Social & External
The people behind it
In Search of Avery Willard iIlluminates the life and work of the groundbreaking, and mostly forgotten, artist Avery Willard — photographer, filmmaker, writer, publisher, leatherman, pornographer.
Cosmic horror explores the elements and matter of so-called inanimate nature, which become actors and form a new ecosystem. A stream of depictions of fluid materials embedded into each other is accompanied by an unsettling soundtrack that reinforces the uncertainty of whether we are watching a cosmogonic or eschatological vision.
Experimental meditation on land, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. Shot in the Okanagan and West Kootenays. Original music by Jack Brintnell.
An experiment in video and sound collage by John Ledingham and Liam McCarrell. Inspired by the novel "Libra" by Don DeLillo.
What are they? What do they seek? When all the lights go out, they will wander. And you will never see them.
A series of testimonies about formative encounters with sex and pornography.
The study of the artistic work and its relationship with the author generates reflections on the connection between the material and the spiritual. The Dance of Icarus is a poetic documentary that offers an open space for reflection, like a tribal dance. Through the effort, passion and imagination of the artist José Benítez, the pictorial process becomes a profound relationship between the artist and the canvas, raising unanswered questions about creation. This documentary, loaded with symbolism, invites a total immersion in the creative process. Directed by Jesús Jiménez, this debut film is presented as an expressionist work that celebrates art in its purest and most visceral form, exploring the dimensions of artistic creation and its impact on the viewer.
A generational trauma through the lens of an Asian American teenager through food and poetry.
Challenging all notions of genre, Semi Colin is a living, breathing art installation. Part performance, part art, part social comment, Colin philosophizes on his life's obsessive work as an erotic artist.
In an intimate and provocative journey, Vibrations is a documentary-essay that explores the filmmaker’s complex relationship with explicit imagery and his own sexuality. Born into a Catholic family and struggling to put his homosexuality into words, the director finds in pornography a space for self-exploration and acceptance. The film dives into the nuances of alternative pornography, challenging stigmas and revealing how desire, identity, and the politics of the body intertwine both on screen and in life. A work that pulses between the personal and the universal, Vibrations challenges perceptions and invites a rediscovery of pleasure and freedom through the image.
A quick view of three remarkable organic gardens: Le Tomple, Le jardin du Mas d’Abri in the department of Gard and Le jardin des Sambucs in the department of Hérault. The film goes over their general layout along pathways amongst the vegetation, ponds and people or animals that happen to be there at the time.
Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.
Jan receives the group patch at the campfire, Herkules brews up some tea in the workshop and Sidney gets a mohawk haircut done by his father. The film shows fragments from an Oberhausen subculture in which symbols and practices of the outlaw motorbiker scene are transferred to cycling.
I'm a Porn Star follows the lives of guys in the neighborhood who are likely a lot more famous than you - at least on the Internet. There are an estimated 370 million pornographic websites on-line. Porn is now a thirteen BILLION dollar business. So who's doing all this moonlighting? Turns out -- probably some people you know.
Latest installment from the on-going collaboration between filmmaker Paul Clipson & musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Paul's Super8 films, shot entirely in New York City, channel the blissed out states of color drenched psychadellia explored by Brakage as well as lovely black and white still life's that reminisce on Ozu's 'pillow shots' & Chantel Akermans monumental portrait of Pre-Giuliani New York 'Letters Home'. Jefre's music is culled from the same sessions that launched his 2007 release on Students Of Decay 'Shinning Skull Breath', (the two share a track in common). Billowy clouds of distorted guitar expand out into long passages of muffled static and fuzzed out melody.
A documentary of insect life in meadows and ponds, using incredible close-ups, slow motion, and time-lapse photography. It includes bees collecting nectar, ladybugs eating mites, snails mating, spiders wrapping their catch, a scarab beetle relentlessly pushing its ball of dung uphill, endless lines of caterpillars, an underwater spider creating an air bubble to live in, and a mosquito hatching.
An investigation about human intervention in nature, from the subjective point of view of the camera, the environment and its transformation are observed.
In the rural desert of Bolivia, where the most important presence is the wind moving between papa flowers and animals, the people who harvest the land, those who built the ancient artifacts and sacred objects and the musicians who play moseñada – songs linked to the first products of the harvest – on the streets of the city have one point in common: labor. With a successful inclusion of stories of enchanted lakes, legends that pass from mouth to mouth – or from orality to audiovisual, in this case – and give a fantastic aura to those lands, Luciana Decker Orozco not only manages to capture life without oscillations . field, but resorts to the incessant movement of images and sound accompaniment to define a sensory and transcendental experience for the viewer.
