Bars & Tone

Samba, Popping, and Jazz. Through these dance styles and documentary interviews, Bodies That Tell Stories seeks to discuss the standardization and whitening of dances that had their roots in Black people.

Latest installment from the on-going collaboration between filmmaker Paul Clipson & musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Paul's Super8 films, shot entirely in New York City, channel the blissed out states of color drenched psychadellia explored by Brakage as well as lovely black and white still life's that reminisce on Ozu's 'pillow shots' & Chantel Akermans monumental portrait of Pre-Giuliani New York 'Letters Home'. Jefre's music is culled from the same sessions that launched his 2007 release on Students Of Decay 'Shinning Skull Breath', (the two share a track in common). Billowy clouds of distorted guitar expand out into long passages of muffled static and fuzzed out melody.

Graduation is approaching, marking the close of a chapter. I took my camera to Green Island, recording video letters day by day. But the camera became unruly, backup batteries went missing, and the trip began to go downhill. Typhoons arrived, and the video letters ceased... Finally, facing the sea beneath the sun, my camera non-responsive, I took a Dramamine, then boated back home.

An Editor recounts the diaries of a failed film production as they attempt to construct a new narrative from the remaining footage.

This is not just a “folkumentary”, but an invitation to reflect on the future of humanity on a planet where tradition and technology coexist, and where the unknown reminds us that there are still unanswered questions.

Short documentary consisting of archival footage and movies that depict the birth of the United States of America, from the Boston tea party to the Spanish American war

An oneiric moment in the contradictory sensations that arise when experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic.

A silent city symphony, projected from gorgeous black and white 16mm film. Materia vibrante lets the resonating frequencies of the urban environment create the inaudible hum that keeps the engines of society running, absent of the inhabitants running around like little ants toiling away.

Memory is a collaboration with musician Noah Lennox (Panda Bear), exploring the relationship between a musician and filmmaker and their personal reflection on memories. From Super 8 home movies and entirely handmade, this film explores familiar memories, the present moment combined with past experiences and how it all seems to evade from our present memory.

‘Under the Weight of a Waking Dream’ is Zefier's debut swan song to the ending year. Comprised of poetry and endless enumerations is a diaristic film chronicling the lessons and contradictions found throughout the human experience.

Welcome to the funbubble! Over 2 hours of bizarre entertainment. Meet Shaye Saint John, former supermodel who now has no arms or legs and her special friend Kiki (a burnt doll). This series of shorts documents the daily collision of Shaye's glamorous fantasies with the realities of the physical limitations of her everyday life. These films with their juxtaposition of child-like imagery can be genuinely disturbing without a hint of blood, violence, nudity, cursing, or off-color subject matter of any sort. Watching Shaye do her schtick is akin to watching a segment of one of John Waters' early flicks. There is no question about the fine line between maddness and genius here -- it's madness, plain and simple, dizzying in its detachment to reality. Depending on your outlook, Shaye Saint John is either a true testimony to the power of art to rise above adversity or these films are hidden footage from a ward for the criminally insane!

The short film follows Endika, a director who, in the midst of a clash with his reality, transforms a documentary about paternal absence into a personal quest for reconciliation with his own father.

Within photographs that are not their own, a body discovers it has always been part of another.

Pictures taken between France and Mexico running at 8 frames per second.

Bolivian artist and filmmaker Luciana Decker Orozco delves into ancient and essential acts: eating, masticating and digesting. Her suggestive celluloid slips through mouths, intestines and entrails, as well as experiments in the catacombs of the human being and the Earth. Inspired by the avant-gardist and indigenist Peruvian writer Gamaliel Chumata, the surface and the underground, the real and the extraordinary, mysteriously merge together.

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In a leafy forest, a Galician sovereign who longs to attain wisdom meets a sorcerer, who tells him: “Go back to your country and study the Earth and the Stars in the sky; anywhere in the world reflects an image of it. You will ride on this arrow, which you must keep for a hundred years and a day. After this time, stick it in the widest valley of all those you possess, with the tip facing the sky. Then the Moon will come and, just as it exerts its action on the waters of the sea, it will act on the arrow, turning it into a holy mountain." - Legend about the Pico Sacro Inspired by Hokusai's views of Mount Fuji and Cézanne's paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, "Pico Sacro [The Holy Mountain]" aims to reveal the mystery and the magic that underlie reality.

"Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the 'sacred erotic.' This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City."

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An experimental home documentary where you step inside the director's lens. A journey through his childhood via his own early recordings, exploring the origins of his craft and how that child’s gaze is still there, captured in time.