Social & External
The people behind it
Şeyda Okumuş
Political engagement spawned the wildest of wonderlands for Hong Kong’s creativity – but as a new law annihilates freedom of expression overnight, underground artists and creatives find themselves targets, and their works disappeared. Together we race to preserve the creative uprising amid China’s crackdown.
Shot in Sweden, the short film, ‘LAGOM: Breaking Bread With The Self-Righteous’ sees an appearance by Lhola Amira. She does not perform, she just appears. She looks a little lost in a field of flowers in bloom, a vista of beauty, yellow everywhere; she does not pluck a single flower. ‘LAGOM’ is the Swedish ethos of “not too much, not too little – just the appropriate amount.”
STATIC! VIBRATION! ENERGY! HYPNOSIS! DEMONS! A UNIVERSE BORN OF GODS BATTLING IN THE DARK WITH FLICKERING LIGHTS OF COLORED FLAME! BEASTS SHAPING HORIZONS BY THEIR MARCHING STEPS! THE SPINNING GOD HEAD! THE SHIFTING TOTEM ANIMALS! STATIC! VIBRATION! ENERGY!
This is an intimate and fragmented portrait of what it means to fall in love in the 21st century. Where desire, breadcrumbing, and vulnerability intertwine in a process of falling, self-creation, and pure frenzy.
Between documentary images of a craftsman in his workshop and spaces threaded with loose strands, Acabado, Permanente Inacabado constructs a living journey that questions the illusion of a finished work, insisting on the possibility of returning, unraveling and allowing the act of creation to bloom.
The nine virtual sculptures underlying vitreous resulted from experimental setups by Robert Seidel for generating three-dimensional clusters of fibrous refractions, as well as the gravitational lensing of different volumetric and chromatic densities. Singular elements gravitate towards each other, accumulating in a gigantic sculptural system, where each entity exists with its own visual axis and vanishing point. The impalpable luminous formations create prismatic interactions between the ridges and plateaux of the main colours floating in front of the infinite violet background.
Hunter, a bride-to-be, feels overworked and unappreciated. Her artistic spirit is squelched by the shallow corporate world she’s in and she has had enough. Unfortunately, she feels as if she can’t turn to Ian, her commercial executive fiancé, for solace. As her wedding day approaches, Hunter and her three bridesmaids embark on a road trip to Las Vegas for one last hoorah together. As the girls venture from the city, they decompress and let their personal barriers fall. An impromptu sightseeing excursion into the desert leads to a clash of anxieties and attitudes between Hunter, the bridesmaids, and her fiancé as Hunter searches for the road that’s right for her.
An experimental reinterpretation of 1950s science fiction B movies.
It is night. The moon is shining. A static camera captures a huge flock of starlings searching the sky in circular movements… At first the starlings are hard to identify. Having deliberately edited frames coming from different generations of the original print in a certain metrical order, without changing the actual chronology of their movement, Kels has the constantly changing shapes of the birds dissolve in the rough grain of the celluloid. Once again a technical weakness of the celluloid forms the starting point of his visual enterprise. Shot on one reel without any interruption, the birds’ flight gradually forms configurations of astonishing beauty. —Millennium Film Journal, No. 30-31.
A man blows balloons until they burst and thus expresses his accumulated aggression.
A "glitch" is a malfunction in a system. Glitch art takes these errors and uses them as moments of aesthetic revelation. Interruptus is a glitch film, comprised completely of strategically halted downloads of digital videos. These broken files are then transformed into a stunning fugue of abstract texture. (Selected Exhibitions: In Media Res, Glitch Media Theme Week, Dramatic Chromatic, International Video Exchange (US Delegation, Trømso, Norway), GLI.TC/H at The Nightengale (Chicago, IL), GLI.TC/H at STEIM (Amsterdam))
Viva Las Vergas! The synthesis of simulacrum and solar max. (Selected Screenings and Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival, Dallas Video Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, New York Underground Film Festival)
A look into the stars, and what might happen if they were to be inhabited. Made using entirely public domain footage.
Three 20 year olds celebrate, while war planes fly overhead.
