In 2010, for the first retrospective of his work, Masao Adachi sent a video letter to viewers at the Cinémathèque Française, summing up his background, the reasons for his commitment, his years of struggle and how his convictions remained intact. Masao Adachi is forbidden by the Japanese government from leaving Japan.

Philippe Grandrieux filming Masao Adachi: an exchange between two filmmakers. The work is part of the film collection It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve - Masao Adachi devised between Nicole Brenez and Philippe Grandrieux. It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve is a homage to filmmakers known and unknown who participated, with rifles, cameras or both at once, in struggles for resistance and liberation over the course of the twentieth century. Fearless and generally heroic directors, examples of relevance and courage, thanks to whom cinema is familiar with the collective history, these filmmakers of the struggles for liberation, with stories that often come across as fairy tales, are also those who most suffered censorship, imprisonment, death and, today, are forgotten. Nicole Brenez

The Zone of Total Eclipse is based on scientific film footage shot by The Finnish Geodetic Institute in Poroluoto, near the town of Kokkola in Western Finland in July 1945. During a total eclipse of the Sun, the film medium was used for the first time in world history to measure the exact geographical distance between two continents: Europe and North America. The double projection “science noir” short film has two separate reels – positive (“The Sun”) and negative (“The Moon”) – which are projected simultaneously on a big screen superimposing each other.

“Do machines play music? Is there a difference between a dot matrix printer and a record turntable? Optical Sound, Taanila’s 2005 widescreen interpretation of [The User]’s brutalist sound piece for an array of obsolete printers, depicts the devices ratcheting horizontally together in a stalled symphony, inkjets repeatedly blackening the same area on the page. It’s not the blurring of man with machine that lies at the core of this film, but the blurring of the spaces that each has been traditionally obliged to occupy. We disappear into our data streams, which are everywhere and ‘nowhere’ at the same time.” – Ken Hollings

A film about Erkki Kurenniemi, whose career represents a natural blend of music, film, computers, robotics, science and art. Kurenniemi’s story is a fascinating and forceful depiction of a forgotten visionary. Throughout the years he constantly seeked for new kind of user interfaces for musical instruments and semiautomatic music generation. The film revolves around Kurenniemi's task of collecting everything. Kurenniemi records his thoughts, observations, objects and most trivial images constantly, with manic precision, with the ultimate goal of reconstructing the human soul – merging man and machine.

Woody observation case in Helsinki through early 1950s newsreel footage. Four locations in shots, accompanied by four tape loops and four locked-groove vinyls.

The World is an upside-down take on The Man Who Fell to Earth (Roeg 1976), featuring a soundtrack with imaginary landslides for nobody’s eyes and “Man Who Sold the World” popping up backwards. All shots are evacuated of human beings, gravity remains. In abandoned landscapes, animals, furniture and empty vehicles are left awaiting for a disaster. A “film without film” and my Bowie tribute. ”We must have died alone, a long long time ago.” (D.B.)

In the streets of the metropolis of Kinshasa, young Congolese imagine their version of the colonial past. Around an empty plinth where a Belgian monument once stood, an imaginary city emerges where archival footage, artistic performances and present-day Kinshasa interact. This film is the first outcome of an on-going exchange between young Congolese and Belgian filmmakers, who try to relate to the colonial past through artistic work.

You live somewhere, walk down the same street 50, 100, 10,000 times, each time taking in fragments, but never fully registering the place. Years, decades go by and you continue, unseeing, possibly unseen. A building comes down, and before the next one is up you ask yourself “what used to be there?” You are only vaguely aware of the district’s shifting patterns and the sense that, since the nineteenth century, wave after wave of inhabitants have moved through and transformed these alleyways, tenements, stoops and shops. Ten square blocks, past, present, future, time, light, movement, immigration, exclusion, gentrification, racism, history, China, America, 3 languages, 13 voices, 152 years, 17,820 frames, 9 minutes, 54 seconds, 9 questions, 5 lessons, Chinatown.

In our own lives, we “choose” to keep what we do not want to remember as far from our consciousness as we unconsciously can. We apply the same method to public archival material that we would rather not be confronted with as a societal whole. At the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Miguel Peres dos Santos and Sharelly Emanuelson found a significant amount of footage relating to migration from the public television memory of the Netherlands. In it, the essence of the Dutch relation to the alleged “other” can be viewed. In Voices Peres dos Santos uses this material to try to find out if the perceived voiceless were really silent, and if those who do not have a voice today are only mute to the ones who refuse to listen.

In The Wave, the archaeological gaze of the viewer is set in motion: a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) opens and closes. In 2011, the artists placed a camera above the spot where nine victims were buried after their execution by Franco’s supporters in June 1939. On day one of the excavation, a digging crane gently loosened the top layer of soil, until the archaeologists came across a skull with a bullet hole. Then the archaeologists continued their work by hand. The skeletons appeared, then disappeared, as if a strong wind blew, removing the sand and uncovering death, a primal truth.

An archive of film and audio material in Bissau. On the verge of complete ruin, the footage testifies to the birth of Guinean cinema as part of the decolonising vision of Amílcar Cabral, the liberation leader who was assassinated in 1973. In collaboration with the Guinean filmmakers Sana na N'Hada and Flora Gomes, as well as many allies, Filipa César imagines a journey wherein this fragile matter from the past operates as a visionary prism of shrapnel, with which to look through. Digitised in Berlin and screened at various locations – in what would come to resemble a transnational itinerant cinema – the archive convokes debates, storytelling and forecasts. From their screening in isolated villages in Guinea- Bissau to European capitals, the silent reels are now a place from which people may search for antidotes to a world in crisis.

