Private Chronicles: Monologue

A Million Debt Is Normal, Says My Grandfather

"In A MILLION IN DEBT IS NORMAL, SAYS MY GRANDFATHER, Gabriele Mathes traces the consequences of the decline of her father’s furniture factory via her family’s Super-8 footage(..)" (Viennale)

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Banksy is a graffiti artist with a global reputation whose work can be seen on walls from post-hurricane New Orleans to the separation barrier on the Palestinian West Bank. Fiercely guarding his anonymity to avoid prosecution, Banksy has so far resisted all attempts to be captured on film. Exit Through the Gift Shop tells the incredible true story of how an eccentric French shop keeper turned documentary maker attempted to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on its owner.

The Sleepless Unrest: The Real Conjuring Home

Filmmakers and paranormal investigators spend two weeks in the world-famous home that inspired the horror movie "The Conjuring."

Wrinkles the Clown

In Florida, parents can hire Wrinkles the Clown to scare their misbehaving children.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

The life of internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin is told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.

Ich lebe in der Gegenwart - Versuch über Hans Richter

Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.

Nobody Wants Your Film

Director Peter Judson's semifictitious tale opens a revealing window into the indie filmmaking process, capturing the trivialities, aggravations and enthusiasm that go into completing a picture. Using footage from an indie movie set, e-mails constructing a plotline about distributor difficulties and interviews with indie mainstays such as Steve Buscemi and Sam Rockwell, the film provides a riveting look at one producer's rejections and rewards.

The Stairway to Stardom Mixtape

Culled from over fifteen hours of footage by the American Genre Film Archive, this mixtape is the definitive presentation of public access TV’s most otherworldly show, The Stairway to Stardom.

Magma (C)

Drops of fire that create a universe of magmatic asteroids. Liquid and gravitational reality. Cosmic energy. Atomized Rhythm. Neurons of a liberated unconscious. Elimination of the idea of "soul" as "everything", reducing it to the condition of units of energy in perpetual process, elementary particles, without duration, that arise in perfect dependence. The "I" as a stream of units of force in ceaseless becoming that procures the illusion of an entity. Karmic chain. The idea that eternity resides in the transitory, the eternal belongs to it instantly. Eternity not as infinite duration but as absence of temporality. Universe of a mobile, procedural, relational and interactive nature of everything that exists. Here the "object" is conceived as something that is constituted, completed, lost and recovered with the vibrating rhythm of a universe in constant production.

La Mer

The passing time is displayed as a series of still frames, or a rapid sequence of moments, ever flowing like the waves that break on the shore, like a repeated chant with no beginning, middle or end.

Congo

An experimental ethnographic documentary that criticizes the colonizer view of anthropology.

Reflejos

Two generations dialogue through the images they filmed of their children, a reflection of the emotional bond that arises from their involvement with what was shot.

Night at the Hotel

Paranormal horror documentary with real footage of the night when two friends entered with cameras in an abandoned hotel among the forests of Galicia, they were surrounded and attacked by unexplained forces. The documentary shows what happened there with real footage and interviews of the protagonists.

6-18-67

Filmed during the production of the Columbia Pictures western "Mackenna’s Gold," this short work presents a non-narrative visual study of the Arizona desert. Rather than documenting the film set itself, "6-18-67" assembles landscape images, time-lapse photography, and ambient sound into an abstract record of place and duration.

Deathfarm

One evening, as Ludvik is about to go to bed, he notices that a painting, once owned by his grandfather, mysteriously begins to move on its own. The next day, Ludvik shares the unsettling event with his friend Amund, and together they decide to investigate the painting's origins. Ludvik's grandfather had lived in an old cabin deep in the woods, that had been abandoned since his passing. Determined to uncover the truth, Ludvik and Amund venture to the cabin, only to discover secrets that should never see the light of day.

The Canadian Conspiracy

A mockumentary illustrating a supposed conspiracy to infiltrate American culture through employing Canadians in the U.S. entertainment industry.

A Trans with a Movie Camera

A non-narrative cine-essay that collaboratively explores the potentials for trans feminine representation in film.

The Tree That Remembers

The 1992 suicide of a young Iranian refugee in a small Canadian town prompted filmmaker Masoud Raouf to examine his own past as a political prisoner in Iran who helped fight for democracy, only to be persecuted by the ayatollah's regime. Raouf's documentary features historical footage and interviews with veterans of the 1979 revolution, who watched with dismay as their homeland traded a despot for a religious dictatorship.

Faces of Death II

This film continues along the same lines as F.O.D. 1 with short scenes of material related to death. Mortuaries, accidents, police work are filmed by television equipment and domestic video cameras.