2022 Festival Edition Screening • Jan 7-9 2023 BFF on IMDB.com |
January 7, 2023 • Gene Siskel Film Center, Theater 1• 6pm - 11pm | |||||
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Alexander Mosolov. Three Pieces | Experimental Film
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The experimental film is dedicated to Alexander Mosolov's constructivist period, as well as to the architecture and cinema of this direction and consists of three parts I named intuitively: 1. Shadows 2. Movement 3. Volume The structure of the film is close to constructivism visually and rhythmically. The idea of creating a musical-animated album belongs to Irina Margolina. Classical composers’ works for children are performed by young musicians, students of Jacob Flier Children School of Arts. This experimental movie is one episode from "Children's Album. Film 2. 20th century” I used a stop motion technique based on a series of black&white photos (sometimes colored), mixed collage and animation. | Israel | ||
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Any Instant Whatever | Animated Film/New Media
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A man in a room, in a film – it is the becoming of something and simultaneously becoming in itself. Nothing is as solid as we believe. The film explores our perception of time and change, bodies and objects, and our inability to comprehend the full motion of things. | United Kingdom | ||
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Dance Till Dawn | Music Film, Comedy
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In 1919, an aspiring starlet and a seasoned comedian step into the radiant spotlight, and step off stage into a society swirling in change, each weighing the cost of success against the chance to be seen and remembered. This project presents these life moments, and similarly the "me too" dressing room scene between Sterling and her suitor, in stride with their era, showing the unsettling alongside the glamorous confection. | United States | ||
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Alone | Feature Film
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Laura Garland lost her husband on the war while she’s pregnant. She lives in a big house which is divided in two. Government pursuits her claiming she must ocupy the whole house, if she doesn’t, they will take it from her. Laura leases the house to Ricky, an outlaw that will bring new trouble in her life. At least she has another plan. | Argentina | ||
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A Gift For All Ages | Narrative Short
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A brand new “Golden Age of Hollywood” classic film about life, love, and, Christmas! A cheerful stranger invades the home of a frustrated author and his wife. The odd fellow heartens a timeless gift for generations. | United States | ||
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That Crow at the End | Student Non-Animated Short
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A video collage of free stock and non-professional footage, which chronicles the interaction of human nature. Did we somehow evolve wrongly along the way? Our deepest, truest self takes the focus - our machiavellian mindset - like a cloud in trousers.. | Austria | ||
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Just the Bit Pilot | Television/Web Series, Nominee | Just The Bit takes hilarious stories from a rotating set of comedians and gives them the cinematic, live-action treatment they deserve. It’s a less full of itself The Moth meets Adam Ruins Everything. | United States | ||
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Kassandra | Narrative Short, Nominee | Five girls born to French families of the African diaspora are confronted with a murder. On an uninhabited island near Marseille the girls battle to find the truth and escape back to civilisation. Power dynamics within the group are tested and their mascot, partially sighted, Kassandra, could be the only one who can divine the crime and lead them back to safety. | France | ||
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Nostromo | Documentary Film, Nominee | For the past 20 years, Olivier, a Frenchman, has lived alone on a small island lent to him by First Nations people, located 200km from Yellowknife, the only city of Northwestern Territories in Canada. One day, three visitors land on the island and disrupt his peace. Nostromo is a film about the dream of living alone in a remote place and its limits. Through its characters, Nostromo explores the thin line between happiness and self-convincing in an unforgiving nature. | Switzerland | ||
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I Tried to write a Love letter- with My Body | Experimental Film, Nominee | A personal letter written in the feminine voices, desires, struggles, conflicts, and assertive in its senses, feelings, and emotions permeates our daily existence. | United States | ||
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Hanna's Bistro | Narrative Short, Nominee | Hanna makes herself believe that she is the first and only inhabitant of a new world more beautiful than the previous one. She considers it her mission to lure the remaining humanity into her state of mind. She sets out to create the bistro of her dreams: Hanna’s Bistro. From now on she does everything for her customer space to be attractive for an actual human being. | Hungary | ||
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The Cat's Cradle | Experimental Film | (noun): a child's game in which a loop of string is put around and between the fingers and complex patterns are formed. | United States | ||
