Essay
321 products
The Balcony Movie
Subscription access
Can anyone be a movie hero? Can the world be captured in a single frame? Director Paweł Łoziński watches people passing by from his balcony: sad, thoughtful, glued to their phones, young and old. Neighbours, random visitors, or simply passers-by. The filmmaker approaches them, asks questions, and talks with them about how they deal with life. Standing there with his camera for more than two yea...
The Dreaming House
Duration: 6 minutes
Subscription access
The filmmaker, his father and his youngest child walk past the house in Chinatown where the filmmaker’s father was born, triggering a sublime moment.
Too Early/Too Late
Duration: 3h30
Subscription access
Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization, and link it to class tensions in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, quoting texts by Enge...
The Blind Owl
Duration: 3h08
Subscription access
An immigrant movie projectionist drifts into an oneiric and fantastical spiral after falling in love with a dancer who appears on his screen. With this singular film, Raoul Ruiz crafts a highly free and hybrid adaptation of two major literary works: _The Blind Owl_ by Sadegh Hedayat and _Damned by Despair_ by Tirso de Molina.
Whose Language You Don’t Understand
Whose Language You Don’t Understand
New product!Duration: 1h01
Subscription access
_Whose Language You Don’t Understand_, named after a novel by the late Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948-2007) is a video cycle exploring the limits of language. Fritz spent most of her life, over 30 years, working on a cycle of dense and complex novels she called _The Fortress_, consisting of over 10,000 pages and still unfinished at the time of her death. Her project is an unusual and asto...
Eastern Anthems
Subscription access
An unfinished film is passed along from one friend to another. The dialogue between them is a journey crossed by the swarming of the Great Eastern Brood X (periodical cicadas that prophetically emerge every 17 years in the United States), invoking a reflection of a post-pandemic present and our shared futures. A road movie composed of a chorus of voices (both human and non-human), the warnings ...
Tigers Can Be Seen in the Rain
Tigers Can Be Seen in the Rain
Duration: 30 minutesSubscription access
Drifting between moving-image formats and collaging local textures and bygone voices, Oscar Ruiz Navia’s film reflects on loss and mourning as experiences of temporal dislocation.
Before Their Eyes
Subscription access
A couple moves into a tower on an island and spends each day observing the small creatures living on the foreshore and in the grass. By reversing scales and perspectives the film establishes a strange relationship between the observers and the observed. While small living beings try to express their fragility in the face of intrusive exploration, what anxieties do humans experience?
Untitled (The Things Around Us)
Untitled (The Things Around Us)
Duration: 1h00Subscription access
The video assembly _Untitled (The Things Around Us)_ presents a heterogeneous scenario of constituent elements—environments, conditions, objects, and figures—that play a distinct role in the conceptual processes and design methods of the Brussels-based architecture and urbanism agency 51N4E and the research agency Rural Urban Framework (RUF). Formulated as a catalogue of “things,” in the philos...
81 meters
Subscription access
Spring 2021. A cinephile invites you on an intimate journey through the last surviving cinema houses in Latvia. This documentary essay, shot on Super 8, opens the locked doors of these theaters during what may be the most difficult period in the history of physical cinema spaces. They are closed to the public, but at times we can feel that they are still alive.
No God No Father
Subscription access
_No God No Father_ is a documentary/fiction that explores the intimate relationship a young man has with the Internet. In the absence of a father figure, he turns to Google as an unexpected mentor. From learning everyday tasks like shaving, to discovering deeper knowledge, the algorithm becomes much more than a simple search engine, blurring the boundaries between real and virtual.
Where the Grass is greener
This trip on the edge of surrealism transports the audience through the various corners of the suburbs in order to find where the grass is greener. An unsettling exploration of a seemingly peaceful place that takes a look beyond the white picket fence.
Joseph Samuel Jacques Julien
Jacques is 59 years old and has spent his entire career as a salesman in Quebec City. The past few months have been especially challenging for him: mourning the loss of his wife, he finds it difficult to regain his footing. Should he change his life? Change his identity? Amidst a growing political turmoil, the narrator remains hopeful, insisting that Jacques still has reason to hope.
Waiting for Casimir
In the village of Saint-Casimir, a seniors’ residence houses five people. At the heart of this confined space shaped by daily routines, a parallel world unfolds. Hours pass slowly in an endless waiting, punctuated by the presence of a local community TV station that intrudes into their universe through the television screen. Alternating between the sweetness of childhood memories and the presen...
Idle Times
Beginning in the late 19th century, the history of baseball tells the story of the transformation of pastures and mindsets in North America. Slow and repetitive, the game makes ample room for daydreaming and boasting. Full-bodied and mannered, it evokes the vastness of a new continent while also recalling its British origins. Filmed at the Victoria Stadium in Quebec and developed with the colla...
Le temps qu'il fait
Nestor, Lei, Pierrette, Mohamed, Hafida, Marius, Marc, Galina, Genady, Mike and Lala: through their presence, \_Le temps qu’il fait\_ weaves a mosaic of stories in which dreams and disappointments, hopes and worries intertwine with the life that is before them. In counterpoint, there are these new landscapes of financial centers, abandoned industrial spaces and wasteland from which we hear the...
Landscape in the Mind's Eye
Through the eyes of children and women from different generations, this film reveals the soul of a small village on Quebec’s North Shore. Madame Kennedy shares a vital bond with the forest; Diane, faced with the hardships of her life’s journey, lifts her head high; Cathy, at 18, possesses the biting clarity of those who have had to fight. The strength and determination of each woman converge...
