Agenda

The work of French activist, novelist, and essayist Jean Genet was considered controversial in the forties and fifties, because of its explicit homosexuality. Genet made only one film in his entire life, but Un Chant d’amour went on to inspire both David Bowie and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

Filmmakers Samuel M. Delgado and Helena Girón go in search of the last living witch in Ye, a village on the island of Lanzarote. The soundtrack features old recordings of preachers discussing the mythical existence of witches. Meanwhile, we see images of elderly women picking roots and plants on the island. The magic of their stories comes alive when darkness falls. Night is the time when travel is possible. But airplanes did not yet exist: travel happened through their prayers. 

underneath it flickers suggests different perspectives on La friche Josaphat, a verdant fallow land in Brussels threatened by real estate development. By questioning our ways of looking and listening, the film seeks to connect with the land as a single body inhabited by many creatures.

A lost woman wanders through Brussels. She is looking for a familiar face, but only encounters streets that no longer exist and strangers she will never get to know. When a mysterious man tells her about a forecasted solar storm, the strange day falls ominously into place. 

Yes, Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett also made a film once, archetypically titled Film. A man tries to escape the gaze of an all-seeing eye, inspired by Berkeley’s statement, “Esse est percipi”: to be is to be perceived. The disorienting camera work comes from Oscar winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflective masterpiece Man With a Movie Camera (with the latter in the title role).

Before Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut ended their friendship due to an unfortunate conflict, they collaborated on the short film Une histoire d’eau, which in many ways beautifully encapsulates the unique energy of the Nouvelle Vague. 

Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid took inspiration from surrealist films like Un chien andalou and L'Age d'Or by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel for their own avant-garde short film—even though they repeatedly denied it themselves. Following a similar dream logic, Meshes of the Afternoon tells a circular story about a dreaming woman.

As a child, filmmaker Chris Marker always dreamed of visiting Beijing. In Dimanche à Pekin, he takes us on a journey through the city. He elegantly interweaves his thoughts and observations about Chinese traditions with the urban banalities of everyday life.

Francis Thompson spent eight years working on N.Y., N.Y., perhaps his most famous film. It is a collection of images of New York City that he captured using special lenses, prisms, and mirrors. N.Y., N.Y. thus becomes a hall of mirrors with a cubist-Dadaist feel that offers a new perspective on the cityscape. The film was awarded the Golden Palm for best short film.