Dawn to Dust examines the position of man in relation to his environment while contemplating the impact this cyclical plundering of resources has on the personal and collective human existence. Set in an ethos of geopolitical displacement, mass exodus, mindless invasions and lost resistance, this piece is intended as an elegy to the present. Lamenting this cataclysmic involvement of mankind, it calls upon the viewer to enter a moment of collective mourning. Dawn to Dust is a mixed media video work that combines motion footage, found material and hand drawn images to weave a narrative.

Though a debt of $206 million remained on the structure, the Seattle Kingdome was demolished by implosion on a cheery Sunday morning in March 2000. Over 50,000 tons of concrete and steel came crashing down causing the equivalent of a magnitude 2.3 earthquake. $O$ documents that morning through time lapse photography and other experimental film techniques. The destruction was the result of Referendum 48, a ballot initiative backed by $5 million in advertising (the most expensive ballot initiative campaign in WA state history.) The theme for this ad campaign was "Save Our Seahawks" from which came the name for the film.

One day Syria decides to leave. She gathers up her words and her personal affairs, her airspace and ground forces, her geopolitical position, and she leaves.

Tales of a Future Past, is a two-channel video about a giraffe and a zebra who fight over an undefined baby creature, in the hope of making it one of their own kind. Using toy masks and a sparse theatricality, Cecelia Condit creates a contemporary reflection on species extinction and the lonely, silent world that might ensue from it.

Someone is missing. Plants grow, but at what cost? Technology threatens and seduces as humans attempt to solve a mystery through telepathy and mirrors. Stainless steel and broken glass strewn about an intergalactic discotheque. Commissioned by the Chicago Film Archives and made in collaboration with sound artist Brian Kirkbride, with footage and sound from the archive chopped, manipulated and arpeggiated into a fertile mix of anthem and narrative.

Paper Box is a desperate attempt to keep memories, reconstruct portraits of people and events from the past. An impression on the transitory nature of memory, inevitably fading, and on the destructive forces of the elements.

Using 16mm archival footage, the film explores a paradoxical fascination of Communist Poland with the ideal of America as a “land of freedom.” I Think You Should Come to America investigates the cultural conditions in which memories are created. While critically evaluating her own enchantment with America, Kuc interrogates various patterns of perception in order to produce a form of reflection that is personal and political as the film aims to expose the patterns of cultural (mis)representation.

Who are May and Fusako Shigenobu? Fusako, leader of an extremist left-wing faction, the Japanese Red Army, hid in Beirut for almost thirty years. May, her daughter, born in Lebanon, only discovered Japan at the age of twenty-seven, after her mother’s arrest in 2000. And Masao Adachi? A screenwriter and radical activist filmmaker, committed to armed struggle and the Palestinian cause, was also underground in Lebanon for several decades before being sent back to his native country. In his years as a film director Adachi sought to reveal the structures of oppression that underpin and perpetuate the political system. It is this complicated, dark, and always suspenseful story that Eric Baudelaire chose to tell in this documentary. Jean-Pierre Rehm (FIDMarseille, 2011)

Grande-Synthe, Northern France, 2002. J.D. loads his rifle and drives through town, looking for people with an immigrant background. His wild odyssey ends with the murder of a 17-year-old North African. More than ten years after the events, the film follows the murderer’s path through Grande-Synthe, confronting the city’s urban metamorphosis to J.D.’s voice, reconstructed from his criminal case report.

Written, directed and produced by Filipa César; performed by Joana Barrios; photography by Matthias Biber; Sound by Nuno da Luz; production assistance by Diana Artus, Jorge Biague, Joaquim Gomes and Rita Pestana. Shot as a live performance in the context of “What Happened 2081?” congress, curated by Georg Diez and Christopher Roth, Kunstwerke, Berlin Cacheu is a 10 minute shot of a lecture, performed by Joana Barrios, revolving around four colonial statues, which are stored today at the Fortress of Cacheu, one of the first bastions constructed by the Portuguese in 1588 in order to facilitate slave trade in the West African country of Guinea Bissau. Barrios evokes symbolic conflicts by tracing back different contexts in which the statues make an appearance: on a pedestal during Portuguese colonialism, dethroned and broken in pieces after Independence in the film Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, as background ghosts in Mortu Nega by Flora Gomes, and finally displayed at the Cacheu fort. The montage is a process that takes place before shooting, so that the image production is a result of a performative assemblage between text, acting, projected image and the framing of the camera by the director of photography, Matthias Biber.

NO ESTÁ

¿Se puede hacer una película con palabras? Tratado de óptica es una película conferencia sobre una película olvidada, La Chambre noire rodada en 1987. ¿Cómo retomarla? ¿Una conferencia puede ser una reanudación?

A Real Game is a fictional game, like Albanian Stories, in spite of its almost documentary style. “I pretend to be the teacher while my daughter plays the part of the pupil that tells her personal story. Like Albanian Stories this video too was originated by a family game. Behind the two characters there is the difficult reality of immigration. Compared to the first video, here the child is more aware of expressions like Birth Certificate, The Banks and Italian Embassy that have already entered her vocabulary. There is just one moment in the video when her fantasy seems to be peaceful and it is when I ask: ‘But do you like Albania?’ and she answers: ‘Yes, because there are not so much cars as here, I can go to visit my friends, they can bring their toys... and then I have a big garden... I can invite them home, it’s better like that, it’s better like that’”.

