A personal documentary questioning the ways in which family imposed narratives force us into roles that we spend our lives either rebelling against or conforming to.
Lorraine Sovern
as
A grandmother faintly narrates her quilts, as seen through the warped glass lens of a broken camera, a laptop webcam, and a clunky Xerox scanner.
A portal, a sorceress, a fictional device to portray existence as a moment encapsulated inside an instantaneous photograph to present fragmented biographical elements —family disintegration, rootlessness, scars, two loyal companions, the promises of a new land—subverting the notion of a home-movie and transform it into a pilgrimage tool of self-discovery, mirroring the fragile nature of memories.
Made over six years in the hotels of six different countries, Hotel Diaries charts the 'War on Terror' era of Bush and Blair through a seven-part series of video recordings that relate personal experiences to the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel/Palestine. In these works, which play upon chance and coincidence, hotel rooms are employed as 'found' film sets, where architecture, furnishing and decoration become the means by which the filmmaker’s small adventures are linked to major world events.
During the last forty years, the photographer Sebastião Salgado has been travelling through the continents, in the footsteps of an ever-changing humanity. He has witnessed the major events of our recent history: international conflicts, starvations and exodus… He is now embarking on the discovery of pristine territories, of the wild fauna and flora, of grandiose landscapes: a huge photographic project which is a tribute to the planet's beauty. Salgado's life and work are revealed to us by his son, Juliano, who went with him during his last journeys, and by Wim Wenders, a photographer himself.
Through phone call conversations, an aspiring Ilocano filmmaker relates to his mother working in Italy about his dreams and struggles while documenting the invisible betweenness of their language and distance.
Faced with an assignment to film something personal, Cem begins a quiet search for what that really means. A casual conversation with a close friend leads him to turn the camera toward the people who already shape his life. Through moments with his grandmother, spontaneous talks about family, and reflections on his dream of becoming a filmmaker, MozikMoro slowly transforms into a portrait of connection and self discovery. Between the ordinary and the intimate, Cem captures a world that is both deeply personal and universally human.
A Turkish woman in Brighton shares her visual diary. Witness her ups and downs, her intimacy and vulnerability. After revealing hers, the film invites you to confront your ‘tiny little things’. It presents a slice-of-life experience with an abstract flow and deals with one’s existence in this world. There is no escape from family and the things in your mind, even if you are thousands of miles away. The meaning changes constantly, and the camera becomes the extension of her mind. And somebody put that voice in her brain.
In 2022, when the economic crisis in her native country was at its peak, she decided to visit her family there. She turned her short trip into a collage-like diary in which she reflects on her relationship with her homeland, which is in a state of protracted decay. The film is composed of spontaneous snapshots capturing the author's stay, interspersed with inserted captions serving as personal, often poetically formulated comments and observations. As a result, the film does not hide its strongly subjective perspective, but at the same time builds on it to make an important statement that shows the transformation of Lebanese society in everyday details such as the appearance of the city itself or in the intimate sphere of the author's family life.
At the Myrtle-Wyckoff intersection, transportation arteries and the community overlap and interact, connect and collide, react and respond. Where are people going? Where are they coming from? And, what lies underneath all of the activity?
The Eye explores silent landscapes where nature and absence coexist. Between the memory of places and resilience in the face of time, the film oscillates between beauty and existential vertigo, capturing what persists and what fades.
A speaking into the void.
What are they? What do they seek? When all the lights go out, they will wander. And you will never see them.
An unhinged, diaristic examination of devastating friendship breakups.
A loose collection of scenes in Hong Kong shot over a five-year period, this film begins with the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and ends right before the summer of 2019, when large-scale social unrest and violent resistance erupted. The everyday scenes capture the ambience and the landscape of change in the city, standing as a quiet prelude to the ensuing conflicts.
Phyllis Bigler has been going to the Spanish Peaks of Colorado since she was a child. Now in her 90s, she tells her stories.
what was the last dream you had?
Rummage is an experimental documentary of the legendary rummage sale that takes place in Far Hills, New Jersey every first weekend in May and October.
Reminiscences of a trip to Čáslav