All Films

Good Morning, People!

1981 • 20 min • Soviet Union

The film is dedicated to the work of O. Berggolts during wartime and her role in the radio committee of besieged Leningrad.

The Microscope

1981 • 6 min • Czechoslovakia

An animated short from Viktor Kubal

Some Bottles

1981 • 7 min • Romania

A series of short stories with bottles.

The Relic

1981 • 6 min • Romania

Short film in the Delta Space Mission film series. The two members of the Delta spaceship crew discover a frozen ship with a time machine.

Beyond the Laxative, the Exploding Kindergarten

1981 • 42 min

Experimental film by Harumi Fujii.

Axe

1981 • 10 min • Iran

Story of an axe against nature

Cerveza Bud

1981 • 22 min

"This filmic slice of life coalesces into an ethnographic view of a possible future: the city as a constantly bubbling, delirious playground where yesterday’s monuments are symbols to be triumphed over, and tomorrow never arrives. Perhaps this is why the ultimate effect is one of wistfulness, due also to the unexpected intrusion of a memento mori in the guise of a nude traversing the Maine woods…" - Trevor Winkfield

Yap: How Did You Know We'd Like TV?

1981 • 52 min • Australia

Examining the change of culture in the small island after American television began being broadcast.

New Friends

1981 • 11 min

Animation short directed by Diane Kenna.

Bedtime Story

1981 • 6 min

A collage film, made as much from splicing tape as it is from celluloid.

Displaced Person

1981 • 9 min

Daniel Eisenberg's film (or "memory essay," as theorist Nora Alter referred to DISPLACED PERSON) is a challenge to a conventional view of history, a provocation using traditional documentary forms: found footage, newsreels, a radio lecture of French anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss and Ludwig van Beethoven's "Razumovsky" quartets.

Skyscraper

1981 • 10 min • Yugoslavia

A day in the life of a tower block of flats, where the two main vertical channels of communication are the lift and the drain.

Sara and Maybelle

1981 • 10 min

A rare filmed performance of the two titular members of the Carter Family.

L'arbre qui gémit

1981 • 10 min • France

A young man and an older woman are prepared for a funeral ceremony, theirs.

The Braggart Sparrow

1981 • 9 min • Soviet Union

About a lazy and boastful sparrow who didn't want to take care of a warm home for autumn and winter in the summer, and then regretted it. But the friends from the sparrow flock did not leave the silly in trouble.

Arabic Numeral Series 13

1981 • 5 min

“With some exceptions, the Arabics take the idea of the void as their ground. That is, the light we do see almost always seems to be set against darkness, or occasionally against white, these momentary flickers that materialize tenuously out of emptiness. But the darkness is not ‘night,’ or even simply some more abstract absence of light, but a more profound vacuum: it represents a world stripped of all the coordinates of the known, an unmeasurable absence. […] These lushly sensual, pleasurable-to-view films are also terrifying: their unpredictability, continually enacting new dramas of surprise, alternatively swamps the viewer in light and leaves him adrift in darkness.”

Fairy Tale on Wheels

1981 • 15 min • Soviet Union

Based on a Georgian folk tale. About an evil attic man who was afraid of children's laughter.

Beats of the Heart: The Romany Trail Part One: Gypsy Music into Africa

1981 • 60 min

The Romany Trail Part One takes us on a search for the lost gypsy tribes of Egypt, up the Nile to the ancient town of Luxor in the shadow of the great Pharaoh’s tombs. Along the way, from the markets of Cairo to the temple of Karnak, we meet dancing girls and acrobats, magicians, fortune-tellers and even mystics performing an exorcism. The programme culminates in the rhythms of Flamenco, in the gypsy caves of the Alhambra, where some of Spain’s foremost gypsy families celebrate their history.

Family Marathon

1981 • 9 min • Soviet Union

The husband prepares for the marathon, rests, and meanwhile the wife prepares food, feeds the children and husband, cleans and so on. During the competition, it is she who produces amazing results of speed and ingenuity, accompanying and saving her husband at all stages. It turned out that despite his stocky height, he is a helpless child who cannot run a marathon without help, but as a result, fame and recognition go to him. Volodymyr Dakhno worked on this film with the master of graphic grotesque artist Radna Sakhaltuyev. The social pro-feminist content is wrapped in an ironic, somewhat psychedelic form.

Toroidal Forest

1981 • 4 min

One tree per frame, each from a different place on the surface of a doughnut-shaped parametric space, cooperate to rotate continuously, slowingly from the one- to the two-dimensional. After a pause accelerating counter rotations attain an approximation of a form of infinite dimension.

The Third T(h)est

1981 • 3 min

1981 short film by Paul de Nooijer and Jerry King Musser

Rencontre des nuages et du dragon

1981 • 33 min

Meeting of Clouds and Dragon is a short film directed by Lam Lê.

Blekbala

1981 • 43 min

Blekbala explores the lives and aspirations of Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory - on small outstations, remote desert locations and in regional town - from Arnhem Land to Central Australia. It looks at a selection of Aboriginal-run businesses and enterprises: cattle stations; children’s education; community projects; sports and music.

Myth in the Electric Age

1981 • 14 min

"...Berliner's film which talks about nature, culture, and technology impresses through its outstanding classical editing technique...Berliner finds precise and original transitions..."