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Top Down Memory | Experimental Film, Nominee | Based on historical events surrounding the Berlin City Palace (“Humboldtforum”), the work raises questions on the manipulation of history. Starting from the confusion about the proclamation of a socialist republic by Karl Liebknecht on the balcony of Portal IV on November 9, 1918, the film examines other events that are related to political and social upheavals and questions about authenticity, construction and manipulation. Who is writing our history? How do we deal with our past? How does collective memory work? The work hinges on the architectural manifestation of hierarchies and power politics in the balcony. | Germany | ||
| The Builder | Experimental Film, Nominee | A ladder is coming to life in a dismantled world, walking into a journey between landscapes, structures, and movements. It is an endless game between the animation artist, the moving objects, and their environment. But the question is, who is moving who? Is it the artist or the objects themselves? | Israel | |||
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Video Man: A Short Film by Peter Lundholm | Experimental Film, Nominee | Video rental stores are dying, but not before you. Filmed and edited entirely on iPhone during early stage COVID stay-at-home era. | Not Specified | ||
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Ten Degrees of Strange | Animated Film/New Media, Nominee | Trying to outrun anxiety, seeking joy and strength in landscape and movement. "Ten Degrees of Strange" is a music video based on a song by Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn, from the album Lost in the Cedar Wood, directed and animated by Lynn Tomlinson. Taking inspiration from The Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient story written on clay tablets, and responding to the strangeness of the global pandemic, this story of loss and hope in nature is told through colorful, shifting, changing, morphing clay on glass animation. | United States | ||
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Remnant | Student Non-Animated Short, Nominee | In a world suffering from environmental collapse, two field biologists must confront their morality when they are compelled to make a detour near a restricted zone. | United States | ||
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The Things I Can't Say | Student Non-Animated Short, Nominee |
A University professor comes to terms with his inner self after a lesson. | United States | ||
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On My Mind | Narrative Short, Nominee |
Henrik wants to sing a song for his wife. It has to be today, it has to be now. It's a question of life, death and karaoke. | Denmark | ||
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Motels | Student Non-Animated Short, Nominee | Have you ever been in a Motel room with rounded beds, love chairs, colored lights and dancing poles? “Motels” explores a prominent yet often overlooked aspect of Colombian culture through the memories and experiences of motel occupants. By capturing these spaces, the filmmaker’s aim is to characterize them, understand their organization and the types of practices that take place in them, and identify the relationship to themes of sexuality and gender in the urban landscape. | Colombia | ||
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January 7, 2023 • Gene Siskel Film Center, Theater 2• 6pm - 11pm | |||||
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The Fantastic | Documentary Film Nominee |
The Fantastic is a film about encountering the unknown and the relationship between imagination and reality. The film is built on interviews with exiled North Koreans, who describe what they imagined the outside world to be like, based on their experiences of watching smuggled western fiction films. Alternating documentary footage and visual effects, the film raises the question of how reality is defined and what we wish to believe in. The Fantastic reverses the set-up where westerners are peeping in on the everyday life of the closed-off state. In this film, it is the North Koreans who direct their curiosity at the outside world and imagine what life in Western countries is like. | Finland | ||
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Sunnyville | Narrative Short Nominee |
When a young boy, Malcolm, discovers that his parents are not who they say they are, he sets out to discover the truth. What he discovers may be a little out of this world. | United States | ||
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Noctuidae | Narrative Short Nominee |
A lonely seamstress receives a strange request: to sew a cloak made only from the wings of moths. A work of delicate beauty is painstakingly crafted, and with it a fragile bond between two lost souls. But as soon as the work is finished, her client disappears. Searching for him, she discovers his secret. The cloak holds his final hope to escape a hostile world of lights. Is it possible to reach the freedom of moonlight? Or is her client a lunatic, crazy enough to jump to his death for a fantasy? The seamstress finds no peace. She answers the call of his dream and sews a new cloak - for herself. | Germany | ||
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Conversations Between Shifts | Student Non-Animated Short Nominee |
Jeanette Alvarez-Basem leads a double life as a nurse and a mother, and finds herself fighting labor injustices and processing personal loss during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. | United States | ||
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Wipe me away | Television/Web Series Nominee |