Experimental short-film made by brazilian students about the trópicalia and cinema novo movement. The narrative revolves around the song Géleia Geral from the album Tropicália ou Panis Et Circensis and also around the political, artistical and social time from that period.
9to5 - Days in Porn focuses on the people behind a controversial and multi-billion dollar industry "The Adult Entertainment industry". It depicts their stories, each one different, unadorned and authentic, without glorification or prejudice. It delivers deep insight into their personal lives - from glamorous to grotesque - strange, fascinating, offensive, absurd and sometimes funny moments all at once.
A string of threatening emails escalates into a revenge plot involving a newly married US marshal and his ex-girlfriend.
In 1972, a seemingly typical shoestring budget pornographic film was made in a Florida hotel: "Deep Throat," starring Linda Lovelace. This film would surpass the wildest expectation of everyone involved to become one of the most successful independent films of all time. It caught the public imagination which met the spirit of the times, even as the self-appointed guardians of public morality struggled to suppress it, and created, for a brief moment, a possible future where sexuality in film had a bold artistic potential. This film covers the story of the making of this controversial film, its stunning success, its hysterical opposition along with its dark side of mob influence and allegations of the on set mistreatment of the film's star.
A subjective documentary that explores various theories about hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick's classic film The Shining. Five very different points of view are illuminated through voice over, film clips, animation and dramatic reenactments.
A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice– whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.
Documentary about legendary Paramount producer Robert Evans, based on his famous 1994 autobiography.
This searing investigative work shadows a group of activists risking unimaginable peril to confront the ongoing anti-LGBTQ program raging in the repressive and closed Russian republic. Unfettered access and a remarkable approach to protecting anonymity exposes this under-reported atrocity–and an extraordinary group of people confronting evil.
Drawn from a never before seen cache of personal footage spanning decades, this is an intimate portrait of the Sri Lankan artist and musician who continues to shatter conventions.
In this documentary, recovering addict and amputee John Wood finds himself in a stranger-than-fiction battle to reclaim his mummified leg from Southern entrepreneur Shannon Whisnant, who found it in a grill he bought at an auction and believes it therefore to be his rightful property.
A documentary on the Z Channel, one of the first pay cable stations in the US, and its programming chief, Jerry Harvey. Debuting in 1974, the LA-based channel's eclectic slate of movies became a prime example of the untapped power of cable television.
Controversy erupts when an unassuming young man floods the American wine market with fake vintages valued in the millions, bamboozling the wine world elite, in this humorous and suspenseful tale of an ingenious con on the eve of the 2008 stock market crash.
Through interviews with both victims and instigators, Nanfu Wang, a first-time mother, breaks open decades of silence on a vast, unprecedented social experiment that shaped — and destroyed — countless lives in China.
An investigation of how Hollywood's fabled stories have deeply influenced how Americans feel about transgender people, and how transgender people have been taught to feel about themselves.
In this film, Laerte conjugates the body in the feminine, and scrutinizes concepts and prejudices. Not in search of an identity, but in search of un-identities. Laerte creates and sends creatures to face reality in the fictional world of comic strips as a vanguard of the self. And, on the streets, the one who becomes the fiction of a real character. Laerte, of all the bodies, and of none, complicates all binaries. In following Laerte, this documentary chooses to clothe the nudity beyond the skin we inhabit.
Ten of Muhammad Ali's former rivals pay tribute to the three-time world heavyweight champion.
When Steve Jobs died the world wept. But what accounted for the grief of millions of people who didn’t know him? This evocative film navigates Jobs' path from a small house in the suburbs, to zen temples in Japan, to the CEO's office of the world's richest company, exploring how Jobs’ life and work shaped our relationship with the computer. The Man in the Machine is a provocative and sometimes startling re-evaluation of the legacy of an icon.
The story of Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, who became fast friends during their youth in Germany. With Rob coming from a broken home and Fabrice having left an abusive household, they shared a similar upbringing, as well as a future goal: to become famous superstars. In a few short years, their dreams came true. Rob and Fab, better known as Milli Vanilli, became the world's most popular pop duo in 1990 and won the GRAMMY for Best New Artist. However, their ascension to success came with a devastating price that ultimately led to their infamous undoing.
Using archival footage, cabinet conversation recordings, and an interview of the 85-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts his life, from working as a WWII whiz-kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's president, to managing the Vietnam War as defense secretary for presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
Torture chambers, acid vats, greased chutes and gassing rooms were just some of the devices of death designed by the Torture Doctor, H.H. Holmes in his castle of horrors. Follows Holmes' entire life as a criminal mastermind.
50 years after the legendary fest, Barak Goodman’s electric retelling of Woodstock, from the point of view of those who were on the ground, evokes the freedom, passion, community, and joy the three-day music festival created.
