Agenda

As a journalist and filmmaker, Jocelyne Saab focused on vulnerable people, from displaced groups to war victims. Her work is marked by the actions necessary to document historical violence. In Children of War, she meets heavily traumatised children left behind after escaping a massacre in a Muslim neighbourhood in Beirut.

In her films, German director and photographer Ulrike Ottinger parodies cinema conventions, searching for new forms of visual pleasure. In doing so, she constantly challenges the viewer’s position. Many of her highly stylised films also contain fantastic elements.

Lamees Almakkawy’s films can be found at the intersection of documentary and fiction, with a particular focus on performance and identity. Dancing Palestine is centered around the dabke, a Palestinian folk dance.

The Black Panther movement was the most influential “Black power” organisation of the late 1960s, globally supported by opponents of U.S. imperialism. French filmmaker Agnès Varda canned this short documentary when she and her husband Jacques Demy were in California for his first Hollywood production.

Palestinian Basma Alsharif examines cyclical political conflicts and counters colonialism’s legacy through satire. Deep Sleep is an immersive performance film in which the artist films under self-hypnosis in Athens and Malta.

Mati Diop, niece of filmmaker Djibil Diop Mambéty, mixes facts with fantasy, as in the latter’s best-known film, Touki Bouki. A Thousand Suns thus becomes an homage to this classic film but, above all, a sensitive portrait of a man who, in his own words, “lost himself”.

Nishikawa’s analogue films often focus on the process of filmmaking itself. Light, Noise, Smoke and Light, Noise, Smoke shows a deceptively complex interplay between fireworks shots taken during a summer festival and the sonic imprints the same images leave on the optical soundtrack.

Writer and poet Abigail Child has been a lynchpin of American experimental cinema since the 1980s. A recognised pioneer in editing, she focuses on the interplay between sound and image to create, in the words of L.A. Weekly, “brilliantly exciting work”, with a keen attention to form that helps examine established norms around narration and gender.

Japanese video artist Toshio Matsumoto became best known for Funeral Parade of Roses. The experimental short film Atman, on the other hand, is a visual tour-de-force: In the center of a circle, Matsumoto places a figure wearing a Hannya mask. In the circle, he places the camera in 480 different positions. The film seems full of zooms and pans, but they are really the result of a clever edit.

American documentary filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt is known for his collage films, which often explore the personable and psychological cores of being human. In his most recent film, he questions the relationship between a father and his daughter through home movies.

My Childhood was the first of three films based on director Bill Douglas’ memories of his own impoverished childhood in the Scottish mining village of Newcraighall. In this cruel environment, the boy learns to take care of himself. We see him grow up from child to adolescent—angry and bewildered but playful and affectionate.