Montreal, Quebec. An apartment building. Three rough childhoods collide. Mélissa, Eddy and Karine live in the same building and from a young age, they have to deal with an environment that crushes grown-ups. The hooker's corner, the violent neighbourhood, parents' debauchery parties, bad company, stealing to survive : for them, all this is quite normal, it's their life. Are their parents to blame? Or do they love the best they can? Are we all condemned to reproduce what we have known? | Canada | ||
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Consensual | Music Film, Comedy Nominee |
Guru Déë Pród offers an incredible opportunity to come take a ride in his magical van. | United States | ||
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Relativity | Student Non-Animated Short | Adams is the first astronaut to approach lightspeed. Boarding the spaceship Myriss, he experiments regularly in order to analyze how such a speed will affect living organisms until an exceptional event happens and changes everything. | France | ||
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Intermede | Documentary Film Nominee |
Images from a small shipyard somewhere in Greece. Water, bodies, ropes, chains, wood and metal in a filmic poem in black and white 16mm. | Greece | ||
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And if not now, when? | Student Non-Animated Short | Marrakech was in 1940 the hometown to 25.000 Jews, today only about 100 remain. This essay documentary makes an intimate journey into the world of Paulette, one of the last remaining Jews who decided to stay and is reflecting on a universal question: where do you feel at home? | Belgium | ||
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Over her | Television/Web Series | In OVER HER we get to know 24-year-old Line (Ulrikke Falch) who has just been dumped by her girlfriend Julia - and life has collapsed. Her closest friend Elin (Clara Henry) tries to help her get over the ex, by running a Tinder account in Line's name. And suddenly she matches with Destiny, played by acclaimed Amy Deasismont. Other roles include some of Sweden's most exciting young talents and popular actors such as Dilan Apak, Rebecka Hemse, Tina Pour Davoy, Ayan Ahmed, Ulla Skoog and Evelyn Mok | Sweden | ||
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Say We | Experimental Film, Music Film, Comedy | SAY WE is an artistic project with the intention to put into perspective the transformative time we are all experiencing due to coronavirus. Music and Dance are before anything a sensation, an emotion. The atmosphere, the style and the visual territory of the short aim to translate those emotions, rather than laying down a rational narrative. The Film gravit around those moments when one could find himself isolated and confined in a limited space. Where the only connection with the outer world and others happens through screens. The rooms become the theater of unusual scenes on internet, the space where we live everything, the good and the bad. Some might find a new way of life, unravel passions, reignite love, or take the time to enjoy simple pleasures. I hope this project to become the expression of a mutual and shared passion for creation, a moment we feel closer and meaningful together as one | France | ||
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The Single Fatherhood Feels of Corey Dean |
Music Film, Comedy | The official music video for "THE SINGLE FATHERHOOD FEELS OF COREY DEAN" by Jeremy Todd | Not Specified | ||
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Toxic | Music Film, Comedy | A Music video on our band's cover of the famous Britney Spears' song Toxic | United States | ||
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This Mortal Plastik | Documentary Film | A personal dive into the world’s most impersonal substance: plastics. Amid the lockdown, a bereaved mother unfolds a surprising journey within and across oceans to understand the contemporary landscape of single-use synthetics. From the noble intentions behind its invention to scales of havoc it has wrought, this experimental documentary brings together art, history, science, and the everyday. Playfully crafted with hand-drawn illustrations and poetic interludes, this evocative “pause between deep time and no time” will change how you think about this ordinary “thing without thingness.” | United States | ||
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Adieu Lacan | Feature Film | "With realistic acumen and artistic expertise, Adieu Lacan portrays the struggles of a young woman, Seriema, who is trying to understand why her path to motherhood has reached an unbearable impasse. Following two miscarriages and the possible loss of her marriage, Seriema travels to Paris in 1972 to undergo psychoanalytic treatment with the maverick French analyst, Jacques Lacan. Her analysis is an attempt to help her to disentangle the enigma of her question: why has motherhood become a seeming impossibility? Inspired by the story of Betty Milan, a Brazilian psychoanalyst and writer, it follows closely her own actual psychoanalysis with Lacan. Based on two books, Goodbye Doctor and Lacan’s Parrot, in which Milan recounts her analytic work, Adieu Lacan offers an insightful and accurate account of an actual psychoanalytic cure." - Mavis Himes, Psychoanalyst and author of "The Power of Names." | United States | ||
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Moment of Impact | Documentary Film | The story of Alan McFadyen's famous Kingfisher photograph, which took 6 years and 720,000 attempts to capture, and was in dedication to his late grandfather. Alan recounts where his inspiration came from, the difficulties in capturing the bird, mid-dive, and how he's still recognised today for his efforts. This film is a directorial debut for filmmaker Blair Stewart, who has a 10+ year background in Television Production. | United Kingdom | ||
