“‘Giving voice to the people’ is explicitly enunciated in both parts of the diptych Tell Me, What is Science? Commissioned by the General Direction of Permanent Education, these two films were transformed by Hatherly into two extremely singular objects. The films depart from two insistent questions posed by the voice of the director, whose body is hiding behind the camera she’s carrying on her shoulder: “what is science?”, “what is the technique?”. As an alternative to an overbearing voice over, which was rather present in so many films of the revolutionary period. To avoid loosing the ‘message’, Hatherly works almost exclusively at the level of live testimonies, with which she is in dialogue with in an exemplary way. ” (Joana Ascenção, Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, 26 de Julho de 2013)

“‘Giving voice to the people’ is explicitly enunciated in both parts of the diptych Tell Me, What is Science? Commissioned by the General Direction of Permanent Education, these two films were transformed by Hatherly into two extremely singular objects. The films depart from two insistent questions posed by the voice of the director, whose body is hiding behind the camera she’s carrying on her shoulder: “what is science?”, “what is the technique?”. As an alternative to an overbearing voice over, which was rather present in so many films of the revolutionary period. To avoid loosing the ‘message’, Hatherly works almost exclusively at the level of live testimonies, with which she is in dialogue with in an exemplary way. ” (Joana Ascenção, Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema, 26 de Julho de 2013)

The Intelligent Hand shows 40 years of Ana Hatherly´s visual artwork, which includes experimental poetry, painting, drawing and cinema. In this film, the artist revisits her creative itinerary.

“Wherever you are, picture the dark matter around the outline of your body”. Darkness is part of Myriam Lefkowitz’s series of ‘attention scores’ which anybody can activate anytime, anywhere, just by following the artist’s voice, aiming to connect specific modes of attention to the imaginary activity. At Doc’s Kingdom, film spectators were invited to the stage and followed the choreographer’s hypnotically suggestive voiceover surrounded by each other in the cinema’s dark room.

Rupture is an example of an experimentalist stance in which the process does not differ from the work. This is the very meaning of performative practice, and Rupture is simultaneously a performance that Hatherly performed at the Quadrum gallery in 1977, and this film that records it. The film shows the artist’s confrontation with large sheets of paper, which are energetically torn and slit, an action strongly reflecting in the sound. Rupture is thus fully integrated in the revolutionary component of her previous films and their violent desire for change.

A detailed study of the architecture in a small German village slowly reveals an uncanny sense of displacement, erasure and doubling. New houses line freshly paved streets that all have the suffix ‘-neu’ at the end. This journey ends on the outskirts of the village, opening onto the pit mine that will displace the old village. (Images Festival)

A voyage into the far west of Brazil leads us to a monumental structure – petrified at the centre of the savannah. Inspired by the epic construction of the city of Brasília, the film uses this history to imagine it otherwise. “I look at Brasília the way I look at Rome : Brasília began with a final simplification of ruins”. Through the geological traces that lead us to this fictive monument, the film unearths a history of exploration, prophecy and myth.

A portrait of urban space, migrant labor, and ephemeral relationships in the center of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in western China. Attending first to the formal dimensions of the transforming worksite – including the demands of physical labor and the relationship between human and machine – the film shifts focus to the social dynamics of a group of thirty men and women who have come from the countryside to work in this ever-changing urban landscape. In exploring the various banal yet striking interactions between these members of China’s ‘floating population’, the city’s residents, and the filmmaker, Demolition simultaneously expresses and resists the fleeting nature of urban experience.

Revolution is an exceptional film that reveals the workings of Hatherly’s playful conception, as her creation extraordinarily develops both an ethical and a political dimension extending to all domains. As she wrote in the preface to the book ‘A Calculator of Improbabilities’, “The experimenter, as an experimenter, brings art closer to life, taking responsibility for a subversion of the established order, whereby creativity becomes a revolutionary gesture.” Revolution is an eminently revolutionary work, joining other artistic explorations, such as the famous posters ‘The Streets of Lisbon’, made in 1977, in which Hatherly ripped and stole the remains of posters from the walls of the capital’s streets, while recording them for the film Revolution. (Joana Ascensão, Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema)

Tahimik’s magnum opus, Why is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow? is an epic film diary spanning the 1980s. Though each of Tahimik’s films is unique, this one defies summary simply because of the sheer volume of ground it covers. While telling the story of a family –overseas vacations, school projects, children’s first steps – it also serves as an introduction to Filipino history and geography. Yet most arresting is the way the film moves seamlessly from the personal to the political as Tahimik’s camera documents the events leading from the assassination of Benigno Acquino to the fall of the Marcos and progresses to hurricanes and earthquakes. “In an age of rising seas and collapsing economies, [the film] shows us how to be furious at all the injustice in the world but also how to face that injustice with the utmost joy. There are indeed few, if any, films like this….” (Christopher Pavsek – Harvard Film Archive)

