Directed by Cannes-award winner Sándor Reisenbüchler, Holdmese is a psychedelic animated short that mixes pulp sci-fi, Tibetan mysticism and Slavic folklore. Two scientists propose that the moon is an ancient, derelict spaceship, and go on a journey through deep space to discover its origins. The influence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 is clear, but Reisenbüchler’s collage technique is distinctively- and irreverently- his own. Holdmese stands as a brilliant forgotten work of Communist animation.
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An almost psychedelically luminous invocation of the Battle of Borodino set to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (1880). As Reisenbüchler put it: the film deals with “self-destruction in the power struggle for the conquest of empires”.
Beginning with the arrival by canoe of a TV and VCR in their village, The Spirit of TV documents the emotions and thoughts of the Waiãpi as they first encounter their own TV images and those of others. They view a tape from their chief’s first trip to Brasilia to speak to the government, news broadcasts, and videos on other Brazilian native peoples. The tape translates the opinions of individual Waiãpi on the power of images, the diversity of native peoples, and native peoples’ common struggles with federal agents, goldminers, trappers and loggers.
If we split the Spanish word “cadáveres” (corpses) in three parts, we obtain another three different words: “Cada-ver-es”, that can be roughly translated in English as “Every-sight-is”. This experimental documentary follows the life and work of Juan Espada, the man in charge at the morgue of the Medicine Faculty in València, Spain, and deals with our visual taboos, the ones that we evade to watch: madness, solitude, death,… and several more that get portraited during its shocking footage. Shot on 16mm with a budget so low that the filmmaker had to sell his camera to finish post-production.
The World is Watching is a political film about the moral issues surrounding news gathering and newsmaking in the electronic age. Who decides what constitutes the news? How do they decide? And what about the men and women who report from the field. Are foreign correspondents allowed to tell all that they see? The film examines these complex issues by focusing on several international journalists in Nicaragua as they cover the negotiations surrounding the Arias Peace Plan in November 1987. With unprecedented access to the inner workings of ABC News, what follows is a unique portrait of a news crew in the field, as it interacts with the editorial process in the newsroom in New York City.
The son of computer graphics pioneer John Whitney, Sr., Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps and worked as animator for Hollywood films like Westworld and The Last Starfighter. He also made this experimental short in 1972, with abstract and swirling color patterns familiar from the visual music tradition of animation. These patterns gradually reveal themselves as a human face, derived from long exposure photography of a nude model.
This first feature film on homosexuality from sub-Saharan Africa is a contemporary African reinterpretation of the age-old Romeo and Juliet conflict between love and social convention. When Sori and Manga tell their parents they are in love, they respond that, “It’s impossible; since time began, it’s never happened. Boys don’t do that.
A white red-haired girl has been raised by the Cherokee Indians after her family was massacred. She considers herself a Native American and she regards all whites as her enemies. Her feelings are justified when outlaws kill her Indian parents. Realizing she can’t seek vengeance alone; she grudgingly accepts the help of white marshal Hollister and is now called the ‘Rose of Cimmarron’.