“One day I was called in by Police Station of Milan because of some photos that I made. On said photos, titled ‘Exit’, my daughters were represented with the exit stamp of the Albanian Republic on their backs. The video Believe Me I am An Artist shows the dialogue I had with a policeman who suspected that I abused my children. I tried to explain him that I am an artist, using this word as a sort of protection. Nevertheless the conversation in the video shows all the fragility connected to being an artist. The dramatic nature of the story, the reflection on the condition of artists today and a kind of self-irony are mixed in this video”. Adrian Paci

In Centro di Permanenza Temporanea the central setting is an airport in San Jose, CA. A crowd of people moves toward an aircraft boarding staircase, in a silent, stoic manner. They form a queue while planes take off and land in the background. Slowly, the stairs are filled with migrants, both men and women. Their faces mirror the yearning for the fulfilment of a life without discrimination and cultural uprooting. The camera slowly circles around the free-standing staircase. In doing so, it elicits a subsequent concern: to where is this plane bound? The video’s title, Centro di Permanenza Temporanea, refers to the Italian name for the temporary camps for illegal immigrants arriving weekly on the Italian coasts. Linguistically, it offers a paradox of meanings, a tension between a temporary and permanent existence; a tension that Paci maintains in this film, where men and women board a plane to nowhere. They remain trapped between the transitory and the fixed, a state that speaks to the dislocation of migrant people across the globe.

Scratchy, grainy images carry the viewers across lands and times. First, with black and white footage, followed by color footage. This work is not about the ones who have passed away; instead, it is about the ones that live. Paci’s work shows us faces of people in mourning, faces of people grieving in public: one face is followed by others as tears are also shed one after another. The pain and suffering of a loss is the only thing that links these individuals. Interregnum offers an uninterrupted survey of death rituals within different cultures, social classes and religious groups. This survey spans across Asia to Europe and over the twentieth century. Paci’s video is a re-configuration of restored footage from official state and national television broadcast archives. What does grieving in public connote? How is the performance of such grieving enacted and how does it affect societies? How does the absence of the deceased continue to linger within the community that is left behind? Oscillating between stoicism and moments of sobbing beyond control, there is an almost imperceptible shift of authentic agony in these performances. As the close-ups and intense expressions of people follow one another, the individual faces come together to form families, communities and crowds, finally losing their distinctive features as they become a part of the masses. Interregnum envelops the viewer in a fog of potential empathy, while at the same time in critical reflection.

The end of dictatorship in Albania introduced a situation where freedom and anarchy, the desire of getting back the wasted time and efforts to make a living at any cost, conjoined. Such was the atmosphere when kiosks with various signs began to appear in Albanian cities. Beside the most common signage, like ‘fruits and vegetables’, ‘bicycle repair’, or ‘home aplliances’, less expected signs outfitted with the word ‘PAINTER’ also emerged. At once, oil paintings, copies of artworks, photo-portraits, car plates, slogans and fake documents, from birth certificates to ownership certificates, university diplomas, international visas and even death certificates, were covertly produced in these small kiosks. Piktori demonstrates pertinent debates, such as the role of the artist within society, the relationships between handcrafted work and artistic action, matters regarding the functional aspects of art, issues of the artistic definition of the interminable chains of activities the artist exercises and the inherent issues in defining the artist as such.

The concept for The Column was born from an anachronistic economic strategy whereby time must be condensed to the point in which delivery coincides with production. En route from China to Italy, a group of Chinese stonecutters sculpt a Classical column. This reflection on the speed with which demand is satisfied constructs the pretext for the documentation of a poetic crossing from east to west. While mirroring a well known condition of productive efficiency, The Column has its roots in a poetic intuition: an idea in search of form will only be able to develop at a distance from its origins, much like commercial goods which are increasingly conceived in one place and manufactured in another through the elaborate and methodical exploitation of cheap labour, seen, in this case on-board ‘sweatshop ships’. The homecoming of a monumental element of architecture renders this as an ancient endeavour, while the characteristics of the journey integrate it into the current social and economic context. The column returns to a new time, revived through economical dynamics inexistent in the era to which it belonged. Reborn at sea, The Column returns in the exodus that unites east and west. It returns while weaving a fabric between the ancient and the contemporary, crossing time and space at once. Together with the produced column, the video footage of its creation becomes the tale of a destabilizing procedure that meditates on the impossibility of defining cultural authenticity of which validity and coherence are usually accepted uncritically. The changing, hybrid identity of the artifact forms itself in the belly of a paradoxical situation where man is identified with profitability, creating a world suspended between reality and imagination. In a quest reminiscent of epic tales, The Column aims to bestow an original viewpoint on contemporary facts.

