Why Watch Yi Yi: A One and a Two...

Straying home

Non-human animals have always been around us, shaping and being shaped by our shared worlds. Yet in the modern city, their presence is increasingly cast as a problem, and their ways of living as disruptions. By following their traces, this film essay points toward a different picture that questions the narratives we take for granted. Through more-than-human encounters filmed locally in Romania, and a critical detour from the official discourse, other ways of living begin to surface. Perhaps there’s more we can do to unmake the anthropocentric landscape. What would it take to coexist more justly with urban animals? This film strays with this question and its possible answers.

Weird West: Bone Tomahawk's Genre Medley

A video essay made on S. Craig Zahler's 2015 film "Bone Tomahawk".

Two Bergmans

There are two Bergmans. One speaks English, the other Italian. They fall in love and set off impulsively to live together. But reality is far from easy. As the rift between their emotions deepens, what choice will they make? And what kind of ending awaits them?

Doors of Bresson

A video essay by filmmaker Kogonada exploring the use of doors in the 13 feature films of Robert Bresson

News from Taxi Driver

The New York of News from Home was filmed in 1976, while the one of Taxi Driver was filmed in the summer of 1975. Both works reflect the same decadent city. Two visions that shift from the everyday to the existential complement each other. A resignification of Akerman's images through the voice-over of Scorsese's work.

Video Essay/The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent

In a world bedazzled by intractable images, do we need the essay film now more than ever? Kevin B. Lee weighs up this distinctively self-aware, searching form of cinema through both video and text.

The Philosophy of Robin Hood

A video essay on the history and morality of the Robin Hood legend.

nostomanie

comment faire disparaître un corps.

Visite banale du musée de l'oubli.

A Brave Engineer: Buster Keaton's Last Ride

From 1920 to 1965, the great Buster Keaton made spectacular use of locomotives in his films. This video essay charts the course of his iconic cinematic career across the many tracks he rode along on screen: as a young man in the surge of his silent movie ascent in Our Hospitality, while making his masterpiece The General, and traversing the width of Canada on a railway speeder car as an old man in The Railrodder.

Autobiography of My Diabetes

After the making of my previous film (PLAY DEAD!), some unfinished business remained on my desktop. Home movies and various body horror films from my childhood cluttered my computer screen. Part medical treatise, part self-anamnesis, and a mashup tinged with nostalgia, this video essay returns the images emanating from my computer screen to the everyday gaze of a diabetic.

Sentimental Structure

A video poem about a house. The home, or at least its foundations, are what evoke memories of that childhood, now lost in time.

Valera: Man-Mountain

An experimental short assembled from YouTube videos of the director’s former classmate, TV fragments, and a 2006 graduation interview recorded in Alchevsk. What starts as an ironic play with early-2000s home-video aesthetics slowly falls apart. Through montage of personal and online material, Chepelev tries to reconnect with a man he once loved – a man whom war and time have made almost unrecognisable. Laughter loses its protective function and gives way to the impossible wish to return to a place that no longer exists.

Dinner is ready !

Right to be Flawed

The film, grounded in the photo series titled "Right to be Flawed"—published on a-part.online, the official publishing platform of the Kadıköy-based aesthetic-modernist art collective apart Art Association—is a short videographic essay that aims, through a practice-based experiment, to test French thinker-sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, the imperfection–perfection dichotomy within that theory, and the implications of this dichotomy in the context of art and image regimes.

Until You Stop Breathing

Surrounded by reflections of color, an ephemeral being explores the ethereal, sweet, and dangerous nature of sexual affection for another. It yearns to desire, but also to be desired.

A Canadian Horror Story

The true horror story that even the great Johnny Carson talked about on the Tonight Show in 1970.

Latxa

The story of Alba, the last farmer of Latxa sheep cheese

Das Kind und die Welt

The development of a child in its everyday environment is documented. It shows how the child gradually conquers, expands and asserts its living space. The hidden camera observes the child from the first weeks of life until the age of eight,