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A Pile of Ghosts | Documentary Film | A ghost story of urbanization. The last hotel, which has been condemned for demolition like the rest of the town, is still standing. The owner Charles imagines himself with a female visitor in the scenes of a Hollywood classic. The vexing interplay of documentary and fiction, in which construction workers, investors and real estate agents appear, takes place in contemporary China, where cities are built entirely on speculation, dictated by the fictions of capitalism. | Austria | ||
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January 8, 2023 • Gene Siskel Film Center, Theater 1• 6pm - 11pm | |||||
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Darwin Nix | Documentary Film | Darwin Nix is an artist living and working in the small town of Evergreen, Alabama. Darwin grew up in Evergreen and has returned after living in Memphis, Philadelphia and Santa Fe as an accomplished fine art painter. His current work strives to subvert the overt confederate sentimentality he has witnessed since returning to the south. Living alone and with very few funds, Darwin has created a series of radical protest paintings and sculptures that reflect and antagonize what he deems to be a cultural inbreeding of ignorance and stupidity. | United States | ||
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100 Cans | Documentary Film | The story is about land mines. It follows a Canadian/ Iraqi urban artist who goes to Yemen amidst the heated conflict. Upon his arrival, he is astounded by all the ordeals, he then meets with Yemeni artists, land mine extraction teams and with the local community to create art as a relief. Ambivalent emotions and challenges create a tone of hope and an authentic documentation of the threats of land mines and the power of dialogue. Filming takes place in Mocha, no longer a major trading hub or a coffee market, the economy is largely based upon fishing. The new art entices a lot of interest, children and struggling families gossip about the foreign visitors and about the colors they brought to town. | United Arab Emirates | ||
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Lights And Landscapes Of Northern Norway | Documentary Film | “Lights And Landscapes Of Northern Norway” combines ten unique time-lapse animated short films to illustrate the diversity and beauty of Arctic Landscapes. Each episode has its own theme and displays either one of the arctic seasons or exceptional natural light phenomena (Northern Lights, Arctic Moonlight). Chronological combined the episodes tells the story of one “Arctic Light-year” in Northern Norway. | Norway | ||
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Poèmes | Feature Film | Rose is a dancer. A break up leads her to doubt about herself like never before. Jacques is a sculptor who rarely shows his sculptures. Their encounter at a street theater festival will transform them both in a small yet infinite way. | Spain | ||
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The Spectator | Experimental Film | I sit in reflection over a recent troubling event from the solitude of my empty bedroom and come to realize that I am not alone: I am in the constant company of my own image of myself. THE SPECTATOR is an abstract, experimental, autoethnographic essay film that explores my own personal reckoning with experiencing myself and my life mediated by a digital screen. The ubiquity and instant accessibility of smart phones and the increasing integration of social media platforms into social worlds enables individuals to assume an ever-present role of paparazzi in their own lives. At this moment of extreme image-consciousness of ordinary life, how does engagement with an ever-present, incalculable digital audience impact subjectivity? THE SPECTATOR unfolds as a psychological drama in a triptych of three screens through which we observe numerous lenses on my intimate, vulnerable, diary-like monologue: black and white footage of my spontaneous performance(-of-self), juxtaposed with verité documentary moments of my life in color. I wonder, to what extent are my experiences lived in service of their digital rendering: a means to an end of digital preservation and a stranger’s validation? | United States | ||
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Junior | Documentary Film | Gifted as a teenager, Jérôme “Junior” Simeon was recruited by top Haitian roots music group “Racine Mapou de Azor” and spent 20 years touring the world. When the lead singer of his band dies unexpectedly Junior’s high-profile career comes to a shocking halt and he suddenly faces an uncertain future for himself and his legacy. | United States | ||
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Happy End | Television/Web Series | Vlad and Lera are heroes of our time in every sense of the word. For them, the main question is whether you can hold onto your sincerity when you are under constant scrutiny, and when it’s normal to conduct your personal affairs online. They push this logic to the very limit. The series depicts the journey of a young couple who have decided to turn their relationship into a sex attraction for the whole world to see. They are outsiders who only found love in their 20s, and were afraid to show their feelings. Vlad is addicted to porn, suffers from social phobia, and is prone to spending days on end at home. Lera is anxious, not fully aware of her body, and has never experienced a single orgasm. | Russian Federation | ||
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The Last Axel | Television/Web Series | “The Last Axel” is the last attempt of the skater Katya to make the most difficult jump both on the ice and in her life. After the mysterious death of her abusive father Katya fights her way to join the team of the best coach to compete in the National Championship. Achieving victory there - is a chance to find freedom for herself and her younger sister. | Russian Federation | ||
