Debra Paget, For Example

To Stay Alive: A Method

Iggy Pop reads and recites Michel Houellebecq’s manifesto. The documentary features real people from Houellebecq’s life with the text based on their life stories.

The Stendhal Syndrome or My Dinner with Turhan Bey

Joan Crawford's close-up in Humoresque. Michelangelo's David and Boticelli's "Birth of Venus". Stendhal was overwhelmed by the cultural overstimulation in Florence, which Graziella Magherini described scientifically in 1979 as Stendhal syndrome. Mark Rappaport describes his fascination for the Austrian actor Turhan Bey, who made a career in exotic roles in Hollywood in the 1940s. A very personal essay about the effect of close-ups, the canvas idols of the dream factory and the role of their admirers and fans.

Visions of Europe

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

Hear O, Mahatma

In an open letter to the most influential modern Indian political leader, the Late Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the filmmaker sequentially narrates the stories of three distinct individuals - that of a confused filmmaker who flows with time, a dedicated social reformer who guides the stratified masses into social upliftment and a divisive and regressive politician. The juxtaposition of their disfigured trajectories provokes a pertinent question: Did Gandhi ever foresee the dehumanized shape that his legacy has now dangerously morphed into?

Ôrí

A look at the Brazilian black movement between 1977 and 1988, going by the relationship between Brazil and Africa.

All This Can Happen

A flickering dance of intriguing imagery brings to light the possibilities of ordinary movements from the everyday which appear, evolve and freeze before your eyes. Made entirely from archive photographs and footage from the earliest days of moving image, All This Can Happen (2012) follows the footsteps of the protagonist from the short story 'The Walk' by Robert Walser. Juxtapositions, different speeds and split frame techniques convey the walker's state of mind as he encounters a world of hilarity, despair and ceaseless variety.

the post-feminist dissonance project

The Post(?) Feminist Dissonance Project uses a quote by Kathleen Hanna as a prompt, a voicemail box as an interviewing device, found footage as a tool, and text as a character. it is a study in the cacophony of the inner life tuned against the perception of reality. i made this piece to see if i was alone, and i discovered that for better or for worse, i am not. this is above all about the process, not the resolution.

Todo Todo Teros

Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.

Private Chronicles: Monologue

The collective life of the generation born as Jurij Gagarin became the first man in space. Vitaly Mansky has woven together a fictional biography – taken from over 5.000 hours of film material, and 20.000 still pictures made for home use. A moving document of the fictional, but nonetheless true life of the generation who grew up in this time of huge change and upheaval.

Il n'y aura jamais assez d'images

Filmfarsi

A found-footage essay, Filmfarsi salvages low budget thrillers and melodramas suppressed following the 1979 Islamic revolution.

The Cooking Show

The cooking show is as old as television itself. But why do we like watching the making of a meal that most of us will never cook, let alone eat? Dirty Furniture’s jam-packed video essay is a rollercoaster ride through the history of the genre, at once a staple of television viewing and a hotpot of shifting perspectives and sociocultural values.

Swimming, Dancing

Swimming, Dancing examines audiovisual representations of the Yangtze (1934–present), from silent film to video art to the contemporary vlog. Inspired by the city symphonies of the 1920s, Swimming, Dancing pieces together a “river symphony”, evoking the images, sounds and contradictions that make up the river’s turbulent history.

Vowellet - An Essay by Sarah Vowell

This Pixar documentary short follows Sarah Vowell, who plays herself as the title character, on why she is a superhero in her own way. (This short piece is included on the 2-Disc DVD for "The Incredibles", which was released in 2005.

Linklater: On Cinema and Time

If cinema is the art of time, Linklater is one of its most thoughtful and engaged directors. Unlike other filmmakers identified as auteurs, Linklater’s distinction is not found on the surface of his films, in a visual style or signature shot, but rather in their DNA, as ongoing conversations with cinema, which is to say, with time itself. A visual essay produced by Sight and Sound.

F for Fake

Documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. Welles moves between documentary and fiction as he examines the fundamental elements of fraud and the people who commit fraud at the expense of others.

White Noise

A reflection on the fate of humanity in the Anthropocene epoch, White Noise is a roller-coaster of a film, a whirlwind of sounds and images. The fourth feature-length work by Simon Beaulieu, this film essay plunges viewers into a subjective sensory adventure—a direct physical encounter with the information overload of daily life. White Noise transforms the imminent collapse of our civilization into a visceral aesthetic experience.

Arcadia

A provocative and poetic exploration of how the British people have seen their own land through more than a century of cinema. A hallucinated journey of immense beauty and brutality. A kaleidoscopic essay on how magic and madness have linked human beings to nature since the beginning of time.

My Mexican Bretzel

Lies are just another way of telling the truth. The desire to believe is the hand of the man hanging from a cliff and clinging to the only stone that would seem to save him. But he always ends up falling because the stone is a mirage, just as the cliff is. Death is awakening from this dream in which the essential can be said and in which the continuous and infinite has a beginning, an end and a meaning.

The So-Called Caryatids

Commissioned by French television, this is a short documentary on the neo-classical statues found throughout Paris, predominantly on the walls of buildings, holding up windows, roofs etc.