“The genesis of Batrachian’s Ballad occurred when I learned a surprising fact – the Portuguese tradition of placing ceramic frogs in the doorways of restaurants and other commercial premises to ward off gypsies. Through this personal tale of mine, I wanted to call attention to a growing tendency to use belief and superstition to deride other human beings and to keep them at bay.” — Leonor Teles

A trip to the ‘roof of the world’, the Tibetan Himalayas, triggers a stream of reflections about roofs’ diverse structural designs and functions. In his film archives Kidlat Tahimik comes across a surprising number of shots featuring roofs and roofing work, beginning with the consecration ceremony of an onion steeple on a Bavarian church in Perfumed Nightmare through a report on the construction of his own bamboo hut in Hapao to shots of skyscrapers throughout the world. Roofs of the world, Unite! is the manifesto of this tribute to the roofs over our heads, complemented by the encouraging statement: “You got nothing to lose but your leaks.” – Kidlat Tahimik

“Prune me in January
Tie me up in February
Dig me up in March
And you’ll see what I’ll do to you.”
(popular saying)”

Myriam Lefkowitz’s ongoing project Walk, Hands, Eyes examines the relationship formed between a city and its inhabitants. Over the course of an hour’s silent walk a participant and a guide form an immersive relationship with their surroundings through the simple acts of walking, seeing, and touching. In the small river town of Arcos de Valdevez, Doc’s Kingdom seminar participants guided each other in pairs after a hands-on workshop offered by the choreographer.

The ecologic crisis is a political, economic and social crisis. It is also cinematographic, as cinema coincides historically and in a critical and descriptive way with the development of the Anthropocene. A Film, Reclaimed is a conversation, an essay that reads the terrestrial crisis under the influence and with the help of the beautiful and terrible films which have accompanied it. – Ana Vaz

The film essay opens with a child’s question of what ‘the West’ means beyond the cardinal direction, then goes on to retrace how it inscribed itself in the Federal Republic of Germany’s postwar history and architecture. – Juliane Heinrich

We are inundated with images. It is impossible to see them all because they are so abundant. In the past year, more images were produced than during the entire 20th century. It is time to think of ways or strategies to look at these images rather than adding to the pile. That strategy could be a reading algorithm, but as the web is very unstable, it is also necessary to produce films and so save some of those images from oblivion, and to archive them. – Dominic Gagnon

“Filming in Lisbon in search of the origins of our colonial history, I found copies. Brazilians, the new worlders fluent in glitz, entertain the Portuguese in awe and discomfort, colonial norms applied and reapplied. Chinese porcelain seem to signal hybrids to come: the Chinese dressed as Europeans, the Brazilian maid dressed as a 19th-century European servant. Porcelain from the 15th-century becomes reproducible ready-mades that set the tables for the new colonies—a transatlantic calling. ‘Ouro novo’ reads new money. As a poem without periods, as a breath without breathing, the voyage travels eastward and westward, marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s seat at the table.” — Ana Vaz

Language is the key to the empire. Enrique is the slave of Ferdinand Magellan, who circumnavigated the globe. Aside from bathing Magellan every evening, Enrique also has to translate Filipino languages into Portuguese and Spanish. The film opens with a cardboard box containing film rolls being dug up from the ground. Shot in 1980 and now showing their age, the images tell the story of the circumnavigation. Magellan died shortly before the journey was completed, but had authorized that Enrique, now by default the first true circumnavigator, was to become a free man. Enrique carved his memories of the journey into wood, with the sculptures adorning his garden. Balikbayan #1 weaves together the official story with that of Enrique, as well as with the director’s cut of what Tahimik started filming 35 years ago in order to find out the truth and continued in a village in the province of Ifugao in 2013. The actors are no longer the same, and Tahimik, who himself played Enrique in 1980, has grown older, just as children have been born. Balikbayan #1 is a home movie, a flamboyant epic, a study of colonialism, a historical corrective and an homage to what Tahimik calls ‘Indio Genius’. (Berlinale, 2015)

“The Voyage Out takes the toxic disaster in Fukushima as a synecdoche of the impending ecological disaster and the possibility of renewal. It presents an ethnography of the future, an ethnography otherwise. Two years after the toxic disaster in Fukushima, a new island has emerged in the Ogasawara archipelago, in the far south of Japan. The Voyage Out stages, in a dreamlike and experimental form, the sensitive imaginary of these two places, and the way in which they compose a world crossed by the spectre of destruction and renewal.” For Doc’s Kingdom, Ana Vaz and Nuno da Luz performed a first public iteration of this ongoing project, just weeks after coming back from their first trip to Japan.