The Balcony Movie
Subscription access
Can anyone be a movie hero? Can the world be captured in a single frame? Director Paweł Łoziński watches people passing by from his balcony: sad, thoughtful, glued to their phones, young and old. Neighbours, random visitors, or simply passers-by. The filmmaker approaches them, asks questions, and talks with them about how they deal with life. Standing there with his camera for more than two yea...
The Dreaming House
Duration: 6 minutes
Subscription access
The filmmaker, his father and his youngest child walk past the house in Chinatown where the filmmaker’s father was born, triggering a sublime moment.
Too Early/Too Late
Duration: 3h30
Subscription access
Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization, and link it to class tensions in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, quoting texts by Enge...
The Blind Owl
Duration: 3h08
Subscription access
An immigrant movie projectionist drifts into an oneiric and fantastical spiral after falling in love with a dancer who appears on his screen. With this singular film, Raoul Ruiz crafts a highly free and hybrid adaptation of two major literary works: _The Blind Owl_ by Sadegh Hedayat and _Damned by Despair_ by Tirso de Molina.
Whose Language You Don’t Understand
Whose Language You Don’t Understand
New product!Duration: 1h01
Subscription access
_Whose Language You Don’t Understand_, named after a novel by the late Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948-2007) is a video cycle exploring the limits of language. Fritz spent most of her life, over 30 years, working on a cycle of dense and complex novels she called _The Fortress_, consisting of over 10,000 pages and still unfinished at the time of her death. Her project is an unusual and asto...
Eastern Anthems
Subscription access
An unfinished film is passed along from one friend to another. The dialogue between them is a journey crossed by the swarming of the Great Eastern Brood X (periodical cicadas that prophetically emerge every 17 years in the United States), invoking a reflection of a post-pandemic present and our shared futures. A road movie composed of a chorus of voices (both human and non-human), the warnings ...
Tigers Can Be Seen in the Rain
Tigers Can Be Seen in the Rain
Duration: 30 minutesSubscription access
Drifting between moving-image formats and collaging local textures and bygone voices, Oscar Ruiz Navia’s film reflects on loss and mourning as experiences of temporal dislocation.
Before Their Eyes
Subscription access
A couple moves into a tower on an island and spends each day observing the small creatures living on the foreshore and in the grass. By reversing scales and perspectives the film establishes a strange relationship between the observers and the observed. While small living beings try to express their fragility in the face of intrusive exploration, what anxieties do humans experience?
Untitled (The Things Around Us)
Untitled (The Things Around Us)
Duration: 1h00Subscription access
The video assembly _Untitled (The Things Around Us)_ presents a heterogeneous scenario of constituent elements—environments, conditions, objects, and figures—that play a distinct role in the conceptual processes and design methods of the Brussels-based architecture and urbanism agency 51N4E and the research agency Rural Urban Framework (RUF). Formulated as a catalogue of “things,” in the philos...
81 meters
Subscription access
Spring 2021. A cinephile invites you on an intimate journey through the last surviving cinema houses in Latvia. This documentary essay, shot on Super 8, opens the locked doors of these theaters during what may be the most difficult period in the history of physical cinema spaces. They are closed to the public, but at times we can feel that they are still alive.
No God No Father
Subscription access
_No God No Father_ is a documentary/fiction that explores the intimate relationship a young man has with the Internet. In the absence of a father figure, he turns to Google as an unexpected mentor. From learning everyday tasks like shaving, to discovering deeper knowledge, the algorithm becomes much more than a simple search engine, blurring the boundaries between real and virtual.
Where the Grass is greener
This trip on the edge of surrealism transports the audience through the various corners of the suburbs in order to find where the grass is greener. An unsettling exploration of a seemingly peaceful place that takes a look beyond the white picket fence.
Joseph Samuel Jacques Julien
Jacques is 59 years old and has spent his entire career as a salesman in Quebec City. The past few months have been especially challenging for him: mourning the loss of his wife, he finds it difficult to regain his footing. Should he change his life? Change his identity? Amidst a growing political turmoil, the narrator remains hopeful, insisting that Jacques still has reason to hope.
Waiting for Casimir
In the village of Saint-Casimir, a seniors’ residence houses five people. At the heart of this confined space shaped by daily routines, a parallel world unfolds. Hours pass slowly in an endless waiting, punctuated by the presence of a local community TV station that intrudes into their universe through the television screen. Alternating between the sweetness of childhood memories and the presen...
Idle Times
Beginning in the late 19th century, the history of baseball tells the story of the transformation of pastures and mindsets in North America. Slow and repetitive, the game makes ample room for daydreaming and boasting. Full-bodied and mannered, it evokes the vastness of a new continent while also recalling its British origins. Filmed at the Victoria Stadium in Quebec and developed with the colla...
Le temps qu'il fait
Nestor, Lei, Pierrette, Mohamed, Hafida, Marius, Marc, Galina, Genady, Mike and Lala: through their presence, \_Le temps qu’il fait\_ weaves a mosaic of stories in which dreams and disappointments, hopes and worries intertwine with the life that is before them. In counterpoint, there are these new landscapes of financial centers, abandoned industrial spaces and wasteland from which we hear the...
Landscape in the Mind's Eye
Through the eyes of children and women from different generations, this film reveals the soul of a small village on Quebec’s North Shore. Madame Kennedy shares a vital bond with the forest; Diane, faced with the hardships of her life’s journey, lifts her head high; Cathy, at 18, possesses the biting clarity of those who have had to fight. The strength and determination of each woman converge...
