Photographs recovered from an 1897 polar expedition (a failed attempt to reach the North Pole by hot air balloon) stimulate a reflection on the ‘limitation of images and other forms of record and the paradoxical interplay of film time, historical time, real time and the fixed moment of the photograph’.

The Forgotten Space follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those marginalised by the load transport system. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle. And in Bilbao, we discover the most sophisticated expression of the belief that the maritime economy, and the sea itself, is somewhat obsolete. A range of materials is used: descriptive documentary, interviews, archive stills and footage, clips from old movies. The result is an essayistic, visual documentary about one of the most important processes that affects us today. The Forgotten Space is based on Sekula’s Fish Story, seeking to understand and describe the contemporary maritime world in relation to the complex symbolic legacy of the sea.

Combining epistolary narrative, personal meditation and journalism, okay bye-bye examines the possibility of comprehending something as monumental as the genocidal slaughter of Cambodians during the Pol Pot regime. The discovery of scrap of super-8 footage of an unidentified Cambodian man spurs Baron’s ‘private research’ into the Khmer Rouge and the archived photographs of the Tuoi Sleng death camp, generating a reflection on the complicated relationship between image and memory, the past and the present.

In 1990, Robert Kramer goes to Berlin for six months, where he makes an hour long single video shot in the bathroom of his apartment. Facing the camera, the filmmaker thinks, alone, about the fall of the Berlin wall.

The five Japanese elements are, in order of importance – Earth, Water, Fire, Wind and Void. People and animals are side by side on a very old game. There is day and night. All exists simultaneously. A journey through the Portuguese border. The director takes us on a journey through the Portuguese continental and maritime borders, oriented by a map of Portugal. A year of pictures that cross the fours seasons. The landscape is visited in detail, between buildings and natural landscapes, architecture denouncing the presence of civilisation. The starting point is the point of arrival – and along the way we are introduced to people, stories, in an accurate representation of space and life forms that inhabit it, including animals under threat of extinction.

Joaquim Pinto has been living with HIV and VHC for almost twenty years. What now? is the notebook of a year of clinical studies with toxic, mind-altering drugs that have not yet been approved. An open and eclectic reflection on time and memory, on epidemics and globalisation, on survival beyond all expectations, on dissent and absolute love. A to and fro between the present and memories form the past, the film is also a tribute to friends who have departed and to those who remain.

The expedition consists of four women and one man. Their aim is to publish a book describing the island. Geography, language, customs, social conditions are to be shared and studied by these young people. The audience takes part in how they pose the questions. The same riddles exist for them as those puzzling the questioners: the tenacious wish to understand a custom that has to do with devils and painted hat. Then the squeezing out of root rind and mixing of colors, decorating the hat, and in the buzzing of insects, the pure present, the moment of filming. When they listen to the tapes back home with the crowing of cocks it will bring back the heavy air that made them ill. The islanders were happy on Reef Island before they came to Ureparapara. Why aren’t they happy here? The conditions with which they live are ‘low’ – what does that mean? Here they work for money and only to begin from the beginning the next day. They live under an oppressive cloud. The sky closes itself over the people like the lid of a suitcase. The bay is a hole into which the wind sweeps and fouls. – Peter Nau, In the South Seas, Der Tagesspiegel, 1979

High above a jungle in Nepal, pilgrims make an ancient journey by cable car to worship Manakamana. Pilgrims make an ancient journey in a state-of-the-art cable car. Each trip unfolds in real-time, highlighting people from all walks of life as they interact with one another, the landscape, and the strange new mode of conveyance. Through these encounters, the film opens a continually surprising window onto contemporary Nepali life, propelled along by the country’s idiosyncratic modernization.

The film As Cidades e as Trocas departs from Lisbon on a cargo ship to sail along the Atlantic route – retracing the routes of the ancient empire – with the purpose of recording the transformations that this movement of exchanges is producing in the physical and human landscape. The planetary economic expansion, treating progress as a religion, displacing soil, sand, rocks, mountains, from one point to another, flattening, producing, building, paving: what changes and what effects does this activity have on the lives of the inhabitants of these cities?

“John Frum prophesied the occurrence of a cataclysm in which Tanna would become flat, the volcanic mountains would fall and fill the river-beds to form fertile plains, and Tanna would be joined to the neighbouring islands of Eromanga and Aneityum to form a new island. Then John Frum would reveal himself, bringing in a reign of bliss, the natives would get back their youth and there would be no sickness; there would be no need to care for gardens, trees or pigs. The Whiles would go; John Frum would set up schools to replace mission schools, and would pay chiefs and teachers.” – Peter Worsley, ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound: a study of cargo cults in Melanesia’

Three mythical stories from the Republic of Vanuatu, an island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean, concerning the origin of humans, why pigs walk on all four, and why a volcano sits where it does.