Designing artificial relationships between found or stolen elements is a technique that seeks to discuss found footage. Credere a tutto tells about houses and living beings and has developed by intertwining ancient photos, a text, a film sequence and original video footage. Materials that take on time, space and new meanings within the expanded vision of the so-called “spectators”. A techno music session while séances and panoramic views of derelict houses question us about what we see and what we cannot see.
Two sisters, Red and White, divided by death’s thin veil. Through bonds unyielding in life or death, a journey of grief and life after loss.
A man and a woman have a conversation on a bench. The wind blows with a calming serenity. The leaves fall with a graceful respect for the grass. Surgery always seemed like a better option. But, as you may already know, surgery can only do so much.
A tradwife whose preparations for dinner become unsettling as the boundaries between reality and the uncanny begin to blur.
A nameless drifter navigates a barren landscape punctuated by satellite dishes, radio towers and droning airplanes. Stopping periodically in anonymous hotel rooms, she makes attempts to connect to an unidentified second party.
In 1973, a young gallery assistant goes on a wild adventure behind the scenes as he helps aging genius Salvador Dali prepare for a big show in New York.
Ambitious artist Jabari attempts to balance success and love when he moves into his dream Manhattan apartment and falls for his next-door neighbor.
When a naive young man becomes the sexual muse for a renowned and provocative artist, his dream job quickly turns dangerous as he is drawn into an obsessive world of power, betrayal, and murder.
With his partner Caprice, celebrity performance artist Saul Tenser publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. An investigator from the National Organ Registry obsessively tracks their movements, which is when a mysterious group is revealed... Their mission — to use Tenser's notoriety to shed light on the next phase of human evolution.
Experimental short uses Ray Charles' “What'd I Say” as accompaniment to constantly shifting collage of female nude, cartoons, and newsreels of atomic bomb explosions.
In the days leading up to a possibly career-changing exhibition, a sculptor navigates her relationships with family, friends, and colleagues.
Single dad Richard meets Christine, a starving artist who moonlights as a cabbie. They awkwardly attempt to start a romance, but Richard’s divorce has left him emotionally damaged. Meanwhile, Richard’s sons—one a teenager, the other 6-years-old—take part in clumsy experiments with the opposite sex.
20 men are chosen to participate in the roles of guards and prisoners in a psychological study that ultimately spirals out of control.
A wealthy woman from Manhattan's Upper East Side struggles to deal with her new identity and her sexuality after her husband of 16 years leaves her for a younger woman.
To escape neglect and abuse from his parents, a young boy plants some strange seeds and they grow into a grandmother.
Al Pacino's deeply-felt rumination on Shakespeare's significance and relevance to the modern world through interviews and an in-depth analysis of "Richard III."
Two hundred years after Lt. Ripley died, a group of scientists clone her, hoping to breed the ultimate weapon. But the new Ripley is full of surprises … as are the new aliens. Ripley must team with a band of smugglers to keep the creatures from reaching Earth.
Caleb, a coder at the world's largest internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a private mountain retreat belonging to Nathan, the reclusive CEO of the company. But when Caleb arrives at the remote location he finds that he will have to participate in a strange and fascinating experiment in which he must interact with the world's first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot girl.
In a dystopian future, a totalitarian regime maintains peace by subduing the populace with a drug, and displays of emotion are punishable by death. A man in charge of enforcing the law rises to overthrow the system.
Mark 13 is a government-built killing machine programmed with artificial intelligence, able to repair and recharge itself from any energy source. Through a series of coincidences, the cyborg's head ends up in the home of a sculptress as a bizarre Christmas present from her boyfriend. Once inside its new home, the cyborg promptly reconstructs the rest of its body using a variety of household utensils and proceeds to go on a murderous rampage.
An aging, out-of-work actress accepts one last job, though the consequences of her decision affect her in ways she didn't consider.
A comedy film that looks into the loosely connected lives of people with strange sexual fantasies.
Conman Robert Freegard poses as an undercover MI5 agent and kidnaps countless victims amidst a high-stakes manhunt, until the woman who fell for him brings him to justice.
Loosely based on the Charles Dickens' classic novel, "Great Expectations" is a sensual tale of a young man's unforgettable passage into manhood, and the three individuals who will undeniably change his life forever. Through the surprising interactions of these vivid characters, "Great Expectations" takes a unique and contemporary look at life's great coincidences.
