Seven Days of Chaos

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 Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.

William K.L. Dickson plays the violin while two men dance. This is the oldest surviving sound film where sound is recorded on the phonograph.

Filmmaking icon Agnès Varda, the award-winning director regarded by many as the grandmother of the French new wave, turns the camera on herself with this unique autobiographical documentary. Composed of film excerpts and elaborate dramatic re-creations, Varda's self-portrait recounts the highs and lows of her professional career, the many friendships that affected her life and her longtime marriage to cinematic giant Jacques Demy.

Arthur Lipsett's first film is an avant-garde blend of photography and sound. It looks behind the business-as-usual face we put on life and shows anxieties we want to forget. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, "Very nice, very nice." The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.

Capturing Avatar is a feature length behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Avatar. It uses footage from the film's development, as well as stock footage from as far back as the production of Titanic in 1995. Also included are numerous interviews with cast, artists, and other crew members. The documentary was released as a bonus feature on the extended collector's edition of Avatar.

In Manhattan's Central Park, a film crew directed by William Greaves is shooting a screen test with various pairs of actors. It's a confrontation between a couple: he demands to know what's wrong, she challenges his sexual orientation. Cameras shoot the exchange, and another camera records Greaves and his crew. Sometimes we watch the crew discussing this scene, its language, and the process of making a movie. Is there such a thing as natural language? Are all things related to sex? The camera records distractions - a woman rides horseback past them; a garrulous homeless vet who sleeps in the park chats them up. What's the nature of making a movie?

A look behind the lens of Christopher Nolan's space epic.

This special explores the return of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker to the screen, as well as Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen to their classic roles. Director Deborah Chow leads the cast and crew as they create new heroes and villains that live alongside new incarnations of beloved Star Wars characters, and an epic story that dramatically bridges the saga films.

Short film made with the help of the Sundance Film Institute and serving as a proof-of-concept for the subsequent feature film.

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

Thirty-four days before she's sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss.

In the Realms of the Unreal is a documentary about the reclusive Chicago-based artist Henry Darger. Henry Darger was so reclusive that when he died his neighbors were surprised to find a 15,145-page manuscript along with hundreds of paintings depicting The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glodeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Cased by the Child Slave Rebellion.

Takes us to locations all around the US and shows us the heavy toll that modern technology is having on humans and the earth. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and the exceptional music by Philip Glass.

In this documentary, wealthy entrepreneur Bryan Johnson puts his body and fortune on the line to defy aging and extend his life beyond all known limits.

The Amazon rain forest, 1979. The crew of Fitzcarraldo (1982), a film directed by German director Werner Herzog, soon finds itself with problems related to casting, tribal struggles and accidents, among many other setbacks; but nothing compared to dragging a huge steamboat up a mountain, while Herzog embraces the path of a certain madness to make his vision come true.

As his life comes to its end, famous Hollywood director Orson Welles puts it all on the line at the chance for renewed success with the film The Other Side of the Wind.

Witness the never-before-seen footage and true story behind the John Wick phenomenon – from independent film to billion-dollar franchise.

As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.

Told through performances, TV interviews, home movies, family photographs, private letters and unpublished memoirs, the film reveals the essence of an extraordinary woman who rose from humble beginnings in New York City to become a glamorous international superstar and one of the greatest artists of all time.

Experimental yet educative and fishy

During a 6-hour performance and in a additional Film, REA and Yannick Mosimann dedicate themselves to the stretching of time and space based on observations of different trees. The tree, the mammoth of floral time, seems to be a gnarled, proud and place-bound existence, nevertheless in low-frequency, flowing movement. Breathing is here a symbol of time and rhythm, carrier of tonal frequencies of our vocal cords.

Hand-edited Lomokino 35mm footage captures scenes from an island, blending shifting textures with guitars and watery drones. A visual and sonic meditation on place and transience.

Begotten is the creation myth brought to life, the story of no less than the violent death of God and the (re)birth of nature on a barren earth.

An experimental short film made as part of a multi-media triptych, originally screened alongside a fashion collection and an art-installation. Drawing from Papa Yorick’s (Director and fashion designer) thesis “Men Are My Cumrag”, the film reenacts eight mainstay gay porn scripts, incorporating and parodying tropes and clichés, that explore masculine identities within the gay porn industry, through a satirical and critical lens.

This short film, built around a randomly chosen name and composed of scenes shot within a single room over the course of three hours, features an introspective monologue that was shaped and adapted during the editing process. The narrative aligns closely with the emotional tone and visual rhythm of the piece, particularly in harmony with the non-original music selection, Maggot Brain by Funkadelic.

The „Haelgung“ films are charmingly impressionistic diary entries, crafted as mini homages to my closest friends, captured with a delightful lack of planning or structure and edited in camera.

The story of a lonely man who accidentally discovers an old camera and uses it to capture pictures of his life.

A young woman is confronted with the conflict of growing up and pushed to her mental limits. Nothing seems to be working or going the way she thought it would. Her inner life is becoming more fragile. How long can she put up with this?

An exiled magician finds an opportunity for revenge against his enemies muted when his daughter and the son of his chief enemy fall in love in this uniquely structured retelling of the 'The Tempest'.

If the fly eats the flower, does the fly become the flower?

In the middle of the night, a sleepless subject rediscovers the ability to use their hands to produce and play with shadows on the ceiling.

This experimental "film" consists of an empty room with a bare lightbulb, and windows covered with a translucent material, for a duration of 24 hours. It is not necessary for visitors to stay for the entire duration - they can come and go as they please. Created by Anthony McCall, it is based on the architectural framing of time and light. It came at the end of a series of works in which McCall was stripping back cinema to its absolute minimum - light, time, and human experience/perception.

A boy stands in a field, flying his kite.

Three stories. Three ages. Three men. Grandfather, father, son. One is an orderly, one is a leading sportsman, and one is a master taxidermist. One desires love, the other success, and the third immortality.

Standing under the warmth of it's glow, the moon welcomes me with a smile.

A relationship between a man and a woman discloses during the course of the film.

TRAILERS unites the most personal and experimental aspects of underground filmmaking with a scope that is as cosmically vast as a science fiction epic. Rashidi’s ongoing exploration into the nature of cinema sees a group of characters adrift in space, each locked into their own sexual rituals while a cataclysm of universal proportions unfolds. Humanity has become a mysterious burlesque show for alien eyes: the gaze of the film camera. This visionary spectacle uses multiple formats and visual textures in weaving an erotic anti-narrative suspended in its own space and time.

HE, the third work in the ongoing collaboration between Rouzbeh Rashidi and actor James Devereaux, is a troubling and mysterious portrait of a suicidal man. Rashidi juxtaposes the lead character’s apparently revealing monologues with scenes and images that layer the film with ambiguity. Its deliberate, hypnotic pace and boldly experimental structure result in an unusual and challenging view of its unsettling subject.

Self Decapitation is a Janus-headed self-portrait by Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain in which death and desire each take possession of this film in two parts. The ambiguities of inhabiting a human body are conjured by way of film technology in its faults, faulty memories and false promises. There is no escape from its haunting – except perhaps to haunt it in turn…