts, these worries spread to include the people and things around the filmmaker, as she presents herself as a slightly spoiled but unconceited youth who is used to having others care for her. It is both the comfort of this emotional security and the realization, as she becomes an adult, that it will not last that prompt Utagawa to record these events, seek out past ones in old home movies, and even re-enact them in the present. More than an affirmation of identity, film becomes for her a celluloid blanket, a warm set of images to which she must sweetly but sadly say goodbye as time marches inevitably on. - Aaron Gerow

Sexual Intercourse Camera #1

1997 • 27 min

Featuring Miyagawa Fumiko.

Movements of the Body - 3rd Movement: The Coloring

1997 • 4 min • Canada

Movements of the Body is an animated trilogy illustrating movements of the mind through movements of the body's parts. 3rd movement: The Coloring uses color to create texture, energy and the illusion of movement.

Bruce

1997 • 3 min

A girl named Fuchyako (Kumagai Fusako) is smoking a cigarette and singing to the background music of a blues song. Waterdrops.

Laws of Nature

1997 • 25 min

An experimental film that looks afresh at landscape by using the medium to explore its time and space in ways other than ‘eye view’. A rich, sensual, densely textured film poem that sets out to challenge perceptual habits without being drawn into the seductive trap of the picturesque.

Red Light Diaries

1997 • 8 min

For his animation cartoon Red Light Diaries, Juan de Graaf interviewed inhabitants and visitors of the Amsterdam Red Light District about their live in the area. The conversations, in which sex rarely plays a role, provided the inspiration for a very individual interpretation of the characters.

Muscle Influenza

1997 • 11 min • Japan

Probably the film in which more people are kidnapped in the shortest amount of time than any other film in cinema history. The antics and light-heartedness that run throughout the film, including the storyline, make it worthy of being called a 'violent film', despite the fact that there are no violent scenes at all. It is also a 'hero film' in that the protagonist has style and sticks to it whether he is hurt or not.

RAT ART: Croatian Independents

1997 • 50 min

Zev Asher's fascinating collage documentary "RAT ART: Croatian Independents" focuses on artists working in Croatia, a nation devastated by the war in the former Yugoslavia. Many of these artists, working in the capital city of Zagreb, were relatively distant from the war zone, while others fought at the front lines, but all were equally aware of the war's effects on their nation.

Guew Bi: Sabar Dances of Senegal

1997 • 30 min • Senegal

Senegalese often set up a temporary stage at a street corner. It is the Guew Bi, the dancing circle where a cheerful crowd dressed in beautiful attire slowly gathers. The event is called a sabar. Soon drummers start playing and one at a time, women and men get up and enter the Guew Bi to perform the most exuberant, breathtaking dances. This film, which introduces us to an astonishing contemporary art form deeply rooted in African tradition, was shot in the streets of Dakar, with the participation of Master Drummer Doudou Ndiaye Rose.

Strait

1997 • 12 min

A highly charged and smart experimental narrative that explores the relationship between sexuality, gender, and the public sphere. Waiting for a train to an unknown destination are two couples: one lesbian, one straight. As they move through the public and semi-public spaces of the train station - lobbies, stairwells, bathroom stalls - the couples and individuals exchange a series of glances (some overt, some furtive) that implicate one another in a web of desire, power, fear, homophobia, and heterosexism.

Kingdom of the Seahorse

1997 • 56 min

To many of us they are a figure of fancy on par with the unicorn. To scientists, however, the seahorse is a fascinating object of study. Unlike other animals, in seahorses it is the male who get pregnant and gives birth. But to populations around the world, the seahorse is something else again; considered a source of sexual prowess to proponents of traditional Chinese medicine, the magical seahorse is also a crucial source of income to fishermen in the Philippines who harvest and sell them to that burgeoning trade.

Inagina: The Last House of Iron

1997 • 52 min

Swiss archaeologist Eric Huysecom and cameraman Bernard Augustoni work with 13 master smelters to recreate the building of a traditional furnace for smelting iron in Mali. There has not been any traditional iron smelting in Africa since the 1960's, in part due to the importing of cheaper substitutes. The building of the furnaces and the work involved in the actual production is deeply entwined with ritual, symbolism and gender. This film describes in great detail every aspect of the event, from the selection of the site of the reconstruction - which is the oldest remaining furnace site in the region, last active in 1961 - to the final result.

Borders

1997 • 2 min • Sweden

Tosun's short animation is an allegory of imposed boundaries. The film was made with the support of Filmverkstan, which became one of the most important institutions for filmmakers who immigrated to Sweden.