Director Lam Can-Zhao leads a small film crew as they shoot a film about a stray dog in the streets of Guangzhou, leading viewers into an unpredictable, peculiar and incredible journey.
Social & External
Avant-garde homage to pre-revolution Russian silent movies, and to the poet Aleksandr Blok.
A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. But in the course of a single day he unknowingly captures a death on film.
A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.
A tale of two brothers from babies to adulthood told without words. One brother is upstaged by the other from the crib onward. Eventually the tables are turned.
To forget about the end of a relationship, a woman fantasizes about an ideal one. Fantasy and reality begin to melt into one another, but the past finds a way to rear its head again. Films used: Notorious (1946) Gaslight (1944)
Cissie Colpitts drowns her cheating husband and, in the ensuing cover-up, enlists the help of lonely coroner Henry Madgett, an old friend with a longstanding weakness for her charms. But when Cissie's daughter and granddaughter—both also named Cissie Colpitts—decide to resort to the same methods for solving conflicts with their own frustrating husbands, the women and their repeated appeals for help begin to wear on Madgett's conscience.
Each day after work, Carlos, a language school teacher, frequents the heady surroundings of his local cruising ground. One evening he encounters a teenage boy from his class named Toni, and the two engage in a brief sexual tryst. As the relationship between teacher and student begins to develop, some dark truths emerge about the young man and his mysterious group of friends.
CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...
The young hero seems the essence of maleness, yet he's troubled by vaguely feminine objects. Soon his masculine and feminine selves are intercut, as each of his identities appears to look and gesture at the other. The film, at once melancholy and transcendent, consists of a shimmering, nearly plotless evocation of gender identity in flux through haunting, densely interlaced images.
Structured in nine tableaux each a study of a simple action or situation involving a lone, naked figure, the blind Eros, searching for fulfilment, for self. The objects he touches - books, paintings - can be seen as icons of the creative spirit; there is also a motor cycle and film equipment. In succeeding scenes he appears to try on identities offered by institutional doctrines of religion and social traditions of (overt) masculinity. Much of the film was constructed in-camera with a small amount of editing afterwards. An innovation was the use of in-camera fade-outs as phrase markers, not as terminal points, within a single set-up or shot.
Psyche 1947, made while a student at USC, shows Markopoulos’ developing style and his sensuous use of colour and composition. Shot in the Hollywood hills, the film was inspired by an unfinished novella by Pierre Louÿs. - Tate Modern
Markopoulos called Lysis “a study in stream-of-consciousness poetry of a lost, wandering, homosexual soul” and felt that the film foreshadowed The Illiac Passion.
Based on Plato's dialogue Charmides.
Eleven young film-makers got together to collaborate in this atypical project. Atypical not only because of its technical specs, but because of its narrative structure. There are several scenes with only the city in common, and more as a conceptual presence at that than as a precise geography. None of those scenes contains a single "story": Each one of them is part of a larger situation that we cannot see, as though the beginning and end of each "story" had to be filled in by the audience.
Sequence of five shots, each one with a particular color treatment, in which a man carrying a machine gun runs. He moves fast in the beginning but, as the end comes closer, he starts to walk in zigzag. Is he hurt?
A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his armless, cult leader mother, and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name.
Second short film by Andrea Campos, about a teenager who tries to combat her mother's compulsive alcoholism with the help of her stepfather. Kind of experimental.
Two co-workers, one a vain woman and the other an awkward teenager, share an increasingly bizarre relationship after becoming roommates.
The film appears like a ritual with splendids and crypteds psalms. The Great Master of Order (Marcel Mazé, new fetish actor after Aloual) seduces the young male prey with a running cinema projector which carves Murnau's Nosferatu extracts on their bodies. Metamorphosis, rituals passages, Eros and Thanotos, illusion and reality, film into the film are the themes and images in perpetual osmosis in this Stéphane Marti's opus.
Without any sounds, dialogues and with unknown actors, the images are the focus of this film. Images that want to awake, to question determinant moments, state of a system's languages, the morality of deaths, the immobility, the silence, among other subjects. Shot at the height of the Brazilian military dictatorship, it is an affront to the most diverse types of repression in that period.
