Just Hold Still

In his New York City landscape, Cohen finds inspiration in disturbance. Looking to life for rhythm and to architecture for state of mind, he locates simple mysteries. Just Hold Still is comprised of an interconnected series of short works and collaborations that explore the gray area between documentary, narrative, and experimental genres.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

The wife of an abusive criminal finds solace in the arms of a kind regular guest in her husband's restaurant.

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.

The Five Obstructions

In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.

A Silent Day

A depiction of a girl’s uneasy state of mind as it wavers between life and death.

Crash!

Short film produced by the BBC about JG Ballard's Crash. “The film was a product of the most experimental, darkest phase of Ballard’s career. It was an era of psychological blowback from the sudden, shocking death of his wife in 1964, an era that had produced the cut-up ‘condensed novels’ of Atrocity plus a series of strange collages and ‘advertisers’ announcements. After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised. Later there were further literary experiments, concrete poems and ‘impressionistic’ film reviews, and an aborted multimedia theatrical play based around car crashes. After that came an actual gallery exhibition of crashed cars, replete with strippers and the drunken destruction of the ‘exhibits’ by an enraged audience.” (from: http://aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.blogspot.de/2013/01/short-film-adaptation-of-jg-ballards.html)

@me

An amateur stand-up comedian seeks company online after the bar closes on a winter's night, but fails to connect with her surroundings and herself.

Harvey

A man without his own half of the body is looking for the other half in the opposite sex. As for the integrity of his body, so for the sake of emotional healing.

Mangúe-Bangúe

The quasi-fictional story of transgender sex workers living in Rio de Janeiro's swampy red light district, who are joined by a group of hippies and a runaway stockbroker, "Mangue-Bangue" is the paradigmatic expression of the post-1968 spirit of desbunde, the Brazilian slang catchword for "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll".

Thot-Fal'N

This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."

6-18-67

6-18-67 is a short quasi-documentary film by George Lucas regarding the making of the Columbia film “Mackenna's Gold”. This non-story, non-character visual tone poem is made up of nature imagery, time-lapse photography, and the subtle sounds of the Arizona desert.

The Sarah Vaccine

The Sarah Vaccine is a technicolor COVID nightmare from the deranged mind of Sarah Squirm. Your government has failed you...but SARAH never will! CW: excessive gore, poop, vomit, blood

23rd Psalm Branch: Part II

The second part: Brakhage’s layering of images spends less time with images of war, and begins filtering in scenes of Vienna and his home in Colorado. He sets up a comparison between “Kubelka’s Vienna” and his own.

Spaghetti Blockchain

Produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Arts at CERN, the arts program of the European Laboratory of Particle Physics, Geneva, with the support of the Permanent Mission of the United States to the United Nations, Geneva; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, with the support of Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung; and New Museum, New York

Then a Year

An audio collage of snippets of narration culled from true crime TV shows, juxtaposed against serene Super-8 nature footage.

Perfect World

A take it or leave it auteur-experimental fiction exercise: two women are monitoring their dreams, dreams that may of course also be stark naked reality, at least to the dreamers, as they come and they go like bubbles, rising, floating, bursting. A man appears out of nowhere. Poet Peter Laugesen co-wrote the script with Tom Elling, who was Lars von Trier's director of photography on "The Element of Crime".

Islands

A sexual reverie unfolds over the course of one ethereal night. Characters wander through an erotic maze of love and lust, blurring the lines between wet dream and lucid nightmare as a macabre, erotic stage performance sends a ripple of lustful desires through its audience and performers.

Congo

An experimental ethnographic documentary that criticizes the colonizer view of anthropology.

I...

By painting and scratching directly on celluloid strips and then duplicating each image for two or more frames, Brakhage produced a flickering cycle of abstract shapes that bespeak the restlessness of his own character and sensibility; the titles of the segments (which Brakhage also intended to function as freestanding films) further emphasize his rejection of collective thinking in favor of personal vision. I..., proposes an unstable image of the self with its centerless collisions of diverse imagery. Small black shapes are superimposed over diffuse colors, and each moment seems to consume and obliterate the last in an emotionally charged rush that suggests a consciousness terrified of stasis and perpetually seeking renewal.

Every Wall is a Door

Drawing on VHS tapes of a programme hosted by her mother on Bulgaria’s national television, the filmmaker gives a pop-style and in-depth chronicle of the gentle – even “over-gentle” – 1989 revolution.

Tale Enclosure

Returning to the primal source of language, Hill explores the physical and subconscious origins of speech. In a continuous shot of a rhythmic, linguistically inspired chant-performance by George Quasha and George Stein, the camera wanders from mouth to face to hands to figure in an open-ended visual search. The performers use the body as an acoustic instrument of sound and abstract utterances.

