Lopez Street

The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.

This is a 1991 documentary film about the legendary artist and filmmaker, Joseph Cornell, who made those magnificent and strange collage boxes. He was also one of our great experimental filmmakers and once apparently made Salvador Dali extremely jealous at a screening of his masterpiece, Rose Hobart. In this film we get to hear people like Susan Sontag, Stan Brakhage, and Tony Curtis talk about their friendships with the artist. It turns out that Curtis was quite a collector and he seemed to have a very deep understanding of what Cornell was doing in his work.

Griendtsveen, a picturesque village in the Peel on the border between Limburg and Brabant, is in danger of losing its primary school De Driehoek. The school, which has been the beating heart of the village for years, is about to close its doors. Documentary maker Ellis Smulders follows the teachers and parents who are determined to keep their school, if necessary by forming the school board themselves. Will they succeed in preserving the core of the close-knit village community, and thus the soul of the village?

What does the looming A.I. revolution mean for us as individuals and as a society?

One billion people on our planet—one in six—live in shantytowns, slums or squats. Slums: Cities of Tomorrow challenges conventional thinking to propose that slums are in fact the solution, not the problem, to urban overcrowding caused by the massive migration of people to cities. (Lynne Fernie, HotDocs)

This film describes a psychological state "kin to moonstruck, its images emblems (not quite symbols) of suspension-of-self within consciousness and then that feeling of falling away from conscious thought. The film can only be said to describe or be emblematic of this state because I cannot imagine symbolizing or otherwise representing an equivalent of thoughtlessness itself. Thus the actors in the film, Jane Brakhage, Tom and Gloria Bartek, Williams Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Olovsky and Phillip Whalen are figments of this 'Thought-Fallen Process', as are their images in the film to find themselves being photographed."

H*ART ON dives off the deep end of modern art. A film about the yearning to create, to mould everyday emotions into a meaningful life and, most of all, to live beyond one's death. A struggle that gets to the existential core of each of us. How do you find meaning in everyday fear, love, sex and loneliness?

Filmmakers use archival footage and animation to explore the culture surrounding nuclear weapons, the fascination they inspire and the perverse appeal they still exert.

In 1992 the Universal Exhibition in Seville was held in Spain. Chile participated in this exhibition by displaying in its pavilion an ice floe captured and brought especially by sea from Antarctica. In these true facts is based the fantasy narrated in Dreams of Ice. Filmed between November 1991 and May 1992 on board the ships Galvarino, Aconcagua and Maullín, in a voyage that goes from Antarctica to Spain, in this documentary film in which dreams, myths and facts converge towards a poetic tale turned into a seafaring saga, in the manner of the legends of the seafarers that populate the mythology of the American continent and universal literature.

Taking its title from the poem by Wallace Stevens, the film is composed of a series of attempts at looking and being looked at. Beginning as a city state commission under the name and attitude of “Unschool”, the film became a kaleidoscope of the experiences, questions and wonders of a couple of high school students after a year of experiences with filmmaker Ana Vaz questioning what cinema can be. Here, the camera becomes an instrument of inquiry, a pencil, a song.

An experimental film from Jirí Lehovec, mixing the sound process with animated rhythms.

Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times, each with a different set of bizarre and challenging rules.