Castle Two

Four Journeys Into Mystic Time: One Two Three

An abstract work featuring three dancers, the performers interact with large screens as well as each other. Included in Shirley Clarke’s Four Journeys Into Mystic Time, costuming and color play an integral role in this piece.

The Other Side of the Underneath

A therapist looks into the mind of a woman diagnosed as schizophrenic and finds, not madness, but tortured sexual guilt created by the taboos of society.

Free as Dead

The story concerns a man bound to death and a young girl, following a path of ritualistic transfiguration to ultimately become completely free as dead. A frightening tale of evil excess, demented sorcery and lurid ritual. An original experimental short horror film presenting a voyage into the darkest and most psychedelic nether regions of the subconscious.

Everyday Portabella

Buenos Aires

An urban documentary that explores economic inequality in Buenos Aires through the contrast between large mansions and skyscrapers that coexist with slums.

Watching a Movie

A young man, attempting to watch a VHS tape of "Love Streams" by John Cassavetes on his television, is constantly harassed and annoyed by outside forces.

Bonn Experi

Degraded found footage, primarily of a cowboy.

Earth Had Issues Loading...

A meditation on the relationship between humans, nature, and technology.

Wall Street

Shot at high noon in New York’s financial district, Wallstreet is much like a vertical tickertape, charting the existence of typical office workers. The film’s elongated shadows suggest these workers’ depersonalized, neuter, nearly uniform lives, which flow by without any solid or stable element that might provide definition.

Western 4.33

Vertiginous documentary, shot in effective black-and-white, treats two painful histories. The first is a love story about a truck driver who, on his way from Johannesburg (South Africa) to Luderitz (Namibia), is haunted by thoughts of his girlfriend and their recently severed relationship. His memories are expressed in an often recurring scene, in which songs by Alec Empire, Macy Gray and Robert Schumann roughly tell the story. This small history is alternated with the tragic fate of the Namibian Heroro people, many thousands of whom died early last century in concentration camps that had been set up by the German colonisers near Luderitz. The depiction of this history is cruder and more poignant, with slanting frames, odd camera angles and a multi-layered sound sculpture. The dilapidated barracks and officers' quarters are the last remnants of the miscarried, so-called civilisation projects in Africa.

Marbles

A little girl's marbles lead to a fascinating journey and opens up lots of new perspectives on the everyday surroundings.

A Chair

One of Takahiko Iimura's (and modern art's) earliest works in conceptual video, A Chair entirely consists of a steady (and usually ghosted) image of a chair to the accompaniment of the firecracker pops of television static. While formally minimal, A Chair is conceptually challenging in its simplicity and its demand that the audience zero in on, of all things, a simple chair. - Tom Fritsche

The Island

The Island is a short film shot entirely on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast of Malaysia that became the largest and longest-operating refugee camp after the Vietnam War. The artist and his family were some of the 250,000 people who inhabited the tiny island between 1978 and 1991; it was once one of the most densely populated places in the world. After the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shuttered the camp in 1991, Pulau Bidong became overgrown by jungle, filled with crumbling monuments and relics. The film takes place in a dystopian future in which the last man on earth - having escaped forced repatriation to Vietnam - finds a United Nations scientists who has washed ashore after teh world’s last nuclear battle. By weaving together footage from Bidong’s past with a narrative set in its future, Nguyen questions the individual’s relationship to history, trauma, nationhood, and displacement.

In Praise of Love

Someone we hear talking - but whom we do not see - speaks of a project which describes the four key moments of love: meeting, physical passion, arguments/separation and making up. This project is to be told through three couples: young, adult and old. We do not know if the project is for a play, a film, a novel or an opera. The author of the project is always accompanied by a kind of servant. Meanwhile, two years earlier, an American civil servant meets with an elderly French couple who had fought in the Resistance during World War II, brokering a deal with a Hollywood director to buy the rights to tell their story. The members of the old couple's family discuss heatedly questions of nation, memory and history.

Berlin Eiszeit

A very degraded found footage experiment. The film runs slightly slowed down, distorting the soundtrack. Many textures of torn and crumpled film are present.

Osnabrück Lagerhalle

Found footage experiment using a war movie.

Düsseldorf Blackbox

Distorted found footage experiment of a firing squad sequence from a war film.

Wax, or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees

Computer programmer/beekeeper Jacob gets a "television" implanted in his brain by a race of telekinetic bees, which causes him to experience severe hallucinations.

Dream of a Summer Night

Rock musical adaptation of William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream".

The Dead Tree

The veneer of the story is a tale of chance love: two French expatriates strike up a chance romance when they meet on a ship headed back to South America.