Adrian Paci’s desire to overcome his feelings of alienation is excavated further in the video work Vajtojca. Enacting his own death, he hired an Albanian woman, a professional weeper, to grieve his loss. Paci presents the banal prelude to the ceremony by revealing the mourner as she adjusts the bed sheets and as he fastens his shoelaces and fiddles with his tie before positioning himself as a corpse. The woman takes a bedside seat and pulls a black veil over her head. With hands clenched, she begins a soft, soulful lament. At the prayer’s end, she removes the veil, and the artist miraculously rises from the dead. They shake hands, embrace and depart. Paci has exorcised his demons and appears before us, reborn a new man”. Amy Stewart

In his famous essay Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes demystified French colonial imperialism with a photograph that appeared on the cover of Paris-Match. This picture, which became an icon of modern criticism, shows a colonial cadet on guard. Vita Nova unveils the biographical ghost underneath the surface of this mythical picture. When recited, Barthes words reveal slowly their hidden meaning: the immeasurable weight of a historically burdened heritage. Vita Nova is a spiral movie in which History (Histoire), now chaotic in its temporality, returns in a more certain form as story (histoire.) The found time of history is here the survival of the image. It is the now, the temporality of the living, the untimeliness of the reciter.

In their video work Lobbyists, Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson portray lobbyists and counter-lobbyists at work, exploring the maelstrom surrounding their activity in Brussels and Strasbourg. In preparation for their work, the artists studied historical and contemporary sources on the figure of the lobbyist, interviewing and filming a variety of people associated with lobbyist associations and civilian “watchdog” groups, and explored documentaries, newsreels and music videos. They commissioned British reporter and activist Tamasin Cave to write an article with their material about the current situation between big industry lobbies and activists and NGOs in their attempt to create a mandatory register of pressure groups, demanding transparency in the European Parliament.

China Girls, used in cinema history since the 1920s, are women with Caucasian skin who are filmed alongside a colour-chart in order to adjust the colours of the film. They have no lines to memorize or characters to impersonate. All they have to do is have an impeccable white complexion. Their skin, white as porcelain, is used as a reference for the colour grading of camera and printing, ultimately excluding people of colour who do not conform to this implicit norm. LILI tells the story of one of these China Girls through archival material, found footage and documentary recordings, and questions the tradition of China Girls contextualized in a society which, according to anthropologist Michael Taussig, exemplifies chromophobic unease with colour.

The central two movements in For Now are horizontal panorama shots and firm, vertical edits. They show shifts of place without the journey. The film unfolds in waves: locations come and go and come back again. The actions are the same: people wait, pass by, kill time. The contrasts between refugees and citizens, between tourists and activists, between Israelis and Palestinians, between Europeans and Americans, all become less clear. The repetition of these unclarified relationships and the enigmatic inclusion of hand signals work together to reveal a certain constellation. It is a film running alongside the events, and alongside time. A contemporary film in the pure sense of the word—a way of being with time.

Shot on Kodachrome film from 1959 and exposed during the Mexican demonstrations for International Women’s Day on March 8, 2017. Corroded emulsion film, affected by a voice-event that recounts the ominous events that occurred at the beginning of May 2006 in San Salvador Atenco, when government repression darkened the lives of the resisting peoples.

Third and final part of the Berlin-Yichq'an-Monimbó triptych. Monimbó; Barricade Near the Water, talks about the participation of children in the Sandinista guerrilla conflict in Nicaragua during the 1970s and 80s.

Dark Matter is an experimental exercise, part of the work of excavating excavation 54,000 folios divided into 85 volumes and 13 annexes about the Iguala Case that were made public by the Mexican Attorney General in 2015. The set of documents presented in PDF are unreadable, crossed out, photocopied, scanned and re-photocopied several times until the disappearance is integrated into the document itself. The disappearance of the image is also the disappearance of the text. The generated images dissolved to the point of losing their condition as images.

Black Pond explores a common land in the south of England and its natural history society. After two years of filming, the rushes were shown to the society. Their memories and responses were recorded and used as part of the film’s narration. The film does not give access to the complete knowledge of the history of humans within the area. Instead, it explores more generally humans’ relationship with and within landscape and nature.

At 39 and with an arbitrary biological clock ticking, the director of this film faced up to her need to be a mother. Womb is a film essay about women, family and assisted fertility. Using everyday footage and recovering personal archive footage, Reposi Garibaldi reflects on late maternity and the fragility between life and death. With an associative audiovisual lyricism, the director explores an issue that concerns many contemporary women.

An old blind woman threads an infinite yarn, while her house floats in the sea. Sometimes she asks her god to wake her from the dream of being alive. Sometimes she forgets what the dream is.

In the film Ojo Guareña we join members of the Edelweiss Speleology Group as they enter the gigantic cave of the same name in Spain. We barely notice the prehistoric traces and the contours of the space, but we hear better: drops of water that have shaped the cave for aeons and continue to do so, as well as echoes of human footsteps. The cave becomes a mental world where several histories and temporalities merge. It's a living space with its minimal architecture populated by discoverers, prehistoric peoples, animals and tourists. Rubio punctuates this soundscape with the speleologists’ memories and revolutionary songs denouncing Franco's dictatorship. A journey through time and space.

In school, we learn to remember to live, but in life, we learn to forget to enrich living. The image ages with the passage of time, and it still has room to let in unwanted information. Frozen from the film-propaganda against the student movement, Let the student study (1962), by Jean Manzon, made in the pre-coup-d'etat context, a frame is photocopied, stretched and dipped in the cave of time.