Out of the folders of his laptop, Dominic Gagnon shared a series of downloaded clips gathered for the second chapter Going South of an imagined tetralogy, initiated with Of the North (2015), in which this ‘filmmaker without a camera’ explores the world through online image culture.

The family history of a Gipsy father and a non-Gipsy mother inspires the director to search for what her life would have been if her father, much like his own unconventional mother, wouldn’t have broken the tradition. In this journey of self-discovery she meets Joaquina, a young girl fully immersed in the Gypsy community and who is a counterpoint to the experience of the director.

Há Terra! is an encounter, a hunt, a diachronic tale of looking and becoming. As in a game, as in a chase, the film errs between character and land, land and character, predator and prey. – Ana Vaz

People’s Park is an unblinking nonfiction look — captured in one uninterrupted, extraordinarily stable and fluid shot — at contemporary China or at least the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people crowded into one Sichuan city park. Using a wheelchair, a lightweight consumer-grade digital camera, and a microphone strapped to the arm of the chair, the directors — Ms. Cohn held the camera while Mr. Sniadecki pushed the chair — plunge you into a human tributary on which you drift and flow and occasionally stop dead, only to rise up and up and up in the astonishing, infectiously joyous finale. – Manohla Dargis

It’s a great day. Four young Indigenous men happen upon two cartons of beer, while another seems to be doing nothing more than kicking back nearby, listening to R&B on his phone. Then everything starts going from bad to worse. Blending Indigenous storytelling with modern worries over environmental degradation and substance abuse Windjarrameru tells a story about a group of young Indigenous men hiding in a chemically contaminated swamp after being falsely accused of stealing some beer, while all around them miners pollute their land.

As a group of Indigenous adults argue about whether to save their government housing or their sacred landscape, their children struggle to decide how the ancestral makes sense in their contemporary lives. Listening to music on their ipods, walking through bush lands, and boating across seas, they follow their parents on a journey to reenact the travel of the Dog Dreaming. Along the way individuals run out of stamina and boats out of gas, and the children press their parents and each other about why these stories matter and how they make sense in the context of Western understandings of evolution, the soundscapes of hip hop, and the technologies of land development. When the Dogs Talked mixes documentary and fiction to produce a thoughtful yet humorous drama about the everyday obstacles of structural and racialized poverty and the dissonance of cultural narratives and social forms.

Salt(water) is based on real events. In 2009 some Karrabing boated to their remote country in the north of Australia. Half got off at one beach, the other half continuing down the coast. When the first group returned to the beach, the boat was nowhere in sight. Just before a swarm of mosquitoes—bred in inland swamps—overtook them, the boat materialised. It had been stranded down the coast, the motor refusing to start. Corroded wiring; angry ancestors; racialised capital; or Jesus: Salt comprises five ten minute films. Each film steps seamlessly from one geography of explanation to the next as if through a strange door. Characters get on a boat in a backyard and step out onto a beach. They walk into a remote house and step out into a city church plaza. Shot by Karrabing members on iPhones, Salt will appear in three formats—multi-screen; web series; and film.

Perfumed Nightmare “reminds one that invention, insolence, enchantment, even innocence, are still available to film,” Susan Sontag wrote. It merges reverie and documentary as jeepney driver “Kidlat Tahimik” dreams of a trip to the moon. Tahimik’s surreal ethnography finds wonder and mystery both at home in the Philippines and in Europe, where his ambition guides him. Critic Gene Youngblood described Perfumed Nightmare as “a bizarre, hallucinatory movie full of dazzling images and outlandish ideas. It’s both real and surreal, poetic and political, naive and wise, primitive and supremely accomplished… a dazzling testament to the liberty of the imagination.”

It is said that in the year of 1492, the first European ship led by Christopher Columbus, disembarked on the coast of Samaná, present-day Dominican Republic, and was received by a rain of arrows carefully plotted by the Caribbean Taíno. Presently, a saline lake named after the Taíno chief Enriquillo witnesses profound eco-systemic changes leading to species migration, forced evacuation and an expanding coral desert revealing the lake’s geologic past. Taking the camera itself as an arrow, a foreign body, Amérika: Bay of Arrows looks for ways in which to animate, to awaken, to make vibrate again this gesture in the present – arrows against a perpetual “falling sky”.

This highly experimental twist on the ethnographic documentary visits the town of Yumen, in China’s northwest Gansu province, a once-thriving, oil-rich community in the 1980’s that has been left depleted and derelict. Strikingly shot on film, Yumen tells the story of this ghost town through a series of wandering characters and inventive vignettes in which even the spirit of Bruce Springsteen is summoned to comment on a world in ruins. A collaboration between Chinese and American filmmakers, Yumen pushes the boundaries of the documentary aesthetic in depicting China’s past and present.