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From Milan to the World | Documentary Film | A documentary has been released on the project that inspired the A.C. Milan away shirt: "From Milan to the World", the initiative-contest created by Milan Foundation in partnership with PUMA that - starting from Monday, September 13 - will call upon the over 500 million Rossoneri fans, inviting them to learn about all the socio-educational projects proposed and to vote for one of them. The concrete ambition of the initiative in fact provides for a donation of 50 thousand euros to the winning program for the development of the proposed project, linked to one of the six cities and six non-profit organizations involved. | Italy | ||
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Beautiful Idiots | Documentary Film | A middle aged man travels to Greece in a time of crisis. He looks for the anarchists, but they are on holidays. It is August.. | Austria | ||
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An Improbable Odyssey: The Life and Times of Brian Wall | Documentary Film | This documentary film provides an insider’s view of three major international art centers during three turbulent decades of the 20th century from the unique perspective of British-born American sculptor Brian Wall. Born in London in 1931, and despite an impoverished childhood during World War II and no formal art education, Wall has achieved renown for his abstract steel sculptures. We follow his remarkable journey from the modernist art center of St. Ives, Cornwall in the ‘50s to the Swinging London art scene of the ‘60s to his arrival in America in the ‘70s. He joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley at the height of the counterculture revolution and continues to live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area today. The story is told through insightful interviews with the artist in his studio as well as art historians, museum curators, collectors and fellow artists who describe the creative ferment of the times and Wall’s significant contributions. In addition, hundreds of archival photographs of art works and influential artists, musicians, and writers make this film a truly educational and inspirational experience. | United States | ||
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iNEPT | Documentary Film | Going through the everyday thoughts and struggles of life, taking place over a week. Self-doubt, self-reflection, and learning to love one's self- Logan goes through his week of work, making music, food, and talking about what's been on his mind for a while... Hoping that this will make him think about life differently. | United States | ||
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Djibril's Forest | Narrative Short | Djibril is a young Sahelian sheperd who travels far to find the forest his grandfather told him so much about. He pays a high price. He is betrayed and abused only to realise that this forest no longer exists. But then his father comes to his aid. Password to watch and download the film on Vimeo: Djibril2020 | Belgium | ||
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The Suit Weareth The Man | Narrative Short | LOGLINE - A young London businessman is seduced by a corporate entity. SYNOPSIS - Have you ever felt ashamed of who you are and where you come from? Maciek does. He struggles to reconcile his corporate ambition, and latent sexual desires, with his traditional Polish upbringing. So much so, that after gaining a promotion at work, he becomes paranoid a group of beautiful Suited Men are following him, and the lines between shame fuelled lust and reality begin to blur... | United Kingdom | ||
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Sabotage | Narrative Short | A security guard is seriously injured in a failed sabotage action by a political activist group. They take him to the their temporary alpine hideout. When it turns out that the guard has identified two members of the group, the group is faced with the choice of either accepting the guard's death or turning themselves in. Which is worth more - the life of the individual or personal militant ideals? | Switzerland | ||
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January 8, 2023 • Gene Siskel Film Center, Theater 2• 6pm - 11pm | |||||
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Alles hat Grenzen NUR DER MONDFISCH NICHT | Narrative Short | "Alles hat Grenzen, NUR DER MONDFISCH NICHT" is an environmental film musical, in which nature acts and speaks in a diversity of voices. Surfacing evocatively from micro- and macrocosmic layers, she resonates with water as the source of life and resounds as exploited resource. She echoes from the trenches of an inverted world and speaks out as a human being. Reverberating through ecological-cultural depths, images, sounds and associations push to light, giving shape to a vision of humanity being in tune with nature. | Austria | ||
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Sucking Wind | Narrative Short | We’re in no name suburbia. Harriet is 17, a misfit rich kid, star of her high school cross-country team, but currently, refusing to cross the finish line. She lies to her friends. She fakes suicide. It’s all a deflection – her only parent is on his deathbed and she can't say goodbye. Combine that with the looming reality that her acid-tongued half-sister will soon be her only family, this is one of those times in life when you decide who you are. Someone who faces up or someone who runs away. Then she finds a hair in her jello. Her best friend calls her a coward. A bird craps on her head. Something shifts. | United States | ||