In 2016, the Colombian state and the FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces) signed the peace agreement. The original video is a precarious video where I performanced an advertising proposal, as a pitch (fictitious) for the new institutional image of the FARC party. I uploaded the video to Youtube and in the same night I tweeted it to the relevant Colombian media. The next day the video went viral and it really came out in the news from Colombia. What I am interested in showing with this video is that the channel where the video is presented begins to play a representative role, not only as an art but also as a suspicion and post-truth proposal.

Second part of the Berlin-Yichq'an-Monimbó triptych. Yichq'an, Root of Heaven, talks about the participation of women in the Guatemalan guerrilla conflict during the 1980s. It consists of the intervention of fragments from Utopia Lost (Sergio Valdés, CUEC, UNAM, 16mm, 1983) and from When the Mountains Tremble (Thomas Sigel and Pamela Yates, USA, 1983).

The man's trajectory is a grievous one: there he goes, watching, moving, leaving behind a trail of lifeless bodies, while the townsfolk fear and yet long for for their own miserable end. It would be absurd to start from the idea that man can learn to be good.

To leave a house. To film the trees before leaving, the light that one takes with oneself. To go, with the measure of that light, towards an unknown place. To film the distance between one house and another, a path made of dreams, a place as an abyss. To film fragments of reality in tension with that light. To film that spiral of time, time itself.

Found footage short that uses images from the documentary El Grito (Mexico, 1968). The student movement of 1968 in Mexico ends with a State crime that has gone unpunished to this day. The degraded images of Closer to Our Time reflect on the old wounds that remain open: the past that defines and reaffirms the growing state of violence and impunity in Mexico.

Celeste, a young photographer, finds in her childhood home garbage bags with thousands of negatives that belonged to her father, a photographer who in the 1970s and 80s fought against the dictatorship in Chile before going into exile in Ecuador. The photos, the only survivors from thousands of missing images, reveal an unknown world, where clandestinity blends with the living emotion of a past, where the idea of making a different future seemed possible. In the light of the present, the archive images seem to offer a space between documentary and fiction, where the unrepresentable part of memory might materialize.

Premature Thoughts About Your/Mine Horizontality is a video centered on the affective relation between the way a house is inhabited and the memory of it. 
The script, a central component of the piece, is a narration developed from a reflection on the past and death. Where and when a person ends, and whether we carry the weight of our ancestors with us, are also a part of that reflection. 
It is a question about the place where the people who have disappeared exist, and if the experience of a domestic familiar space is informed and altered by the way others before us inhabited a home.

A film-portrait tells the story of the day when the Félix family bees expelled the US Navy from the family land. A story that is kept alive in Vieques, Puerto Rico, like the hot embers of the resistance to the colonial status of the island.

The filmmaker Letícia Simões spent the first semester of 2016 pursuing a master's degree at the International School of Cinema and TV (San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba). The result of this experience is this short film, which takes an epistolary form as she tells her mother about her impressions of the country, just as President Barack Obama visited for the first time, the first Chanel fashion show was held, and shops were opening with brands like Adidas and Clarins. The film reflects the impressions of a foreigner amid the imminence of major transformations and of what will remain of the socialist revolution of 1959.

Abubakar is 46 years old and participates in the zikr, ritual dances performed by Chechen Sufi Muslims. In each zikr he reaches a state of ecstasy and for Abubakar this is an exorcism, a form of liberation from everything that his people have suffered over so many years of occupation. The presence of his mother, his wife and his nine children make ghosts reappear from the past and present: stories of the 1948 deportation, his daughters in danger of being kidnapped, the city of Grozny in the present day, lights, sounds, landscapes, dark faces behind dilapidated walls. All of this brings memory to life, mixing it with reality. This is the everyday encounter of one Chechen with two pillars of his society, faith and culture, embodied in the zikr where the sacred merges with the profane.

Commissioned for Documenta 13, Continuity follows a young German soldier returning home after serving in Afghanistan. A familiar domestic environment with emotional parents soon gives way to a series of anomalies that gradually become perverse and uncanny. It remains unclear whether the family has suffered an actual loss or if they’re performing an obsessive ritual that keeps them together. A total of three different sons spend the night at the house. Each disappears under mysterious circumstances.

Originally premiered in the 52nd Venice Biennale, 5000 Feet is the Best is based on conversations with a U.S. Predator drone operator, which were recorded in a hotel in Las Vegas. On-camera, the drone operator discussed the technical aspects of his job and his daily routine. Off-camera and off-the-record, he briefly described incidents in which the unmanned plane fired at both militants and civilians. The film fluidly moves from documentary to reenactment and fiction, weaving together the drone operator’s account along with scenes depicting crimes in and around Las Vegas.

A family, a house and a fire

Outside, a meadow in Patagonia turns from daylight to dusk to darkness. Inside the cabin, lights turn on; the great windowpane reflects the inside of the living room. While the outside disappears, a man and a woman sit down to read and listen to music.The scene plays with Quartet for the End of Time, by Olivier Messiaen, from witch the second movement is For the Angel who Announces the End of Time. In the rooms´ half-light, one person stands and switches the camera off.

A film whose theme is waiting, recording it in its most varied manifestations. Waiting in line, mystical waits, the waiting of an actor to get into a scene, the harrowing wait for sleep, the wait for the hormonal effects in a gender identity adjustment. The waiting time is mixed with the time of our own lives, at a time that we are unlearning how to wait.

