Agenda

In the silent avant-garde film Garden of Luxor, Derek Jarman creates an imaginary Arabian garden by superimposing various images like old postcards from Egypt, and discarded images from ancient sword-and-sandal epics. This strange garden gets destroyed occasionally by a man with a whip, or by people smoking and eating insects. This is Jarman’s take on the Garden of Luxor and its mysteries.

Experimental filmmaker Marie Menken was noted for her unique way of filmmaking which incorporated collage techniques. Menken was one of the first New York filmmakers to use a hand-hend camera and trained Any Warhol on it use. “Marie’s films were her flower garden. Whenever she was in her garden, she opened her soul, with all her secret wishes and dreams,” according to Jonas Mekas. 

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an independent investigator or Private Ear. His investigations focus on sound and linguistics. This 45-minute video essay plunges viewers into a chilling chronicle of daily life transformed by the weaponisation of the air, where the terror of repeated incursions becomes a disconcertingly banal backdrop.

Bill Plympton is a household name amongst animation filmmakers and illustrators. His illustrations have been published in The New York Times and magazines such as Vogue, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Your Face prompted his career in the heyday of MTV.

Dimanche was intended as a didactic film in which “the problem of leisure” would be addressed. “I was summoned to the Cinéma de l'Éducation Nationale and the director said to me, ‘We would like you to make a film about the problem of leisure.’ Internally, I burst out laughing. What is free time? Joe average who doesn’t know what to do on Sunday? (...) I did not know what free time meant. No more than vacation. One is always on vacation anyway. Unless you’re a lawyer, but then you brought it on yourself, dammit,” Edmond Bernhard said back in the days.

Panning shots describe a room as a succession of still lives: a chair, some fruit on a table, a collection of solitary, waiting objects. Sitting on the bed, there is the presence of a young woman: Chantal Akerman, filmmaker herself, eating an apple.

This television documentary about the great British miners’ strike of 1984 was not broadcast by patron ITV because the film was “too political” and sided with the miners. Did anyone really expect anything different from Loach, one of the most politically engaged filmmakers of his generation?

You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born follows a woman whose life is marked by loss, but in which she still finds humor and love. With a soundtrack that follows the period of Lenore’s life, from her birth in the 1970s to her death in the 2040s, the film takes us from poignant loss to deep joy and dark humor.