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‘The Shadow of the Sun’ draws upon Derek Jarman’s interest with alchemical processes as a metaphor for reprocessing Super-8 film. Jarman once described film’s union of light and matter as “an alchemical conjunction” and experimented throughout his career with creating dream symbolism through the superimposition of image and action. Originally called English Apocalypse, the film’s final title is derived from a 17th Century alchemical text that used the phrase as a synonym for the philosopher’s stone – the highly sought substance that turns base metals into gold and silver. The film was intended as a step toward the idea of an ambient video, that like its musical counterpart, was designed to enhance an environment.
Captain Henri Rochard is a French officer assigned to work with Lieut. Catherine Gates. Through a wacky series of misadventures, they fall in love and marry. When the war ends, Capt. Rochard tries to return to America with the other female war brides. Zany gender-confusing antics follow.
Lt. Franta Slama is a top pilot in the Czech Air Force who is assigned to train a promising young flier, Karel Vojtisek, and they soon become friends. When Nazi Germany invades Czechoslovakia in 1939, they both reject the authority of their new leaders and escape to England where they join other Czech exiles in the RAF. While flying a mission over England, Karel crash lands and happens upon the farmhouse of Susan, a young woman whose husband is in the Navy. Karel soon falls head over heels for Susan but, while they enjoy a brief fling, in time Susan decides she prefers the company of the older and more worldly Franta. As Franta and Karel struggle to maintain their friendship despite their romantic rivalry.
Jean-Luc Godard brings his firebrand political cinema to the UK, exploring the revolutionary signals in late ’60s British society. Constructed as a montage of various disconnected political acts (in line with Godard’s then appropriation of Soviet director Dziga Vertov’s agitprop techniques), it combines a diverse range of footage, from students discussing The Beatles to the production line at the MG factory in Oxfordshire, burnished with onscreen political sloganeering.
Beautifully constructed, 1001 Nights stays true to the lush and mysterious backdrop of the well known and age old story. Tezuka remolds the story into an escapist fantasy where a 60s-era working man is transported back to an era of entirely fictitious Arabian details. Seemingly at odds with itself, 1001 Nights consistently unfolds in a way that combines Playboy graphics, Arabian rug design and traditional Japanese scroll paintings. Sound like a strange mix? You bet and along the way we experience some of the great cultural juxtapositions that makes Tezuka the unpredictable style it is. Source: MAL
Journey from the depths of the Pacific Ocean into the far reaches of space on a quest to find something that changes everything…signs of life, somewhere else in the universe. With cutting-edge imagery from the world’s most powerful telescopes, The Search for Life in Space takes audiences from the surface of Mars and the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, to the extreme lava fields of Hawaii and thermal vents deep beneath the sea. In these harsh environments, astrobiologists look for clues to how life takes hold. As this immersive adventure into the universe reveals the possibility of planets like ours, The Search for Life in Space will make you re-examine such fundamental questions as: “Where did we come from?”, “How did we get here?” and “Are we alone?”
From a graffiti artist speaking out against domestic violence in the favelas of Brazil to a dancer rehabilitating sex-trafficking survivors in India, Little Stones profiles four women, each of whom are contributing a stone to the mosaic of the women’s movement through their art. The film and accompanying education initiative have been designed to raise awareness about global women’s rights issues, and to celebrate creative, entrepreneurial, and arts-therapy based solutions to the most pressing challenges facing women globally.
A young journalist named Jin Maddison has traced the origin of many Christmas traditions to a remote town in the Midwest called Selah. Years ago another famous journalist died in an accident there while investigating the same story. Jin travels to Selah hoping to unravel the mystery, suspicious of a darker truth behind the festive holiday. Upon arrival she’s stunned by the lack of decorations, lights, and signs, as well as the refusal of most locals to even talk about ‘Christmas’. After a violent encounter she’s saved by Private Investigator Amy Carson, who is trailing several Missing Persons cases that have led her to Selah. As they continue prying, they realize that the secrets Selah is hiding are far more terrifying than they could’ve ever imagined.
Eddie’s mom signs her slacker son up for a digital training seminar to get his life back on track.
Evolutionary biologist Professor Armand Leroi believes data science can transform the pop world. He gathers a team of scientists and researchers to analyse over 50 years of UK chart music. Can algorithms find the secret to pop success? When the results are in, Armand teams up with hit producer Trevor Horn. Using machine-learning techniques, Armand and Trevor try to take a song by unsigned artist Nike Jemiyo and turn it into a potential chart-topper.