In this video piece I approach these power figures, kissing history, my heroes, my men, cold and erect by the city inviting me to love them. With these subtle gestures I metaphorically attempt to suspend the historical and patriarchal weight they carry. The discussion and provocation I seek in the video work, not in the place of execution. The kiss for me represents a great sentimental affection, a mutual concession that both parties allow. In this piece the kisses that I give are intense, passionate, in a sexual-erotic tone and maybe a little violent. Ultimately, each character I choose has a powerful historic value for the construction of my Latin American identity, from the pre-Hispanic to the political.

Interview with the photographer and experimental filmmaker Marie-Louise Alemann.

In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications from starvation, at a time when he was one of the world’s most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness. At the Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet miraculously reforms the face. The carriage is set upright.

Throughout the animation, visual and narrative elements generate analogies between the sun and electronic displays, culminating in the following statement: just like the sun once did, screens illuminate and give life to digital societies, and in return they are worshiped in the same way past civilizations did to the sun under a plethora of ancient gods. In Brief History of the Sun it is posed as a question what is the human relationship with the digital screens to be used as tools for the production of immaterial and affective labor. Similarly, it evidences screens as the main window for corporate control over our bodies and desires through the use of algorithms.

Overlapping of the monumental structures of communist East Berlin architecture.

The Dora Case aims to carry out a practical investigation situated on the border between documentary and fiction, taking as its main reference the film La Chinoise by Jean-Luc Godard. The narrative of The Dora Case establishes a distorted mirroring between the happenings of May 1968, in Paris, and the protests of June 2013, in São Paulo. The title refers to the first case study published by Freud, in 1905, which to this day is considered a paradigmatic text for presenting the central tenets of his theory of hysteria. Taking advantage of the coincidence between the pseudonym assigned by Freud to his hysterical patient and the first name of the director of the film, The Dora Case proposes an autobiographical reflection commenting on the position of the artist in the present day.

In mid November, the corpses appeared, floating in the Strait of Magellan. The dead bodies of Yan Cumbao, Wang Hao and Sung Chungman were tied up with life vests, cellular phones, computers and passports. Two of them were found malnourished, another with typhus. Yin Xinji’s body was never found.

(I. A word can take the place of labor in reality / II. Labor hints at other labors behind it / III. Some labors do without a name) Video I and II correspond to the micro story of A and E, both self-employed workers and those who have a direct relationship with the economy (they produce, distribute and consume their product). Video II, in the form of a recipe, emphasizes the non-visible production processes behind the product. Video III frames everyday tasks, where the working day is camouflaged with (unpaid) domestic work. Camelia puts the economic chain into circulation by connecting the three videos, altering the language (with a nod to the national debt) and the time of the image in movement in contrast with the real time of the production of labor and merchandise. 2* Each title (I, II, III) is a phrase taken from Magritte's work. I have replaced the word "object" with the word "labor." 4* The word "debt" is a substitution for "banana" in Magritte's work.

Eviction was imminent and I had a run in with the law. Whatever happened to Josefa, the owner of the apartment, is a well-kept and mysterious secret. The file states that she died the day after the last time I saw her that night, torn up in the room of a building in the Constitución neighbourhood. Then came two years of court battles that were lost before they even began. The goodbye lasted just as long: the evenings at the iron-framed window, the conversations with my neighbor, the uncertainty of not knowing whether every night would be the last. I reconstructed each memory through my eyes and the beauty of that refuge. I wish I could have covered my ears. Lengua Vernácula is only the balcony of a bizarre microcosm within the neighborhood, the live expression of common sense and my sadness which can’t be seen.

Can film and video coexist in the same film? Here, 16mm film and VHS video tapes need each other in order to exist. Thanks to the transparent clear leader of 16mm acetate film, we can visualize in movement the materiality of the analogue video support, glued on top of the film, serving as skeleton and structure of the VHS tapes intervened. A film? A video? Both and none at the same time...

Cinematic Graffiti. A defacing of the image of normality sold to the public en masse. We manipulate these images to express our visceral reaction as filmmakers and artists to the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the disastrous yet logical conclusion of a system that is finally imploding before our eyes.

Pokhot is the story of two people who do not know each other but at the same time have some things in common. One is a Venezuelan sex worker, and the other is Ukrainian and an Orthodox Christian. Aside from that, this isn’t a story about culture shock, but rather a story about the closeness and distance between people.

A fascinating look at the exuberance of the Argentine province of Corrientes, travelling over the Esteros del Iberá and the coast of Empedrado. Along the way the film focuses on the abundant life all around.

A child's dream is indecipherable, we can only embrace that mystery without wanting to solve it and cinema gives us the privilege of trying tometaphorize that bewilderment.

Dune Field explores the encounter between human, economic and geological trajectories in the area of the dune complex in Concón, Chile. With brief descriptions, Mollenhauer examines how our inability to establish contact with the non-human has historically led us to take geological monuments as passive entities, ready to be occupied or used. Taking into account this inability, the film uses the act of speculation as a method to uncover geological agencies in action. The film has a structure in which all the scenes have equal duration. In this way, the recording apparatus is converted into a measuring tool to explore transfigurations of time as a result of the encounter between the different trajectories that define the place.

Research on time, its passing and perception. Composition from fragments of the recorded image and the space; other space made possible upon the screen. Video serie.

In the Jiu Valley, once a traditional Romanian industrial area, parents now make long journeys to the West wherever they find work. They return too rarely. They send money. Their children are a lot like orphans.

