All Films

Experimental documentary about the baroque school of music that flourished in Minas Gerais, hinterland of Brazil in the eighteenth century, formed mostly by mulatto musicians. Original baroque music and electronic music by Arthur Omar.

The first documentary directed by Maria del Carmen de Lara, together with feminist producer, scriptwriter and director Maria Eugenia Tamés. A direct cinema experience, based on research on the harsh reality of sex workers in Mexico at the time. Testimonies from several women, who have different life paths, but share the violence to which they’re exposed: precariousness, prison, mistreatment, discrimination and dehumanisation.

A simple meal of meticulously photographed ingredients with gruesome close-ups.

About a lazy bear cub who was taught to work by his friends.

A trip inside a Steel Valley workers’ magazine, which looks like raw material for a Bruce Springsteen song.

Originally aired in 1981 and later virtually lost for decades, Sound Business is a UK-produced documentary about two British sound systems, the legendary (and at the time already 18 years-established) Sir Coxsone Outernational and the (then) up-and-coming Lion Charge, both based in SW London.

A landscape that has been filmed once is projected onto a screen and then filmed again. The re-shot screen changes with the sound of quick beats. An unremarkable local landscape. Roads stretching through rice paddies, clusters of telephone poles, wooden houses with large eaves. These landscapes are transformed into a blur of memory for the purpose of reshooting. The electrically produced noise-like acoustics and the sound of beating quislings beat the landscape out of the memory circuits of the brain. For a moment, a girl stands in front of a screen of landscape, and the landscape rotates around her. The whole work is more than an idea, including the composition in which the synthesis of a kind of screen process brings about change.

“For many years I had wanted to visit the Rock, but I had never really had the means. A little funding from Germany finally got me there. I had read a lot about the history and mythology of the Rock and of the Aboriginal people, but I was only too aware that I, as a European, could never hope to get into or feel that mythology. So I decided to make a film about it from my perspective. I cut out all these mythological figures…lizards, emus, wallabies…some of them from drawings in caves on the Rock, and carefully employed them as mattes for footage I shot in real time. In those days hotels were very close to Ayers Rock [now known as Uluru], so I never had to go very far with my camera. I used filters and telephoto lenses to suggest a kind of unknowable aura…to show that there was truly something out there on that flat plain.” (Paul Winkler)

An experimental student film about failure and existential anxiety relating to student life.

Shot in the Guatemalan Highlands, Meta Mayan II is a keenly observed, poetic video essay on the indigenous culture of the Mayans. Velez's vision is intensely personal; avoiding overt editorializing or ethnographic analysis, he depicts the landscapes, gestures, textures and rhythms of their culture in powerful, evocative images. The political and internecine conflicts confronting the Mayans are conveyed through the sound of American news broadcasts. Through subtle video effects — rapid, almost liquid pans, magnified close-ups, and slow motion — Velez expresses their strength and dignity. His highly charged, slow-motion image of a Mayan woman, gazing with curiosity and suspicion at the camera, becomes an eloquent metaphor for a culture in transition.

From the earliest childhood to the death and back. What a life represents, flashing past through photos.

Fayrouz sings Al Ardou Lakoum at the United Nations General Assembly, New York 1981 USA Legend and legacy tour 1981

Wadi is a valley located east of Haifa. A former stone quarry, it is a sort of enclave where Eastern European immigrants, survivors of the camps, live in a state of fragile coexistence with Arabs who have also been expelled from their homes.

After five years of intense work on identity, an alchemical quest for the depths, after nine films and films / actions where the actresses' gestures resounded against a black background which eliminated the environment to reveal the inside, taken outside: encounter of the inside with the outside. Journey back into memory. Crossing the Greek landscape in August. The seas. The ruins, remains of abandoned houses, homes with holes, pierced by the wind, inside crossed by the outside. Unheimlich: the disturbing strangeness. Activation of a memory of origins. Unheimlich: what should remain secret, hidden and which manifests itself. MHTRIS = mother's country.

Aderlaß is a youthful attempt to process the inheritance of the Vienna Actionists through the use of a super 8 camera. In front of the camera is a performance from Armin Schmickl Sebastiano (Peter Tcherkassky). A game with light and sound that explodes out of the calm into a delirium of movement and finally returns, after the "blood-letting", to rigidity. (Irene Judmayer)

Transposition of Arrigo Barnabé's song "Clara Crocodilo" to film, with cartoon visuals. Clara Crocodilo is considered to be the public enemy #1, and he's waiting his execution at a state penitentiary. Meanwhile, the Radio Interferência eloquently narrates his story. Some strange characters come forth and even some voodoo rituals are performed to help the anti-hero. He manages to escape and disappears in the dark alleys of the city.

Documentary on the life of the Basque shepherd and oral improviser (or 'bertsolari') Fernando Aire (1920-1976), known as 'Xalbador'.

In Painting Room Lights a performer paints four fluorescent lamps and makes a drawing of a landscape with a rectangular solid in the foreground. He also makes a drawing of a room in one point perspective. Two four foot fluorescent lamps stand in the foreground and two eight foot fluorescent lamps stand in the background. The drawing of the landscape and the drawing of the room appear to be made on a white surface (the film is in negative and the lights are turned off in the room). A deep space is revealed behind the drawings when the fluorescent lamps are turned on in the background. The performer then paints the fluorescent bulbs. As the lamps are painted the room disappears and the drawing seems to be again on the flat surface. The drawings are cut with scissors and they fall out of the film frame. The process is repeated with the lights in the foreground. The film is in color and the fluorescent lights are green. The negative film effectively casts the scene in red.

Outtakes from the movie.

The images from the landing of the first expedition of the spaceship Columbia are juxtaposed to a reflection on the function of the visual medium, and artistic creation as a whole.

Tour of La Ribera, a region located in the south of Navarra.

Montenegro in 1944. A highland farmer tries to change his only son's decision to join the partisans, while minding his own business and not taking any side himself. During the work field they are both captured by Chetniks who previously killed some local shepherds, and their fate is about to be decided by a reckless gang of murderers.

"For those who came of age in the 1960s and 70s, glamour received its highest expression in fashion magazines like Vogue, where the representation of lives and those who lived them achieved perfection on every page. Prime Cuts is a work premised on the notion that the lives of magazine models are real (much like another Vancouver artist, Ken Lum, who as a child believed that the bedroom suites in the furniture store flyers that landed on his doorstep were real bedrooms). In exploring the lives of models (some of whom the Mainstreeters worked with through commercial projects), Prime Cuts does not so much imagine what these models get up to both before and after the lights, camera and action of the photo shoot casts them in amber, but extends the fantasy." – Allison Collins & Michael Turner, Mainstreeters: Taking Advantage, 1972-1982, Satellite Gallery, 2015