When her mother disappears while on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend, June’s search for answers is hindered by international red tape. Stuck thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, June creatively uses all the latest technology at her fingertips to try and find her before it’s too late. But as she digs deeper, her digital sleuthing raises more questions than answers... and when June unravels secrets about her mom, she discovers that she never really knew her at all.

Sara Sadik s'intéresse à la jeunesse française des quartiers populaires, notamment celle issue de la diaspora du Maghreb. L'artiste s'attache tout particulièrement à sa culture, à son langage et à ses mythologies sociales. La pratique artistique de Sara Sadik fait appel au film documentaire, à la science-fiction, à l'animation et à la télé-réalité pour documenter et déconstruire les représentations de l'adolescence et de la masculinité. "Khtobtogone" est un film réalisé à partir d'images du jeu vidéo Grand Theft Auto. Il fait le portrait de Zine, 20 ans, alors qu'il se prépare à demander sa copine en mariage. Une voix-off décrit le monologue intérieur de Zine alors qu'il s'interroge sur lui-même et ses actions, produisant le portrait émotionnel complexe d'un jeune homme confronté à la violence structurelle et à la pression sociale.

Variations is a 1998 American short silent avant-garde film directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. It is the second film in a set of "Four Cinematic Songs," which also includes Triste, Arbor Vitae, Love's Refrain.

Since time immemorial, we have used images to form a picture of the world. But never before has there been as much filming and photography as there is currently. But how do people deal with it when the world and its image merge? The filmmakers Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer show how quickly and profoundly the way we deal with images is changing. Will we eventually move into a world in which reality and image can no longer be distinguished from each other?

A slow movement through a residential neighbourhood, with empty streets, plain facades, as though artificial. A man recounts his story about the first time, attraction, desire, dizziness of the ignition, forgetfulness, complete blackout. The monologue is composed from transcriptions of psychotherapeutic sessions with arsonists, from the period 1960-1980.

Artificial grass on the balcony, a meeting hall with a forest wallpaper, a palm beach in the waiting room of the dentist. This short documentary examines the role of nature simulations in our society. To what extent does artificial nature satisfy the city dwellers and where are these simulations still falling short? Will artificial nature ever replace real nature?

In this 25 minute documentary director Sebastian Mulder follows the tracks of the wolf Naya, by the huge amount of data that is collected: camera-recordings, gps-coordinates, samples, news items and so on.

Across walls, fences, and alleys, rats not only expose our boundaries of separation but make homes in them. "Rat Film" is a feature-length documentary that uses the rat—as well as the humans that love them, live with them, and kill them--to explore the history of Baltimore.

Somewhere on the internet is a land where communities pretend to live out a survivalist fiction. The avatars of the directors of Knit’s Island spent 963 hours there, creating a fascinating film resulting from their encounter with these communities. The “players” reveal their fears and fantasies, in an at times unsettling blurring of the real and the virtual.

SCREEN FLICKER re-stages the flatness of the computer screen, in direct opposition to the tunnels of cyberspace. Screens naturally flicker, at a rate too quick for our eyes to perceive but one that can be captured by a camera. This video confuses the medium of the computer screen with that of film, employing the classic avant-garde film strategy of flicker.

A film producer, an assassin, and a patriot. These aren’t three characters in this film but three ways of describing Wu Dun, a member of the United Bamboo Gang who murdered the Taiwanese-American writer Henry Liu and became a producer of wuxia films. Hsu Che-yu, who previously brought Single Copy (IFFR 2020) and Re-rupture (IFFR 2018) to Rotterdam, visits Wu’s abandoned studio to restage the events with forensic scanning techniques.

BJ Cherry Jang 2019.8 Shorflim by Ryu Sung SIl

BJ Cherry Jang 2018.4 ShortFlim by Ryu Sung Sil

In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, ‘Preemptive Listening’ is an ode to the sirens that are and those that could be. Siren compositions from over 20 contemporary musicians form a resonant voice to ask; Does an alarm have to be alarming?

When US border agents fired tear gas grenades at civilians in November 2018, photographs showed that many of those grenades were manufactured by the Safariland Group, one of the world’s major manufacturers of so-called ‘less-lethal munitions’. The Safariland Group is owned by Warren B. Kanders, the vice chair of the board of trustees of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“In order to strengthen the happiness, sense of belonging and sustainable development of residents in Colaone, the “Coloane Construction and Development Association(Macau)” will hold an opening ceremony for the audience of Macau. Together with representatives of development areas in Coloane, we sincerely invite you to join our ceremony to witness a historical moment of Coloane.”

Author of the official spot of the 22nd Ji.hlava IDFF 2018 is the renowned French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard.

Based on one of the Lumière brothers’ historic first films, Harun Farocki has created a montage of scenes from 100 years of film history, all variations on the theme of “workers leaving the factory”. Farocki uses the pictures to reflect on the iconography and economy of a workers’ society, as well as that of cinema itself, which tends to acquire its audience at the gates of the factory and hijack them into the private sphere.

“I would like to propose a film that contributes to the concept of work. That compares the work of a traditional society, like in Africa, in an early industrial society such as India, and in a highly developed industrial society, in Europe or Japan. The object of comparison is to be the work in building houses. Houses to live in.”
This was written in Harun Farocki’s exposé from 2003 for a documentary project. “After initial research (...) I had the idea of using the brick, its manufacture and its processing as the object of comparison, explains Farocki. “We were looking for a great variety of uses for bricks – and we were looking for manufacturing processes that would possibly do away with bricks.” In India he filmed a brickworks whose threading machine was from the 1930s when Gandhi was organizing the anti-colonialist protest. The installation in northern France was operated by Moroccans who housed in barracks like POWs or forced labourers. In Mumbai apartment houses were built much like they are in Europe. No hand touched the products that came out of the highly mechanized factories in Germany. In Burkina Faso Farocki followed the communal work on a hospital ward and a school building with his camera: “I’ve never in my life been able to observed such a strange process so closely.”
The film does without commentary; there are only indications of the places and a few explanations offered in subtitles.