Fantastic Return to Oz

A year to the day after Dorothy and the people of the Emerald City defeated Urfin Jus, the villain is trying to exact his revenge. To command the army of Carraci, however, Urfin needs not only the magic book, but also Dorothy’s silver slippers. The slippers are safely hidden away in Dorothy’s house. Unfortunately, Dorothy’s guest, Tim, is overcome by curiosity and picks up the shoes, accidentally transporting himself, Dorothy and the slippers to the Land of Oz. The Emerald City and its citizens are in danger once again.

Return

A girl is at school. Suddenly it's as if she can't breathe. As she runs down the stairs we follow her into her mind. It takes us deep into dark woods.

RETURN

8mm work directed by Norihiko Morinaga.

Return Return Return

Hello

The film tells the story of three best friends named Ako, Aki and Awang, who are well-known in their village for their mischievous and humourous pranks. The trio work for Pak Man. One day, they are assigned to pick up his daughter Misha, who has just returned from overseas and dreams of becoming a doctor. The trio have been in love with her for a long time but she does not pay them any heed. When Misha is robbed by a snatch thief one day, she is rescued by a doctor named Shafiq. Her face reminds the doctor of his late wife, and he begins to pursue her, which annoys the trio.

Return

The Return

The Return is a 2016 documentary directed by Emmy Award winning director Erich Joiner chronicling Ford GT's return to 24 Hours of Le Mans after their 1966 1-2-3 victory.

Return

Polish animator Anna Błaszczyk’s humorous short—a collage of drawing, cut-out, and computer animation—was inspired by Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel Return from the Stars, a time-paradox tale of an astronaut who returns to Earth after many years away.

HELLO

Through a haze of smoke, coke, and booze; possible futures, pasts, and presents coalesce chaos inside the mind of a man drifting directionless through life. When your future calls, what will you have to say?

Mama

Two young social workers are delivering a fugitive child to his mother by ferry. But in the middle of the icy Baltic Sea, something goes wrong.

Return

A tale of terror. Cathy Reed has been institutionalized most of her life because of Schizophrenia, as a child her parents thought she was possessed by demons and had her exercised by priests. Medical science saw different. Now decades later Cathy is freed, relocated to her own flat and given a chance to be independent. Once alone things are not what they all seem and when her nightmares turn real she questions her state of mind before she is left to face her demons.

The Return

Two young children and an adult in a small town have an encounter with an alien spaceship. 25 years later the children are reunited as adults in the same town which is now beset by strange cattle mutilations. Matters become worse when the cattle mutilations are joined by human murders and mutilations.

Trancers II: The Return of Jack Deth

Once again someone from the future has come back to create an army of Trancers, human zombies who do what they're told without question or pause. Now officer Jack Deth, a cop from the future stranded in the past, must once again go forth to stop them. This sci-fi action sequel chronicles his courageous actions as he struggles to save the future. His difficulties are compounded when his boss sends his first wife back from the future to help Deth who has unfortunately, married a 20th-century girl.

L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies: Return to Savage Beach

A stolen computer disk contains the location of a hidden tresaure trove. It's up to the sexy ladies of LETHAL (Legion to Ensure Total Harmony and Law) to find the treasure before the bad guys do.

Return

RETURN tells the story of a retired Green Beret who embarks on a healing journey from Montana to Vietnam. There he retraces his steps, shares his wartime experiences with his son, treats his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and seeks out the mountain tribespeople he once lived with and fought alongside as a Special Forces officer.

Return with Honor

Rowe McDonald is a headstrong missionary who has life after his mission all figured out. When a fatal car crash interrupts his plans, he is given sixty days to return to life and finish his work. Now he must choose whether to lead the life he planned, or reach beyond himself to change the lives of others. What will he do? Who will he touch? How will he prepare to leave it all behind?

The Return

BIFA-nominated psychological thriller. “Everyone’s got a secret, something they hide…” When a small time criminal returns to London he unravels a catastrophic secret about the murder of his brother. Twisting and turning, this dizzying journey into the mind of a criminal at his darkest hour keeps the viewer guessing until the final frame. An intense and mind-bending crime noir shot on 35mm.

Return to Rajapur

A doomed love affair blooms against the beautiful and exotic backdrop of the deserts of India in this romantic drama. Samantha Hartley (Kelli Garner) is a woman in her early twenties who travels to Rajapur in India to visit a resort where her mother stayed years ago. While tracing the steps of her mother, Sara (Lynn Collins), Samantha learns the true story about her mother's stormy marriage to Jeremy (Justin Theroux), a charming but moody alcoholic. Only a few days after their wedding, Sara began to wonder if marrying Jeremy was a mistake, and while visiting India on their honeymoon, Sara met Jai Singh (Manoj Bajpai), a handsome and sensitive widower living in Rajapur. Jai Singh, who speaks fluent English, soon strikes up a friendship with Sara that quickly grows into a romance, but both are aware of the transgressive nature of their love, and their affair takes a tragic turn, leaving its scars on all parties involved.