El miedo y la esperanza: utopías y distopías en la cultura de masas

Sanctuary

Sanctuary explores queer spirituality and utopian sexualities through the figure of Purusha Androgyne Larkin (1934–1988), a monk, pioneering gay filmmaker, and self-proclaimed cosmic-erotic mystic. Larkin’s 1981 book, 'The Divine Androgyne According to Purusha', challenged repression with a spiritual vision rooted in eroticism and presented a radical path to cosmic-erotic consciousness through ‘extreme’ forms of sexual pleasure. Sanctuary explores Larkin's attempt to form a utopian, pleasure-based spiritual community, and considers the complex legacies of his ideas in queer culture. Shot on 16mm, the film weaves together the voices of Larkin’s friends and followers, creating a portrait in absentia of a figure ahead of his time.

Flys and Angels

Ilya Kabakov is considered one of the most important contemporary artists worldwide. Born and raised in the Ukraine in the period between Stalin and Gorbatschow he left the country in the 80s. In his Installations and his numerous paintings Kabakov creates a world of its own, which leaves the heaviness of socialist and post-socialist life far behind. The film links Ilya Kabakovs artistic spaces with insights into Russian everyday life, which itself sometimes appears like an installation by the artist.

The Net

Explores the incredibly complex backstory of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. This exquisitely crafted inquiry into the rationale of this mythic figure situates him within a late 20th century web of technology—a system that he grew to oppose. A marvelously subversive approach to the history of the Internet, this insightful documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting countercultural responses to the cybernetic revolution.

In the Year 2000

A utopia about Finland in the year 2000, when man is finally the master of himself and his world. In the imaginary year 2000, a historical documentary series is created to provide a look at the irrational history of man in the 20th century, with all the wars and all that. The setting is an ascetic futuristic home, outside of which people move around in personal helicopters. The optimism about the future culminates in a school presentation shown simultaneously on giant screens in living rooms across the country, in which rational thinking is shown to have finally reached its fulfillment. On the other hand, faith in the development of humanity and a peaceful future is reflected in this post-war, escapist and dogmatic vision of the future.

Druid Heights

Druid Heights is a short documentary film by Marcy Mendelson about a wild & wooly place. California’s hidden bohemia. Where sex, drugs and philosophy thrived among the eucalyptus just a few miles north of the Golden Gate.

Tie Your Plow to a Star

In 1997 the Argentine filmmaker Fernando Birri returned to his home country to film a documentary on the 30th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara and the relevance of utopias at that time. Carmen Guarini decided to record those moments. A rough edit of this film was hidden away on a fragile VHS tape for twenty years. Today, these images come to life and shed some light on the life of this Latin American poet and master filmmaker, who, at the age of 92, still refused to give up on his own utopias.

Desert Utopia: Mid-Century Architecture in Palm Springs

Southern California’s Coachella Valley, including the communities of Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Desert Hot Springs, boasts hundreds of extraordinary midcentury modern homes, public buildings and commercial structures. Modern designers such as William F. Cody, Albert Frey, William Krisel, John Lautner, Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler, Donald Wexler, E. Stewart Williams left their collective mark on this desert paradise. Desert Utopia: Mid-Century Architecture in Palm Springs traces the history of modern architecture in Palm Springs from the first bold forays into modernist design to the preservation challenges facing the region today. Director Jake Gorst’s film features rare archival images and footage as well as interviews with historians, homeowners and the architects who helped create this mecca of modernism.

Beyond the Sea

Short documentary about Emmen, one of the first planned cities in the Netherlands, a home for workers in the textile and metal industry. Emmen was one of the first planned cities in the Netherlands, a home for workers in the textile and metal industry. A city as a social experiment: it had to become the embodiment of a committed, happy and united society. But the planned idyll did not last long or perhaps never existed. A poetic, science fiction-like quest for a never materialized utopia.

Leisure, Utopic

The first episode in a series of “adaptations” of poet Bernadette Mayer’s book Utopia that artist Beatrice Gibson envisions to undertake over the next decade, producing a series of small, quotidian films that together, and over time, will constitute an epic. This first film is drawn from Chapter 4, entitled “The Arrangement: of Houses & Buildings, Birth, Death, Money, Schools, Dentists, Birth Control, Work, Air, Remedies, and So on” and was shot at home during the pandemic.

The Liberal War

The Vietnam War during the JFK years and beyond. Made in 1972 in the filmmaker's apartment, without documentary footage of the war, metaphors are created through the animation of images and objects, and through guerrilla skits. By rejecting the authority of traditional documentary footage, the anarchist spirit of individual responsibility is established. This is history from one person's point of view, rather than a definitive proclamation.

The Scars

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

Orange Sunshine

The never-before-told story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love – a spiritual group of surfers and hippies in Southern California that became the largest suppliers of psychedelic drugs in the world during the 1960s and early 1970s. Bonded by their dreams to fight social injustice and spread peace, this unlikely band of free-spirited idealists quickly transformed into a drug-smuggling empire and at the same time inadvertently invented the modern illegal drug trade. At the head of the Brotherhood, and the heart of this story, is the anti-capitalistic husband and wife team, who made it their mission to change the world through LSD.

A Tear for Every Drop of Blood

"Love is Passing Moment, Art is Eternal." This is the title of one of the earliest cinema melodramas from Russia. As early as the year of the Revolution, 1917, melodramas lured the majority of the public into the cinemas, a world that turned its back on every form of revolutionary utopias.

Wolfsburg - mobility transition town

In August 2022, a handful of creative activists went to the “lion's den” in Wolfsburg, the heart of the automotive industry, for two years. Their goal: to break up the automotive consensus - to open a window of opportunity through creative campaigns and colorful actions together with militant workers. Their goal was to reach the conversion of production to things we really need - and socialization - the factory for those who work in it. The film, with some action scenes and many interview passages, shows the effectiveness of direct action on social awareness. “It doesn't take many to make a difference,” the activists and workers are convinced. It's about thinking about the social and ecological issues together and acting accordingly.

Supersurface: An Alternative Model for Life on Earth

Produced for the 1972 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Lanscape, Supersurface was the first of five films planned by Superstudio as a "critical reappraisal of the possibility of life without objects." Superstudio envisioned a "network of energy and information extending to every properly inhabitable area". According to the artists, this network would bring about the destruction of objects as status symbols, the elimination of the city as an accumulation of formal structures of power, and the end of specialized and repetitive work as an alienating activity. "The logical consequence," they write, "will be a new, revolutionary society in which everyone should find the full development of his possibilities".

Felicidad

A gardener working at a resort on the island of La Palma decides to go to the top of the volcano to plant a garden amidst the ruins. Meanwhile, a young girl vacationing at the same hotel feels bored, reflects on utopia, and searches for happiness.

I'll See You Again

A group of artists settle in a swamp on the banks of the Indre River. Meanwhile, a voice describes a utopian world.

Koho – Future from Forssa

A documentary about Kari Aro, the distinctive manager of Koho -hockey-stick factory, whose visions were to change the world. Story about the fairy-tale -like success, the destructive power of money and Aro's faith in goodness of people.

Utopías y otras especies

Double Around the Interlude

A flock of memories activated by various musical exercises, to strike the past to the heart, to build something utopian: the future, a sonic architecture. Music as a tool, transcriptions of YouTube tutorials as poetry, percussion exercises as descriptions of reality.