A reality show star leaves her family's TV show fame and unknowingly joins a supernatural cult.
Social & External
The people behind it
Gisela Chípe
Luz Marina
Emilio Delgado
Carlos
Pooya Mohseni
Santana
Lynne Taylor
Antonieta
Kat Gonzalez
Karina
The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.
Lights flicker & fade as focus shifts from artificial to natural light, ending on a second artificial light speeding through the blackened miasma of the night sky.
Rapidly changing images of natural objects, scenery, animals, plants, and people flicker, flash, tumble, and cascade across the screen.
Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The "girlie" cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2016.
This film is a succession of visual and aural "notes" generated by the patterns in animals' hides, which are arranged and re-edited into a complex musical architecture, developing intricate rhythms not unlike the complex syncopations found in traditional African music. Elements of sand, dirt, light and shadow cross-reference the film's emulsion with evolutionary history and provide a second level of musical structuring through which the first layer is filtered. The animals' fur patterns, which evolved naturally as camouflage to hide them from predators, ironically now make the animals more visible to human predators who are attracted by their exotic uniqueness. This cinematic analogy underscores modern humanity's relationship to the natural world.
NYC’s genre-bending Temporary Distortion mines the worlds of Japanese ghost stories and J-Horror in Americana Kamikaze. Inside one of Temporary Distortion’s signature box structures, an East-meets-West psychological horror story unspools, complete with vengeful spirits, impossible physical manipulations, elliptical storylines, nightmarish cinematography and stunning visuals. Temporary Distortion has been making new works that seamlessly blend theater, cinema and installation since 2002. Their work has been presented in the US, Canada, France and Austria.
Combining home movies, 16mm footage, audiotape, and an original score, Gallisá Muriente’s poetic excavation oscillates between chronicle, dream, and document. Where people and nature meet, she uncovers environmental and colonial memories from her grandmother’s past and in the landscape of Puerto Rico.
This cine-portrait of New York City uses digital effects to turn the countless riders of the subway system into living, breathing paintings.
In the Mojave Desert, fields of solar panels follow the sun’s daily journey in perfect synchronicity.
The Displaced View traces a personal search for identity and pride, within the unique and suppressed history of the Japanese in Canada. Through an examination of the emotional and cultural links between the women of one family, the processes of the construction of memory and the re-construction of history, are revealed. Utilizing an innovative combination of experimental, dramatic and documentary forms, the film emerges as a deeply moving and compassionate love letter. Just as the official history of the Japanese Canadians has been thrown into question, so does the film’s fictionalized narrative, question documentary as truth.
Experimental short film on the excitement and rush of a day trip
"Mapang-akit" is an offshoot of a documentary project made with an Icelandic filmmaker and uses the outtakes from the Hudas Hudas festival in Antique, where a community bonds over a large effigy of Judas Iscariot during Holy Week. Amidst it is a found story of a man who returns home to his death after pursuing a woman in a neighboring village.
From the Maroon village of Malobi in Suriname, South America, this single-take film offers a strikingly contemporary take on a Jean Rouch classic. It’s Halloween at the Equator, Andrei Tarkovsky for the jungle set.
On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.
Filmmakers use archival footage and animation to explore the culture surrounding nuclear weapons, the fascination they inspire and the perverse appeal they still exert.
Colossal explores the complexities of grief and the process of grieving as understood through the myth of a Man as he ventures through shifting landscapes ruminating.
ISLANDS explores a cinematic journey of two astronauts. As they enter Earth’s atmosphere the structure transforms. The spacecraft becomes the meteor from a myth of a tribesman; it triggers an old lady’s memory of a lover from her past. As these diverse characters converge in a plane of reality, we confront a particular form of gravity we covertly feel—falling in love.
At first, there was Tagalog, Gym Lumbera’s short and, to his mind, unfinished narrative about the infidelity that comes between a husband and wife in their twilight years, shot on film and reflecting his own real-life infidelity.. And then there was a storm, a real storm and not a metaphorical one, that flooded his house and submerged, and subsequently damaged, the only copy of Tagalog. This damaged version, entitled English, became the missing piece that completed the film. The new work is named after Taglish, the bastard hybrid, some say corruption, of Tagalog and English, and has become a meditation on love and language and the ways in which we betray and destroy them.
Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.
