In an open field, a butterfly flies from flower to flower. The charming image is interrupted by cut-out photos of apartment blocks and flats that jump into view to the rhythm of a pile driver. The butterfly is increasingly hemmed in by the buildings, until there’s no more space left, and it is finally mounted and framed on a wall. The last of its kind died in 1975.
Category: Short
Sientje is a little girl whose mother won’t let her watch TV. She’s angry. Extremely angry: what does a little girl do when she’s so angry? Sientje takes out her aggression on everything, even her most precious stuffed animal.
Documentary portrait of writer and performer Spalding Gray, tracing his journey from his Rhode Island childhood to his rise as a celebrated monologist. Through interviews, performance excerpts, and reflections, it explores how he transformed personal experience into art. The film highlights his distinctive storytelling style—wry, confessional, and deeply human—revealing the creative process behind his acclaimed stage works.
Nuit noire, Calcutta, a film commissioned by the pharmaceutical industry and hijacked by Marin Karmitz, unfolds as an intense, nocturnal meandering, with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. Marin Karmitz rapidly abandons the informative intent of the project, adopting a much freer narrative. Although the film’s purpose is to promote a drug claiming to cure alcoholism, it transforms into a black-and-white mirage, starring Maurice Garrel as a drunken writer, a vice-consul in Calcutta, who is rendered creatively impotent.
Maldoror’s short debut film Monangambééé encapsulates the director’s artistic and political vision: this is not militant grandstanding, but a deeply human and lyrical portrayal of colonial inequality and injustice. Based on the short story “O fato completo de Lucas Matesso” (1962) by José Luandino Vieira, it shows how an Angolan activist arrested by the Portuguese occupiers becomes the victim of an absurd linguistic mix-up.
Animated film satire of self-indulgence in a hungry world. Rapidly dissolving, reshaping images, made with the aid of a computer, create a stark contrast between abundance and want. A man eats, at first sparingly, but his appetite grows to gluttony, greed, and gratification of every desire. The nightmare that finally haunts him is the one that hangs over our disparate world.
A train from Paris to Moscow arrives at Brest-Litovsk, a border crossing between Poland and the former Soviet Union. Since Soviet rails are 89 mm wider than European ones, Belarusian railway workers must lift the cars and change the wheels so the train can continue eastward. Nominated for an Oscar in 1995 and winner of numerous awards worldwide, 89 mm od Europy shows the gap that still exists between the countries of the East and the West.
A film that was created by chance, while making another documentary. This is the story of a typical opportunist who has always been able to adapt to the times in which he lived. “Hero” without any sense of shame tells how he sewed uniforms for German officers and now runs a thriving restaurant. Despite the rather short statement, it is worth thinking more deeply about the attitude of the “king” of life…