A Canadian craftsman and an American designer with a father and son generation gap collaborate to revive the ancient Japanese woodcut using pop-culture icons: Mario and Pokémon.
Can games change the world? With cities everywhere struggling to cope with the population growth that increased urbanisation brings, can video games be harnessed to help the residents, especially young people, take part in planning, and fixing their own cities? Today public spaces and entire cities are being designed, planned and played through the medium of games. The result of this ‘civic gamification’ is that city architecture and urban planning is being democratized. Cities have become the ground zero for digital innovation and the debate about how our cities evolve has suddenly gone viral. We follow three game companies navigating the space where urban planning and gaming meet. Lydia Winters at the game developer Mojang, the creators of Minecraft, Paradox Interactive and the game Cities: Skylines and José Sanches and his indie game Block’hood. How will our cities look in 20 – 100 years time?
Barcelona, Spain, 1921. A tough cop from Madrid arrives in the city to locate, under the suspicious scrutiny of corrupt local police officers, a significant amount of military weaponry stolen from a train, allegedly by revolutionary anarchists.
FEMALE PERVERT is a provocative sex comedy by Atlanta based female writer/director Jiyoung Lee (Moral Sleaze, 2013), premiering at Slamdance this year. Actress Jennifer Kim (Mozart In The Jungle) shines as the titular star, a painfully awkward, sex obsessed video game designer who meets a series of men in hopes of sparking a love connection, and follows a twisted path to self-empowerment. The film has a truly absurd, original vision and impeccable comic timing. (more info on the film below).
Through Lyonne’s surrealist eye, the lead character learns to reconcile with her Vaudevillian past in order to step into her life more fully. We witness Chastity’s journey through the eloquence of incoherence. It’s about the illusion of significance in a surreal, unjust and often unintelligible world, yet finding meaning within it and retaining a form of hope in despite of it. Chastity finds an uncompromising way of realizing reality is a kind of absurdity.
Many people think of Space as a quiet and desolate vacuum of emptiness, but new evidence reveals that space is rife with activity beyond our comprehension. Just as we sent Voyager and Pioneer probes beyond our solar system, Aliens have probes of their own that may have arrived as early as the 1600’s. While Tesla was the first to successfully communicate with neighboring worlds using radio waves, we have received recent signals from intelligent sources. In 1989, Russian Space Probe Phobos 2 photographed a UFO on the surface of Mars just prior to losing contact. Scientists have determined that the craft was real and of a thin elliptical shape over 20 miles in length. We are not alone in outer space and while the Aliens may be initiating contact, they could also be here already.
On the eve of a significant birthday, a woman facing an existential crisis convinces her partner that a threesome might change everything.
The Narrow World examines the sudden appearance of a giant creature in Los Angeles through the eyes of three people with differing ideas of its true significance.
We are taken care of when we are children and we do not know as much as when we are older. There is less to worry about. But it does not mean the things that are important to us as children have less significance. You see, for Scruffy, despite that she is from a poor family of the countryside, it is very important to study well, because she will become an asthma doctor. The doctor said her dad will die but she has decided – she will grow up and cure her father. Equally important is to run away from her grandmother, who almost always is lurking around in the dark corners of the house with a comb to fix her messy hair. Death is too abstract to understand, war is a word one hears on the radio that grownups sometimes listen to. Yet, as Scruffy lives through her days full of happiness and misery at full steam, the most tumultuous years of Iran become unveiled on the background, as we are introduced to the Revolution and the Iran-Iraqi war through the eyes of a child.
In the sequel to “A Royal Family Holiday”, the children Phillip “Flip” Royal (Romeo Miller), a good-looking spiritual guru; Austin Royal (Eric Myrick III, At Sunrise), a Washington, D.C. community activist; Kelsey Royal (Chelsea Tavares, Fright Night), a fashion designer’s gopher; and Pamela Royal (Taquilla Whitfield, Magic Mike XXL), a hair and nail salon owner; join forces to reunite their parents in time for Christmas. They try every trick in the book – including “playing nice” and setting aside old sibling rivalries – only to learn their mom and dad are enjoying “the single life.” Their plan also goes awry as getting their parents back together ends up taking a back seat to their own personal and professional drama.
Inspired by a 1970’s science fiction novel entitled ALTERNATIVE 3, one man, armed with nothing but a camera and an open mind, sets forth on a journey to reveal the truth behind what may well be one of the most startling secrets: An elite group is said to be secretly building an exclusive off-world survival colony on planet Mars. Credible individuals have begun to emerge claiming to have been actual Mars recruits including the great granddaughter of a historically significant American president.