Sarah is a debt collector who lives among the inhabitants of the village of Guimbal on the island of Panay. She wants to find the young man who appeared to her in a dream and goes to the island of Negros. Here, as she interacts with the inhabitants, Sarah continues her search, gathering memories of life and war, dreams, myths, legends, songs and stories that she takes part in and at times revolve around her. She is the daughter of an ancient mermaid, a revolutionary, a primordial element, a virgin who was kidnapped and hidden away from the sunlight. “The film is a retelling of fragments of the American occupation. Dialogue, shot in the Hiligaynon language, is not translated but used as a tonal guide and a tool for narration. Using unscripted scenes shot where the main character was asked to merely interact with the villagers, I discard dialogue and draw meaning from peoples’ faces, voices, and actions, weaving an entirely different story through the use of subtitles and inter-titles.”
A woman answers a help wanted ad to be a housekeeper in a mysterious New York City high-rise, unaware that she is entering a community that has seen a number of disappearances over the years and may be under the grip of a Satanic cult.
In a California desert town, a short-order cook with clairvoyant abilities encounters a mysterious man with a link to dark, threatening forces.
A young girl struggles to maintain her school grades while competing as a gymnast.
14-year-old basketball phenom Terron Forte has to navigate the under-the-table world of amateur athletics when he is recruited to an elite NCAA prep school.
A hopeful young starlet uncovers the ominous origins of the Hollywood elite and enters into a deadly agreement in exchange for fame and fortune.
A Catholic school newcomer falls in with a clique of teen witches who wield their powers against all who dare to cross them -- be they teachers, rivals or meddlesome parents.
On a dark and somber night, a secret cabal of monster hunters emerge from the shadows and gather at the foreboding Bloodstone Temple following the death of their leader. In a strange and macabre memorial to the leader’s life, the attendees are thrust into a mysterious and deadly competition for a powerful relic—a hunt that will ultimately bring them face to face with a dangerous monster.
When a shy teenager's new-found powers help him score at basketball - and with the popular girls - he has some pretty hairy decisions to make.
Down-on-his-luck Hollywood producer Barry 'Dutch' Detweiler attempts to lure Fedora, a famous but reclusive film actress, out of retirement, only to discover the horrifying truth behind her success.
Celeste Talbert is the star of the long-running soap opera "The Sun Also Sets." With the show's ratings down, Celeste's ruthlessly ambitious co-star, Montana Moorehead, and the show's arrogant producer, David Seton Barnes, plot to aggravate her into leaving the show by bringing back her old flame, Jeffrey Anderson, and hiring her beautiful young niece, Lori Craven.
An eclectic foursome of aspiring teenage witches get more than they bargained for as they lean into their newfound powers.
A woman is released from prison after serving a sentence for a violent crime and re-enters a society that refuses to forgive her past.
A shy teenager living on the Isle of Wight dreams of pop stardom. With the help of an unlikely mentor, she enters a singing competition that will test her integrity, talent, and ambition.
A young bride in the midst of her wedding finds herself mysteriously transported to the TARDIS. The Doctor must discover what her connection is with the Empress of the Racnoss's plan to destroy the world.
While dabbling in Satanism, Count Karstein resurrects Mircalla Karnstein who initiates him into vampirism. As a rash of deaths afflicts the village, Gustav the head of Puritan group leads his men to seek out and destroy the pestilence. One of his twin nieces has become inflicted with the witchcraft but Gustav's zeal and venom has trapped the innocent Maria, threatening her with a tortuous execution, whilst Frieda remains free to continue her orgy of evil.
Dawn thinks she's joining a dating show in Paris, France, only to land in Paris, Texas. She has an exit plan — until sparks fly with the cowboy bachelor.
In the town of Normal Valley, an eccentric magician named Maestro entertains the local children every day in his spooky mansion. One stormy night, the town's mayor leads a group of angry citizens to the mansion in an attempt to run Maestro out of town.
A troubled young man is drawn to a mythical place called Midian where a variety of friendly monsters are hiding from humanity. Meanwhile, a sadistic serial killer is looking for a patsy.
A young woman with psychokinetic powers breaks out of a Louisiana asylum and makes her way to New Orleans, where she falls into the city’s netherworld of misfits and miscreants.
Young Macy is abducted by a deranged, monstrous figure who wants to raise her as its child.