An unconventional portrait of a small village trapped out of time and located on the Galicia-Portugal border. Moments of fiction stand alongside everyday village life, with the ‘actors’ farming, sitting in the local bar singing traditional songs or telling old wives’ tales. The combination of detailed observation with dialogues from ‘The Forest’, a lyrical and existential play acted out by the villagers, opens access to a world where reality, myths and dreams merge and live together. Then, a stranger appears announcing an uncertain prophecy. What is left after the end, when all has been consumed?

(performance recording by Kidlat Tahimik)

Kidlat Tahimik is a young man living in a small Filipino village. As the film opens, we see him in three stages of life (symbolised by toy and then real ‘jeepneys’, the elaborately redrafted and decorated vehicles that have their origins in the Jeeps left by the Allies in World War II) crossing the bridge – ‘the bridge of life’ – to his village. Narrating in voiceover, Tahimik explains the patterns of daily life in the village. He has a fascination with the Voice of America broadcasts, and particularly with the space program. He longs to be part of the developed world, and forms the Werner von Braun fan club. When an American arrives for an aborted international conference, he gets his chance. The American asks him to come to Paris, to run his chewing-gum-ball machine concession on the streets. In Paris, and on a trip to Germany, he makes friends and discovers that progress in the developed world sacrifices important values. Backgrounded by footage of a summit meeting in Paris, and unable to return to an idealized image of his past, he stubbornly refuses to capitulate to the terms of progress, resigning from his post as head of the Werner von Braun fan club and maintaining that he will find his own way.

A poetic and experimental documentary about the Capelinhos Volcano, in the island of Faial, Azores.

This film was shot between 1931 and 1933 on the Aran Islands, west of Ireland’s Galway Bay. Flaherty’s screen ‘family’ was actually composed of three unrelated islanders chosen for their photogenic appeal: Colman ‘Tiger’ King is the title character, a no-nonsense fisherman, Maggie Dirrane plays his wife, and Michael Dilate his young son. Flaherty is more interested in recording the natural beauty of the islands, which are largely rock, and the surrounding sea than in presenting any formal information on the lives of the islanders. Life here is elemental as it was for the Eskimos in Nanook and the South Sea islanders in Moana. Though the film came under fire for not presenting the social conditions that hampered the lives of the islanders – many of them renting from absentee landlords indifferent to their economic well-being – it has come to be accepted as a work of film poetry rather than a social document.

Wandering through Russia as if through someone else’s house. “Day two is the worst. It was the same in the train: on the second day, I stamped my feet impatiently. Then, from the third day on, it gets better. You get used to the slowness, to the monotonous landscape, to a life made up of short sleep-eat-wait cycles having absolutely nothing to do with the usual timing of a day.” Advertisements for linoleum as if it were some precious stone, and entire cities – built on gold mines – left abandoned. There is no such thing as Russian chaos. Just ‘Europe’ stretching all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and no longer merely to the ghostly Oural Mountains. – Nicolas Rey

“The Commander could not decide whether he should keep a diary and record the occurrences in his life. What if someone were to read it by chance? (…) From early on he had understood the particular hardness of the military life. He assumed it with courage and with patience. But he was not to know that patience was itself an agonising task.”

“If the viper could hear, and the scorpion could see, nobody would escape.”
The viper is deaf, the scorpion is blind. That’s how it is and what’s how it will always be, only life in the countryside is peaceful, the city is agitated, and the human being is insatiable. Lacrau looks for ‘the curve where man had lost himself’ in a journey from the city towards nature. The escape from the chaos and emotional emptiness which we call progress; matter without spirit, without will. In search of the most ancient of human sensations and relations. Bewilderment, fear of the unknown, loss of basic comfort, loneliness, encounter with the other, the other animal, the other plant. A dive in search of a connection with the world. Where the starting point and the finish line are the same, yet I am not.

A Spell is a non-fiction feature film in three parts that refers directly to the cinema of Jean Rouch (Chronicle of Summer), Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad) and Jean-Luc Godard (Sympathy for the Devil), among others. Shot on color Super 16mm film stock in the farther reaches of Norway by artist/filmmakers Ben Rivers (UK) and Ben Russell (USA), A Spell depicts a single character at three disparate moments in his late 20’s – as a hermit in the solitude of the Arctic Circle, as an uncertain participant in a contemporary ‘commune’ in the Lofted Islands, and as a drummer for a neo-Pagan black metal band. Taken as a whole, A Spell is a direct inquiry into what it means to lead a spiritual existence in an increasingly secular world.

Charting the four seasons, each shot in the film opens with an excerpt from Kaczynski’s diary (narrated by Benning) which begin with tales of self-sufficiency and escalate into acts of national security. Technology, environmental destruction and the lack of autonomy in industrialised society were Kaczynski’s concerns. By contrasting these diaries with the deeply meditative landscape, Benning challenges the audience’s notions of this disturbing, yet complex manifesto. Variety magazine called Stemple Press ‘cumulatively stunning’ and noted that ‘for those willing to open themselves to Benning’s alchemical experiments, such art is pure’.