Distant Close

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror

An exploration of the cinematic history of the folk horror, from its beginnings in the UK in the late sixties; through its proliferation on British television in the seventies and its many manifestations, culturally specific, in other countries; to its resurgence in the last decade.

Sans Soleil

A woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler, meditations on time and memory expressed in words and images from places as far-flung as Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco.

In the Frozen Tomb of Mongolia

Zombiemania

The evolution of the zombie from its roots in Haitian voodoo to its coveted role as the world's most popular monster: from being a clumsy corpse to becoming a cannibal killer and the main agent of every infectious pandemic, the zombie has come a long way in seventy years. A look at the rising tide of zombie culture examining why something so dead has so much life in viewers' nightmares and at the box office.

Nothing Remains Nothing Disappears

A Berlin street corner is slowly changing: an aging supermarket turns into a construction site and finally a new building. People restock shelves, demolish walls, take breaks and count money. Those who work here participate in the making and unmaking of the place. How does it shape the conditions of their labor? Between supermarket aisles, construction scaffolding and exposed concrete, different versions begin to overlap. Repetitions appear like echoes between worlds, both playful and eerie.

PosSession of the Spirit

Filmmaker Herbert Alfonso and musician Glenn de Randamie travel to Ghana to do some research on polyrhythm and the West-African spirituality. However, their trip to The Motherland makes them realize that home is more than the place where they grew up. Years later, they recollect their faded memories and try to find the right words to describe their intense experience. What exactly made them feel at home and lost at the same time? What does being home actually mean for a black individual from Europe while visiting Africa? Only abstractions seem to persevere as this colourful and musically-charged collage serves to show how a life-changing experience can leave us with nothing but fragments of a truth that has yet to be discovered.

Stone and bag

The film delves into the work processes of an archaeological team from the Aranzadi Science Society at the San Adrián Tunnel site. Interspersing this observation with archival materials, the film explores the relationships between archaeology and museography, as well as the different ways in which these two practices produce the displacement of objects.

Broken Gods

India has one of the largest populations of Indigenous people in the world, known locally as adivasis or tribals. As India's current Hindu nationalist government pushes to redefine India as a homogenous Hindu nation, adivasis’ ways of life are under greater threat. Set among the Rathava and Bhil adivasi communities of western India, broken gods document the social impact of Hindu religious evangelism among India’s Indigenous groups. As Indigenous people join Hindu religious sects, their old gods are literally becoming broken - devotional mural paintings are being whitewashed from homes, and the earthen figurines in honour of village gods and ancestors are being left to fall apart. While for those who convert joining a Hindu sect offers the allure of a better life, those who continue to follow their old ways have become ostracized by their communities. Their broken gods have lost the power to protect them from illness and scarcity.

Call Me Miss Cleo

Follow the rise, fall, and reinvention of controversial and revered '90s television psychic Miss Cleo. Featuring interviews with celebrities and those closest to the self-proclaimed voodoo priestess, this documentary explores the many layers behind a complicated and charismatic figure.

Phantasia

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Salamanca

A walk through the landscapes of the province of Salamanca, Spain, as well as a testimony of the daily life and customs of its inhabitants.

Barcelona

A walk through the landscapes of the province of Barcelona, Spain, as well as a testimony of the daily life and customs of its inhabitants.

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin

The extraordinary life story of science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) who, in spite of remaining for many years on the sidelines of the mainstream literature, managed to be recognized as one of the most remarkable US writers of all time, due to the relevance of her work and her commitment to the human condition.

Stone, fish, river: Itamatatiua

A film that explores the space of intimacy shared by three people who live under the same roof. Ariana, an eight-year-old foster girl from the city of Sao Luis, Iban, an anthropologist of European origin who intends to make a documentary film, and Doña Eloisa, a native woman from Itamatatiua who works in ceramics. The members of this kind of family in transit find in common a feeling that binds them intimately: the feeling of loss. Ariana, Doña Eloisa and Iban have lived the experience of separation from their mothers. Human fragility will become the truth of their relationship, even more so after Sheyla's death.

Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti

This intimate ethnographic study of Voudoun dances and rituals was shot by Maya Deren during her years in Haiti (1947-1951); she never edited the footage, so this “finished” version was made by Teiji Ito and Cherel Ito after Deren’s death.

African Dwarves

Lovci lebek

Haunted Jamaica

Why are there so many ghosts on the island of Jamaica? Why is the island so notoriously haunted by tales of voodoo and dark mystical lore? "Haunted Jamaica" seeks to answer these questions ...

Bamboo Theatre

This film is a portrait of unique cultural space for Spirits, Gods and People. While permanent theatres are commonly built in most cosmopolitan modern cities, Hong Kong preserves a unique theatrical architecture, a Chinese tradition that has lasted more than a century - Bamboo Theatre.

Voodoo

The slave ships during the XVII and XVIII century transported millions of colored people from Africa to America carried within it the seed of a religious cult that would help the slaves in the Confederacy for their freedom. This is the story of the formation of African roots syncretic cults that worship spirits of two faces: black continent mystical entities hidden behind Catholic imagery.