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Ghosted | Narrative Short | A widower is encouraged by his best friend to download some dating apps and "get back out there" after his wife dies. The only thing is his first match is with his deceased wife. ### Three years ago, I laid to rest my wife, Noel Mor. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer 4 months after our daughter, Leia, was born. I wrote and starred in Ghosted in hopes of reconnecting with her memory. Thank you for your consideration. -Rob Mor | United States | ||
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Pretty Pickle | Narrative Short | Logline: As he spends more time with his new girlfriend, a young man begins to privately dwell upon one of her quirks, leading him to a troubling discovery. Synopsis: Part horror, part comedy of manners, part romance, PRETTY PICKLE is a provocative probe of 21st century dating paranoias and insecurity, and the timeless unpredictability of human secrecy. It’s the story of Sam and Sam—Samuel, a young man, and his new girlfriend, Samantha—during the “honeymoon phase” of their relationship. As Samuel sinks further down an Othellian spiral while privately dwelling on one of Samantha’s persisting quirks, he is led to a nightmarish discovery. | United States | ||
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Road Movie | Documentary Film | On March 25th 2019, musician and composer Gabriel Naïm Amor and filmmaker W Justin Clowes set off on a tour of southern Arizona in Naïm’s 1969 VW beetle. Armed with a bundle of tri-x super 8 black and white film and a Gretsch guitar, the duo took every opportunity to play music, film, talk about life and drink tequila. What made its way onto the 8mm rolls became the film “Road Movie”. The film is accompanied by a book with commentary from the filmmaker, as he saw it, and stills and 35mm photographs from behind the scenes. | United States | ||
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I Loved You | Documentary Film | I loved you - A film about the end of a great love. “Endure and survive,” are the words Ben tattoos on his skin. His relationship with Katharina is over. Or is it? The couple meet one last time. One evening, one night, one morning. He reproaches her, she blocks him. Ever new attempts, loops of desperation and anger, speechlessness. Ben wants to reinvent the relationship, Katharina wants to reinvent herself, as in her self-made videos which she shares on TikTok. “I loved you,” she says, “I thought you couldn't feel it – I felt it anyway.” Long Synopsis Ben (27) and Katha (21) are a young, impulsive couple. Ben has a great longing for a family of his own, Katharina is about to graduate from high school. They meet for the last time in Ben's high-rise housing estate, on the outskirts of a small town in eastern Germany. There, in his two-room apartment in a twelve-story prefab building, he is often haunted by memories of his own difficult childhood. Ben tattoos himself to express his feelings. Ben and Katha argue a lot and the question whether they want to stay together and live together is always on the table. In TikTok - videos Ben and Katharina capture moments of their lives. Katharina transforms herself into anime characters and slips into various roles for these clips. Ben is dissatisfied with the fact that Katha often does not react to his attempts at contact and does not show him her affection enough. Why does she pull away? They experience a last night together and an all-important morning. A debate ensues. Katharina lost their child during her pregnancy, which changed everything. Both try to hold on to the relationship, Katharina makes a decision after an all-night stay... The two show the range of their feelings towards each other undisguised, their anger and sadness, their disappointment and hope. The TikTok-Videos are contextualized within the inescapable reality of their break-up and shown in the end credits. | Germany | ||
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Mr. Ashley Lived Here | Documentary Film | Through interviews and hand drawn animation, Mr. Ashley Lived Here looks back at the lives of six individuals that grew up in the sharecropping community on the filmmaker's family farm and former plantation in the heart of central Louisiana. | United States | ||
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Zero To Zero | Documentary Film | Filmed over 15 months, the gripping one-hour documentary offers an unfiltered look at what it’s like to be a healthcare worker in the grips of the Covid-19 pandemic. It follows the staff of a hospital from the moment they admit their first Covid-19 patient in June 2020, till after the third wave. Gripping and emotional – at parts intense yet also hopeful – what makes Zero to Zero especially stand out is that it’s filmed by a healthcare worker with unprecedented access to the hospital frontline. This story narrates what unfolded during the darkest moments of the Covid peaks where no cameras were allowed. The unequalled footage from ICU and beyond tells a story of despair and hope. It humanises the frontline workers, showing the world a glimpse of what they have had to face. | South Africa | ||
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The Innocents | Documentary Film | Follow two acclaimed musicians who are determined to use their talents to advocate for social justice. Allen Otte and John Lane tour the country with their performance of The Innocents - a piece created to shine a spotlight on the growing problem of wrongful convictions in the United States. Using a variety of found-object and home-made instruments, electronic soundscapes, and spoken texts, the performer-composers endeavor to explore various aspects of the issues surrounding wrongful imprisonment and exoneration in the American criminal justice system: mistaken identity, incarceration, injustice, politics, psychology, and resilience. The film culminates with a performance attended by Anna Vasquez - an exoneree, who spent 13 years in a Texas prison system for a crime which never happened. | United States | ||