A tragic tale of a shipwrecked and injured fisherman as he searches for signs of life on the island where he was stranded leading to a dark secret.
He feels at home in places we would flee from and lives his life among the very things we fear. Throughout his life, HR Giger had inhabited the world of the uncanny, a dark universe on the brink of many an abyss. It was the only way this amiable, modest and humorous man was able to keep his fears in check. Giger was merely the bearer of dark messages, charting our nightmares, drafting maps of our subconscious and molding our primal fears. A film with and about the internationally acclaimed and controversial painter, sculptor, architect and designer (Oscar for ‘Alien’).
The history of the artist Ruth Gardner. That paints a picture in his own blood. The heroine of the film signed a contract with God himself. Who has promised to make Ruth famous all over the world, in exchange for a talent that had Ruth.
Tom “Putuparri” Lawford is a man caught between two worlds: his past and present in modern society, where he battles with alcoholism and domestic violence; and his future as a leader of his people, reconnecting with his ancestral lands, learning about his traditional culture and shouldering his responsibility to pass this knowledge on to the next generation. Director Nicole Ma spent more than a decade documenting Putuparri’s journey, travelling with him and his family on numerous occasions to Kurtal, in the Kimberley’s Great Sandy Desert region – traditionally a site of great significance as a place where people ritually make rain – as they fight for their native title claim over the area. Set against the backdrop of this long fight for ownership of traditional lands, the MIFF Premiere Fund-supported Putuparri and the Rainmakers is an emotional, visually breathtaking story of love, hope and the survival of Aboriginal law and culture against all odds.
He’s an unemployed guy who earns some money by giving lifts to strangers. She’s a graphic designer who just got her first job. The film tracks their relationship – and the way it gradually melts away – throughout a year. A subtle, moving portrait of an immature love that breaks down easily.
Football star Charlie has the world at her feet. With a top club desperate to sign her, her future is seemingly mapped out. But the teenager sees only a nightmare. Raised as a boy, Charlie is torn between wanting to live up to her father’s expectations and shedding this ill fitting skin.
In a near future, the world order has changed. With its 10 millions of unemployed citizens, France has now become a poor country. Its people wavers between rebellion and resignation and find an outlet in the shape of TV broadcast ultra brutal fights in which the players are legally doped and unscrupulous.
The American Dream Is the cultural motif that has inspired North America for the last century. Work hard, save, sacrifice and you will get ahead. America offers the freedom of upward mobility. But over the last decade the American Dream has been called into question. For many, it no longer seems to be working. The MILLENNIAL DREAM is a feature length documentary that explores the values that may replace the cultural motif known as The American Dream. As the Millennial generation becomes the most significant portion of the work force what will change about what we want from our jobs, what education will look like, what kinds of companies will succeed in the new economy and what kinds of living communities will be desired? And what can cities and regions do to attract the new economy? Interviews with experts such as Seth Godin and the personal reflections of young workers will stir debate and dialogue around what might emerge as the Millennial Dream.
A.I. guru Ben Goertzel grew up in a hippie community in Oregon during the Vietnam War. Inspired by science fiction, he imagined a perfect rational world that would transcend 1970s’ America. Ben has dedicated his life to developing OpenCog, a software that models the human mind. If Ben’s design works, OpenCog will become a human-like general intelligence. But for OpenCog to work, it needs a body.
Bouncing between Europe and the United States as often as she would between lovers, Peggy Guggenheim’s life was as swirling as the design of her uncle’s museum, and reads more like fiction than any reality imaginable. Peggy Guggenheim – Art Addict offers a rare look into Guggenheim’s world: blending the abstract, the colorful, the surreal and the salacious, to portray a life that was as complex and unpredictable as the artwork Peggy revered and the artists she pushed forward.
The boss and employee of a matchmaking website pretend to be lovers in order to save the company and regain their significant others.
With channels that can’t be found on any other cable package and a special offer including a lifetime of free service, one homeowner doesn’t think twice before signing on the dotted line and settling in to check out his new programs. But when the salesman said that these shows couldn’t be seen anywhere else, he wasn’t kidding… These series are all a part of something more vicious… Something more vile… They’re all a part of THE CARNAGE COLLECTION
Nam-bok, a middle-aged South Korean farmer is conscripted and assigned a mission to deliver a classified military document that may decide the fate of the war. After losing it while under attack from the enemy, he then faces a teenage North Korean soldier named Yeong-gwang who happens to acquire the secret document on his way to the North.