Both a requiem for and an honouring of Canada’s First Nations, Métis and Inuit women, Michelle Latimer’s Nimmikaage (She Dances for People) deconstructs the layers beneath the recorded pageantry of Canadian nationalism.

The film gives us access to the demilitarised zone and immerses us into the heart of the personal memory of a soldier who tells us about his experience in a reconnaissance mission.

A group of peasants enters La Estancia in search of their missing relatives. Are they dead? Are they alive? Nobody knows. Some survivors of the massacre hide in the forest wandering around in shock.

Watching home movies with the Al-Haddad family, Hebron, West Bank: snow, settlers, and souvenirs. Images of stones thrown and beatings blend in with humorous digressions, cinematographic critiques, and the obligatory tea ritual of Arab hospitality.

Scenes of Maracanã. Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment vote by the Lower House of Congress in 2016. The 2017 Labour Reform for the super wealth of businessmen. A World Coup in Brazil.

This project explores through my family history the political parallelism between Spain and Guatemala during the 20th century, with their respective wars and post wars. The thread for this exploration is given by the madness (due to the case of schizophrenia of my brother) and delirium (due to the alcoholism of my father). The approach of this political history was made as a victim and as a victimizer, having in mind how easy is to go from one side to the other and the terrible and corrosive apathy from the society.

A simple portrait of the daily life of the author going through another shitty winter in a small house in the outskirts of Villa Carlos Paz (Córdoba, Argentina) without money or heating.

Quehuaya is the story told by a fisherman on Lake Titicaca, about an island that only exists once a year, during the rainy season. His story transports us to the origins of the lake, the customs of its people, their language and the close relationship they have had with the water for centuries. A warlock reads the future of the water in the coca leaves. He alerts us to what the future holds for a civilization that refuses to disappear.

Using found footage, The Space Shuttle Challenger connects the Challenger disaster, Guantanamo Bay, the Pinochet coup and the experience of being sixteen. It reflects on the personal impact of major events in world history, and the small moments of hope that survive.

If I haven’t blossomed, if I remain unbloomed, it’s because my roots have been poisoned. I know it's false, an induced error, but... this is me.

This video was made with footage collected from the CD-ROM for the Encarta 98 encyclopaedia and footage made especially for the piece. It narrates and confronts two logics or forms of storytelling. One is the information from the Encarta 98 with which I used to play as a child. The other is a dream. My voice narrates the video in Spanish, while subtitles in English are provided. The English subtitles intentionally omit part of the information given by the voiceover. The video plays with language hierarchies, changing the role of those who read the subtitles, delivering less information to non-Spanish speakers, making them aware of the lack of information delivered. The work also emphasizes the history of science as a form of hegemonic storytelling.

Starting from a series of weekly meetings with a group of people from the Villa 21-24 slum in Buenos Aires, this project became a documentary, bringing out a rich variety of points of view, mostly from the slum inhabitants themselves. With the purpose of bringing audiovisual production closer to them, these individual stories are intermingled in a series of images that build as a whole (and from what is missing) a search for identity and collective memory.

The film sets out as an investigation into a clandestine printing press operated by the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (PRT) in Argentina during the period of revolutionary armed struggle in the 1970s. Through an exploration into the clandestine press’s inaccessible location, the film constructs itself formally and artistically as the possibility of being both testimony and a space for investigation.

Watching cinema, we spend half the time in complete darkness without being able to perceive it because of the effect of retention of images in our brain. Exercises in Disappearing is a brief questioning about the gaze, its limits, what we show, what others hide from us, what lives behind the curtain, out of frame, or just disappears from our field of vision.

One day my grandparent’s TV started to malfunction. The colours on the screen turned red and magenta. When we told them that the TV wasn’t working, Rafael and Isabel didn’t agree. As far as they were concerned, it was still functioning perfectly . This anecdote gave the name to Life in Red, a project begun in 2008, which takes as its starting point the private and political life of my family. It is an artistic investigation into the history of communism in the twentieth century, the use of personal documents to reflect on history, and the change of representation of images and words in different times and contexts. This video-essay functions as a mirror of the different parts of the project and narrates, over three generations, the search for that treasure called revolution.

The Origin of Stones questions the ideals of the past and their validity in the present through the decay and fall of monuments built to preserve a historic memory. With a text based on a debate that puts in doubt the effectiveness of a scale used to document the proportion and appearance of archaeological remains, this work looks to ruins as elements of living content connected to the present and emphasizes the powerful yet fragile nature of the narratives of history. Thus, it mirrors the impossibility of imagining the promises of a future in the ruins of the recent past, representing in this way a model of a failed utopia.

A dialogue about archival footage turns into a language class. A language class turns into a perspective on a country and its history. A perspective of a country and its history turns back into fiction.

First part of the Berlin-Yichq'an-Monimbó triptych. María Elena Batres, Displaced from Berlin, talks about those displaced by the guerrilla conflict in El Salvador in 1983. The piece was made from intervening discarded news reports from Corela TV (authors not identified, 1983). Held in the TVUNAM archive.

The Forces follows a group of jockeys as they learn their craft. In their analogue practices, simulation reproduces a future experience and a face becomes strange with a new gesture. Under a school logic, with methods and forms of evaluation, the material to be modelled is the body. A body that is complemented by another, a small body that should not grow, of a latent fragility, always at breaking point.