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Age Group Winner | Documentary Film | In 1980 Jay Helgerson shocked the world by becoming the first person to run a marathon a week for a year, each race completed in under three hours. From 2015-2020, his daughter, filmmaker Lex Helgerson, follows him with a camera in order to attempt intimacy with the man who raised her. What she gets are his projected anxieties and his struggles with physical age and emotional distress, all while he trains for the Boston Marathon. Using voicemails and old home movies, universal questions about the parent child relationship drive the story. Helgerson offers a complex portrait of a man, her father, a Coca Cola guzzling, pizza loving, never stretched a day in his life marathoner. Ripe with humor and heart, Age Group Winner reminds us there is beauty in pain, and in getting to know our parents, we may better understand ourselves. | United States | ||
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The Natural Law | Documentary Film | The Natural Law is a ground breaking documentary on Ayurveda, one of the oldest whole body healing systems from India. Featuring over 30 world renowned doctors, experts and patient cases, the film explores the fragmented western medical system and the healing power of balance between mind, body, and spirit. | United States | ||
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Climbing Eros | Documentary Film | "Climbing Eros" takes place on a Greek island in the Saronic Gulf. The short film explores the stages of a pilgrimage through the eyes of director Charles M Pepiton and his young son who walk the island—from the deserted lighthouse on one end to the peak of Mt. Eros—whilst artist Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton collects botanicals to create inks for painting. Each finds a means to reconcile with loss and return to the earth and to themselves. The film features two meditations written for the film by Damon Falke—one of confession, one of returning to materiality—that knit the threads of hiking and gathering around Jean-Luc Marion’s notion that “loving requires distance and the crossing of distance.” | United States | ||
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January 9, 2023 • Gene Siskel Film Center, Theater 1• 6pm - 11pm | |||||
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Rent-A-Friend | Documentary Film | In 1986, a novelty video tape named Rent-A-Friend introduced the world to friendship on demand. Over thirty years later, the man behind the tape reflects on the experiment and his own personal views on friendship. | United States | ||
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Choulequec | Narrative Short | A father in search of his missing daughter arrives in the isolated village of Choulequec. His immediate confrontation with the local sheriff and his absurd regulations is a mere foretaste of what lies ahead. | France | ||
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Hair In A Bag | Feature Film | An artist visits his family for the holidays, only to discover the old cat he grew up with has a terminal condition. When inner demons from his past resurface, as this cat was a source of therapy for traumas he endured as a child and young adult, he stays in town to ensure the cat lives as long as possible, exploring whether or not he has made anyone else's life better. | United States | ||
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Vikken | Documentary Film | France | |||
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Grounds of Hope | Feature Film | In a small rural town, Alex, a former professional boxer, lives as a worker for a concrete materials company. One night, chased by armed men, his twin sister breaks into his home with a migrant and his daughter. Alex, forced by the situation, helps to hide them, unaware that they are keenly sought. The spiral starts. With no choice and under financial pressure, he starts competing in illegal boxing fights. | France | ||
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On The Silk Road | Narrative Short | An old man named Tursunboy, who is over 70, lives alone at the station. Afraid to join the community. Because this old man hates what people do. Throughout the film, an unfamiliar woman and child are added to his life. At the end of the film, the old man realizes that what he is doing is the reason for his separation from society. | Uzbekistan | ||
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Shepard's Wetland | Experimental Film | AI generated landscapes accompanied by a musicalized interpretation of the "Shepard's Tone" - an auditory illusion of a tone falling indefinitely. This video can be viewed in its short form as presented here or as an installation. As an installation, the sound is designed to be infinitely loopable - always falling - while the video can loop indefinitely in a forward/reverse pattern. Music and video by William Harper. | United States | ||
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Wild Bones | Feature Film | Fay reconnects with her sister, Alice, as she misremembers the cause of her Father's disappearance and allows it to consume her. Fay lives a life that is blurred and frayed at the edges; memories are catching up with her as past cruelties, and tragedies collide into sharp focus through a myriad of visions and half-remembered history. Fay's sister, Alice, reaches out and reveals that they have been left a house by their missing Father, now presumed dead. To retrieve her Father’s house, Fay has to meet with Candace, Alice’s biological Mother and the woman Fay holds responsible for her past trauma. The two sisters attempt to rebuild their relationship, while trying to convince one another of the truth about their family and their history. | United Kingdom | ||
