The Dead Tree

60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero

An anthology of one-minute films created by 51 international filmmakers on the theme of the death of cinema. Intended as an ode to 35mm, the film was screened one time only on a purpose-built 20x12 meter public cinema screen in the Port of Tallinn, Estonia, on 22 December 2011. A special projector was constructed for the event which allowed the actual filmstrip to be burnt at the same time as the film was shown.

Stabat Mater

Hotel guests look restrained, sedated in the diffuse light of the service provider’s shimmering cage. A network of joists, pilasters and fluting exposes the proverbial off-season chill in the seating arrangements. Smart-phones and tablets mask a total lack of communication.

Mirror

A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.

Blow-Up

A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. But in the course of a single day he unknowingly captures a death on film.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

When churlish mobster Albert Spica acquires an upscale French restaurant in London, he dines there nightly, effectively scaring off the clientele with his bad manners. His wife, Georgina, is especially disgusted by him, and soon begins an affair with regular guest Michael. Despite their best efforts to keep it secret, Spica learns about their trysts, and he plots a terrible revenge.

The Holy Mountain

The Alchemist assembles together a group of people from all walks of life to represent the planets in the solar system. The occult adept's intention is to put his recruits through strange mystical rites and divest them of their worldly baggage before embarking on a trip to Lotus Island. There they ascend the Holy Mountain to displace the immortal gods who secretly rule the universe.

Three Mirrors Creature's Flashes of Flesh

In the aftermath of an emotional shock, a ruthless high-class manager faces her own abyss, becomes pervaded by a sensory spirit and undertakes a purifying voyage.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion

SEELE orders an all-out attack on NERV, aiming to destroy the Evas before Gendo can advance his own plans for the Human Instrumentality Project. Shinji is pushed to the limits of his sanity as he is forced to decide the fate of humanity.

Child on a Chess Board

Santa Sangre

A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his armless, cult leader mother, and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name.

Cremaster 3

CREMASTER 3 is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect...

Big Bang Love, Juvenile A

An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility. More an exercise in style than storytelling, the story follows two detectives trying to uncover the case. Homosexual tension and explosive violence drives the story which delivers some weird and fascinating visuals.

Triumph and Ruins

History as immersion and dispersion in the fragments of the past, a visionary journey accompanied by the voice of Patty Pravo. Presented at the Taormina Festival '97.

Return to Reason: Four Films by Man Ray

An immersion into the surreal and dreamlike world of painter, photographer and filmmaker Man Ray (1890-1976), one of the most prolific American visual artists, through four of his short films, brought to life by the atmospheric music of SQÜRL.

The Baby of Mâcon

In 17th-century Tuscany, a church play is performed for the benefit of young aristocrat Cosimo. In the play, a grotesque old woman gives birth to a beautiful baby boy. The child's older sister is quick to exploit the situation, selling blessings from the baby, and even claiming she's the true mother by virgin birth. However, when she attempts to seduce the bishop's son, the Church exacts a terrible revenge.

The Illiac Passion

Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.

Casual Workers

An abstract perspective into two young South African workers in the heart of Johannesburg's industrial sector during Covid-19

Himself as Herself

The young hero seems the essence of maleness, yet he's troubled by vaguely feminine objects. Soon his masculine and feminine selves are intercut, as each of his identities appears to look and gesture at the other. The film, at once melancholy and transcendent, consists of a shimmering, nearly plotless evocation of gender identity in flux through haunting, densely interlaced images.

Eros, O Basileus

Structured in nine tableaux each a study of a simple action or situation involving a lone, naked figure, the blind Eros, searching for fulfilment, for self. The objects he touches - books, paintings - can be seen as icons of the creative spirit; there is also a motor cycle and film equipment. In succeeding scenes he appears to try on identities offered by institutional doctrines of religion and social traditions of (overt) masculinity. Much of the film was constructed in-camera with a small amount of editing afterwards. An innovation was the use of in-camera fade-outs as phrase markers, not as terminal points, within a single set-up or shot.

Lysis

Markopoulos called Lysis “a study in stream-of-consciousness poetry of a lost, wandering, homosexual soul” and felt that the film foreshadowed The Illiac Passion.