Crystal City

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

Das Wachsen des Römischen Reiches

The rise of the Roman Empire towards world power is reconstructed with the help of cartographies and re-enactments. It also shows where traces of ancient Rome can still be found today.

The Radical

This beautiful short, commissioned by UCLan’s Creative Innovation Zone, is an intricate hand-drawn journey through the life of a local activist, George Dewhurst. An ordinary working man from Blackburn, George was charged with High Treason, shortly after The Peterloo Massacre in August 1819, for speaking at a gathering of workers in Burnley. Narrated by one of George's descendants, 8-year-old Monty Speed, this beautiful animated montage depicts events in George's life in the year 1819, following a quest by descendants to uncover his grave and raise awareness of his story.

Wuthering Heights

As Cathy Linton nears death, she finds herself in a loop of memories while coming to terms with the truth of the world she’s lived and loved in.

The Disease Has Taken the Farmhouse

In the farmhouse Gaikoborda, located in the north of Navarre, a mournful family lives; dad, mom, and their four children: Jon, the paraplegic Aintzane and the twins Saioa and Anartz. One of these monotonous days, the mother recieves a visit: the doctor.

Ferdinand, Battlefield Rat

Casablanca revisitada

A lyrical and nostalgic analysis of how Casablanca, the mythical film directed by Michael Curtiz in 1942, has influenced both film history and pop culture.

Apocalypse Toto

Toto, a worker in Catalonia, analyzes the violence spiral experienced in Barcelona in October 2019.

The Devil of Comparisons

The Devil of Comparisons (original title: El Demonio de las Comparaciones), was a 30-hour black & white silent film from 1929 by Narding Salome Exelsio (1883-1949). It explores the cyclical lives, deaths, and rebirths of Jose Rizal and his characters (played by hitherto unidentified actors) in a wasteland ruled by demons.

108 spin

A kinetic prayer and structuralist intervention. Shot entirely on an iPhone 11 in a desolate Midwest laundromat, 108 spin documents the mechanics of impermanence. The film shifts from heavy turbulence to suspended repetition—not as a path to completion, but as a study of the loop itself. Featuring a layered soundscape, the work asks the viewer to stare into the rotation until the noise becomes a mantra.

Salandar

The Mongol invasion of Iran leaves the country devastated but the people fight for their right in their own way.

Martyrs of the Inquisition

Martyrs of the Inquisition

Dreams of the Past

A film about peace, love and war. Dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the end of the Civil War in Russia. The film takes place at the end of the summer of 1917, when Russia and the whole world were at a crossroads between two eras. None of the people could even imagine how much his life would change in the very near future. In a strange way, the atmosphere of the film echoes our current reality and what is happening in Russia today. According to the form of visualization, the film belongs to experimental mockumentary cinema. To give greater authenticity to what is happening on the screen, the shooting was carried out on black-and-white negatives of 16 and 35 mm, hand-operated cameras were used and the material was developed in manual spiral tanks. The documentary chronicle of the Kolchak army of 1919 and the White army in the Far East of 1922 is embedded in the finale of the film.

Free Range

Based on actual events, Free Range is the story of a cow that crosses the border from Israel to Lebanon and meets 16-year-old Malakeh and her family.

Johanne

Inspired by Joan of Arc, Johanne follows a day in a life of the eponymous heroine. While set in medieval fantasy town, it explores the very current and urgent theme of preserving one’s humanity while struggling against inhumane environment, from modern feminist perspective.

Nostradamus and the Queen

An elderly Catherine de Medici reflects back on how the prophecies of Nostradamus accurately predicted the fates of her husband, her three sons and herself.

A Film in the Theatre

Eusebio José Fernández López Reboredo Bergamín is a teenager in the 1960s whose dream is to be a movie director, but General Francisco Franco prohibited in 1964 all types of art. A coincidental encounter with another artist, named Antonio Mínguez, will change his life.

Letters

LETTERS, a dramatic historical fiction written by Mrs. Evelyn Merritt in 2010, tells the story of U.S. soldiers and their loved ones through their correspondence beginning with the Civil War and ending with the War in Iraq. Sahuarita High School students adapted the Readers’ Theatre play into a movie, reasoning the student actors would be kept safe from Covid-19 by filming them individually, and afterward the footage could be reassembled into a screenplay following the original dialogue.

Lie

In 1968 Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys met a dynamic and passionate singer/songwriter and introduced him to Hollywood. The two set out to record that artist's first professional album. The album became known as LIE. In 1969 this artist achieved incredible fame, but not for his music. The artist's name was Charles Manson.

Hope Dies Last

A sickly scrawny man in a striped uniform takes a shaving brush and foam, and with a sharp blade, he shaves the back of the head of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz camp himself. They will never speak with one another, and Joseph (we only learn his name during the credits) will never harm Höss, will not stop the flood of horrible murders with yet another murder. This short sketch about life of a death camp makes us feel pain and grief of millions of people who had passed beyond the walls of the shaving room during the imprisonment of Joseph, the man who outlived his torturer.