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Niblets | Documentary Film | Yellow, squeaky, buttery. Corn. A film about food aversion, growing up, and the dangers lurking in your own backyard, NIBLETS is a profile of erstwhile skronk-rock star Anne Gomez, an attorney working in indigent criminal defense. One advance viewer commented, "it's funny, it's poignant, it's well-shot, it's surprising in places, the viewer gets a feel for this person, [and] it touches on some big topics in a sly way." | United States | ||
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January 9, 2023 • Gene Siskel Film Center, Theater 2• 6pm - 11pm | |||||
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Rhino Putty | Documentary Film | A family of three generations come together in their summer house. Each member of the family tries to adapt with the changing mental condition of the father of the house. As the passing time reveals tensions rooted in the past, they all realise no effort can bring the old times back. | Turkey | ||
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Skin Hunger on Film | Documentary Film | From grandparents unable to hold their grandchildren, to dating via Zoom, COVID-19 has transformed how we touch. In response to this dramatic shift in human experience, Dante or Die created Skin Hunger - an interactive performance which explored the role of touch in our lives. The show featured three actors sharing stories about touch, surrounded by walls of covid-safe plastic, inviting moments of touch between actor and audience members. Skin Hunger on Film documents three audience members - a dementia care worker, a professor of neuroscience, and a former prisoner - who attended the show. As they move from story to story, each brings their own unique relationship with touch to the performance. | United Kingdom | ||
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Tangible Memory | Documentary Film | This short film is based on conversations with (and footage of) a veteran moldmaker/machinist from Spain who reflects on a lifetime of working with metal. Through the sharing of memories and storytelling this brief account sheds light on the intimate, life-long relation between maker and material (and the degree to which the latter has agency). As people shape material, material also shapes people. The circular concept behind this film also embodies a core idea of ontological design, as described by Anne-Marie Willis; namely, "we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us." The medium used to capture this footage (using a Bolex 16mm camera in an industrial work environment) further reinforces the significance of tools and tactility in shaping things. | Canada | ||
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The Shadow Between Us | Documentary Film | To address ongoing civil unrest following the death of George Floyd, a Black dancer and a White choreographer embark on a journey to heal the divide. Nehemiah, a Black dancer trapped in a pandemic lockdown in Cleveland, receives a call to join a mostly white dance troupe in Colorado to create a silhouette-based dance seeking solutions to racism and the killing of George Floyd. Having given up his art for a job at the post office, Nehemiah must find the courage to travel and participate in the project. The resulting performance transforms all the participants in unexpected ways. | United States | ||
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City Tinnitus | Documentary Film | Artist Statement Actual sounds and found footage recorded from SEOUL show the past, present, and future forms of the city. Therefore, this documentary film would show Contemporaneity beyond time and space. It has a semi-documentary format as the video work that reflects the city's past, present and future stories. City-tinnitus contains together the tragedy of history in time, sometimes anxiety and nervousness that can be felt in everyday life, and the contemporary nature of urban tinnitus that always revolves around us. City Tinnitus is an autobiographical essay film based on a real-life background that can be viewed as a story-based documentary video art. Even now, city tinnitus is being heard beyond the frame of video. Synopsis 2042. A man living in the near future. He recalls his past and longs for those days as he gazes at the dark world around him. A woman living in an entirely different dimension: the present. The image of the woman, like the rest of us, moving through her ‘daily life’ is the complete opposite of the man. Meanwhile, solitude from the past has still been remained in his future world because of a lot of environmental issues. So, longing for the past, he tries to go through a certain path of time that can go back in time….But.. | Korea, Republic of | ||
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Fighters of Bukom | Documentary Film | There is a place in Ghana which is home to a boxing village. Africans from all over Africa cross the continent to reach Bukom. A place where boxing can change a life. This is the journey and fights for survival of two immigrants. | France | ||
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The Adventures of Saul Bellow | Documentary Film | The film traces Bellow's rise to eminence and examines his many identities: reluctant public intellectual, 'serial husband', father, Chicagoan, Jew and American. Interviews with the novelist's family and friends will shed new light on Bellow's personality and the way he turned life into art. | United States | ||
