An experimental, no-dialogue short in which a man comes literally out of a closet, only to be held in bondage by a woman. She finally puts him back into the closet.
Social & External
The people behind it
Loi Chin Yu
Man
Mun Lee
Woman
Born in Los Angeles but a New Yorker by choice, Barbara Hammer is a whole genre unto herself. Her pioneering 1974 short film Dyketactics, a four-minute, hippie wonder consisting of frolicking naked women in the countryside, broke new ground for its exploration of lesbian identity, desire and aesthetic.
An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.
“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread. Shifting the focus from character to interior, Ben Russell and Rhyne Piggott mine the landscape of a beige-carpeted ranch style house for new insights into the architecture of suburban alienation.” - Anne Reecer, Cinematexas
Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.
Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.
Between a man and his lover lies a wall, between the man and the country he loves lies another wall. Can a one-sided dialouge breaks the walls and expresses the man’s feelings and sentiments? Or does the lover or the country wants the wall to be broken in the first place? This short was inspired by Amy Len’s dance choreography “Wall” and colloborated with Loh Bok Lai. The dance was originally choreographed for a performance in Japan Dance Wave Fukuoka ‘06 - Asian Contemporary Dance Now and later made into an experimental video combining elements of an actor and monologue. The video footages were also used for the dance piece itself in KL.
"In medical terminology, absence of genitalia in females is referred to as "gynatresia". In other words, an extreme defect that goes beyond a mere illness" Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive
Follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City.
The film contains the despair of an artist’s desire for creation on ruthless censorship, rebel, and anxiety in the mid-70s when it was politically and socially depressed.
The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.
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.
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.
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.”
"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.
Emma is a young woman who's yet to find herself. In the meantime, she has to deal with the high expectations that society has set for women.
Gaining ideology from their last album Disco Volodar, the short film uses the core theme of space. The short film is filmed at Unit 3 Regents Trading Estate, the usual area for Sounds From The Other City. Using the philosophy of avante garde pioneer Maya Deren ‘one must at least begin with the body feeling’, the films opening is of the four piece standing atop of the hill in the Pendle countryside. This quickly melts into a warped reality and lands you into the POV of a camera and trapped in a liminal space where you see a band in session.
In 1983, yacht sailor Will Parker leads an American crew financed by millionaire Morgan Weld to defeat during the America's Cup race against an Australian crew. Determined to get the prize back, Will convinces Morgan to finance an experimental boat designed by his ex-girlfriend Kate's new beau, Joe Heisler. When the boat is completed, the Americans head to Australia to reclaim the cup.
Experimental short film with focus on Bahia(Brazilian State) Christian iconography.
HIDEO, It's Me, Mama is a psychological melodrama that introduces narrative and structural devices that are integral to Idemitsu's work. Exploring the flawed universe of the contemporary Japanese family, she focuses on a woman's identity as mother through mother-child and husband-wife relationships. Hideo, a young man living away from his parents, is kept under constant surveillance by his doting mother via an omnipresent television monitor. In a cogent metaphor for familial relations in the media-saturated culture of contemporary Japan, Mama can only communicate with her beloved, absent son through the video screen. Idemitsu's poignant irony is embodied in the scene in which Mama, blind to her husband's needs, caresses Hideo's video image. (Electronic Arts Intermix)
A man and woman embark on a sexual journey to detach mind from body. The relationship slowly grows into one of emotional domination, physical disease, abandonment and the creation of personal pornography.
20 men are chosen to participate in the roles of guards and prisoners in a psychological study that ultimately spirals out of control.
A retired boxer intends to return to the ring for one last shot at the title, but first he must make the weight. Holed up in a room in Las Vegas with an unscrupulous trainer, he embarks on an intensive and illegal weight-cutting program.
A jazz musician seeks refuge from a lynch mob on a remote island, where he meets a hostile game warden and the young object of his attentions.
In New York City, a young girl is caught in the middle of her parents' bitter custody battle.
A nightmarish evening unfolds for neighbors David and Robert when they accidentally hit a woman on her bike and flee the scene. While David is increasingly plagued by feelings of guilt, Robert shows no remorse and becomes overbearing and possessive.
The true story of 20-year-old Colleen Stan, a hitchhiking woman abducted by a young couple and held captive for seven years, during which time she's tortured and forced to live as a slave to her captors.
MMA legend Patton James, now a commercial fisherman, is pulled back into the cage when his brother is in danger. Reuniting with his old coach Sammy, he commits to one final fight in one championship against the brutal champion Xavier Grau.
A man is released from prison after 15 years. He reunites with his high school girlfriend, now a single mother of three. What follows is a lyrical take on love, regret and second chances.
Up-and-coming sports reporter rescues a homeless man ("Champ") only to discover that he is, in fact, a boxing legend believed to have passed away. What begins as an opportunity to resurrect Champ's story and escape the shadow of his father's success becomes a personal journey as the ambitious reporter reexamines his own life and his relationship with his family.
The legendary Roberto Duran and his equally legendary trainer Ray Arcel change each other's lives.
Louis Menkins is five weeks away from being released after 26 years in prison. He is faced with the decision to put his own release at risk in order to protect a young man named Beecher from growing gang controversies.
A noir thriller set in Miami, the film follows an enforcer who discovers his femme fatale boss has branched out into cyber sex trafficking, putting a young runaway he’s befriended at risk. He sacrifices everything to save the young girl from the deadly organization he’s spent his life building.
A former special forces contractor is forced out of retirement as an avocado farmer in Mexico when local gangsters try to force him and his family off their farm.
Conman Robert Freegard poses as an undercover MI5 agent and kidnaps countless victims amidst a high-stakes manhunt, until the woman who fell for him brings him to justice.
The relationship of a couple who meet by chance in New York City is put to the test when they encounter a life or death circumstance.
After Margaret, a divorcée living in Dublin, loses her teenage son, she develops an unorthodox relationship with Joe, a homeless youth. Their tentative trust is threatened by his involvement with a violent gang and the escalation of her ex-husband's grieving rage.
While serving life in prison, a young man looks back at the people, the circumstances and the system that set him on the path toward his crime.
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 troubled young woman becomes obsessed with her mysterious new neighbor, who bears a striking resemblance to the girl's dead mother.
A young man with a bright future suffers a near-fatal accident and recreates his new life with the help of an unlikely animal friend.