In early 2010, Jean Luc Godard shot Film Socialisme almost clandestinely aboard the Costa Concordia cruise ship. Three years later the same ship sank in the Mediterranean. An experimental making-of, Film catastrophe investigates the case.

An interstice.

Red, green, blue and yellow grids track the horizon, left and right. The colours collide and mix.

The North Toronto Wastewater Treatment Plant lies in thick brush downhill from a hydroelectric corridor. The eye bounces, guided by the vertical forms coming up out of the valley, and a low frame bridges these movements.

Stamens and pistils are lit in rapid succession behind the dome of the Palm House at Allan Gardens in Toronto. The plants trade colour, making alien scenes in the conservatory. Solid forms, too near to the eye, become muddied and indistinct, in constant passage, but the dome and the grid are fixed.

Birds in flight break through rusted clouds and translucent buildings. Rebar at a construction site seems to snake through sunlit puddles.

Serena Gundy Park, in Toronto, so named for the late wife of Toronto businessman James Henry Gundy, who influenced the financial character of early twentieth-century Canada. Lundy had owned the parkland as a family estate, and upon his death in 1951, donated the land to the city in memory of his late wife. In early spring, the trees remain bare from winter, on cusp of renewal. The films her name from its homophonic relation to the nursery rhyme Solomon Grundy (born on a Monday…) which cycles through the days of the week that chart Grundy’s life from birth to death, inevitably repeating, birth and death enclosed in a loop.

A tragic mistake jolts Teddy and Joanne into limbo. Their spirits bear witness to their past usage of household appliances, as if by electric charge they might uncoil their spectral presences from home and garden. A myth and a ghost story for Christine Lucy Latimer, on her birthday, 2015.

Studies in motion, made red, black and blue by tone and tint. To be present in a landscape is to turn from vision to a menacing rhythm.

In the spring of 1998, Christ Church - Saint James, an historic black church in Toronto’s Little Italy, was destroyed by arson. All that remains were walls and a pit, and over subsequent years, the site was overtaken with graffiti. This film has taken on the layered form of the site itself, the space and its surfaces becoming tangled and multiple, the grid of a stone-filled window giving geometric form to simultaneously occurring images of concrete, nature, waste, paint and sky. Music by John Butcher.

Lily Dale is a spiritualist community in Chautauqua County, New York. Pilgrims and tourists swarm the hamlet in summer, but in the fall, Lily Dale becomes a more intimate setting for spectral communions. This film explores the town’s Leolyn Woods, pet cemetery, Inspiration Stump and Fairy Trail. Music by Nate Wooley.

Seagulls hover and dip on the rocky coastline of Gibraltar Point. Tilting and multiple horizons camouflage the birds, splintering and gathering the lone gull to the flock.

Paris, past and past and present. The fountains of Paris witness day passing into night, gatherings of children and workers and lovers. The fountains of Paris, decorated with statues of an ancient order of philosophers and gods, confer with medieval illustrations in stained glass, merging Christian and Greco-Roman visions “as we fade to a marvellous view…” Music by Stuart Broomer.

A waterfall cuts through the land along the Bruce Trail; birdsongs and a distant cloud; I stand in the shadow of an electric cross; a bow set in the cloud, a token of the covenant between god and man.

“There is no one named Barbara to be found; a pair of mysterious blind-person's hands (looking suspiciously like Wieland's) make only one cameo appearance to 'read' us the title; yet these seemingly incongruous elements provide the perfect introduction to the ironic humour of the film itself. The main source of the film seems to be an old grade-school morality-movie on the appreciation of eyesight, starring golden-haired Mary, who finds herself temporarily blind, and a leaden-voiced narrator, who finds himself our unwitting straight-man. The filmmakers re-edited this curiosity and intercut it with other stock footage of disasters, agricultural techniques, and monster movies, to create a very different object lesson on the nature of vision." - B. Ruby Rich

A remake of Abram Room's 1927 silent Russian feature, “Bed and Sofa”. Heralded as a revolutionary feminist film, Room's version was suppressed for its radical treatment of sexual freedom, women's rights, and abortion. Armatage's version shifts the emphasis to the woman's point of view and stylizes the narrative. A comedy.

Abandoned by her lover, a young woman finds comfort and safety in her basement apartment. Mundane routines, a diet of junk food and the warmth of the television insulate her from the pain and betrayal of her ill-fated relationship. Eventually, The Basement Girl emerges - transformed and ready to “make it on her own.”

While leading us on a very personal tour of Toronto, Jim gradually reveals his unfortunate life, optimistic outlook, and friendly manner - all of which are mirrored somewhat in his pitbull's determination and innocence. Labelled by the police as a troublemaker and by his employers as incompetent, Jim will be seen by the audience as someone to be laughed at, someone to be pitied, and finally, as a very friendly and unique personality. The film gives us a sadly cruel yet hilarious perspective on life’s absurdities.

“This is one of the most assured films I have ever seen. In the simplest of frames, in monologue, Vancouver actor Callum Rennie plays a man remembering his lover lost to AIDS. Hoolboom fills his words with blood and the space behind Rennie with blood-rich images. Eight minutes of pure, perfect cinema.” - Cameron Bailey, NOW

The film unfolds to reveal some of the filmmaker’s friends who lead alternative lifestyles. We meet transsexuals, homosexuals, hookers, transvestites and female impersonators.