Hotel Diaries

In 2022, when the economic crisis in her native country was at its peak, she decided to visit her family there. She turned her short trip into a collage-like diary in which she reflects on her relationship with her homeland, which is in a state of protracted decay. The film is composed of spontaneous snapshots capturing the author's stay, interspersed with inserted captions serving as personal, often poetically formulated comments and observations. As a result, the film does not hide its strongly subjective perspective, but at the same time builds on it to make an important statement that shows the transformation of Lebanese society in everyday details such as the appearance of the city itself or in the intimate sphere of the author's family life.

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Maria Lang is my very close filmmaker friend who lives in the southern german countryside. We see her gardening and visiting an exhibition of female impressionist painters.

If there is one person Matthew Lancit can’t get out of his mind, it is his uncle Harvey. Dark rings around his eyes, pale, blind, his legs amputated. Like Harvey, the filmmaker also suffers from diabetes. He has the disease under control, but one question is always nagging at him: How much longer? His long-term (self-)observation reliably revolves around fears of infirmity and mutilation. He translates the feared body horror into film, stages himself as a zombie, vampire, a desolate figure. Lancit playfully anticipates his potential decline, serving up a whole arsenal of effects which – as video recordings prove – go back to his youth. It is not for nothing that the “dead” in the title is also reminiscent of “dad.” Because “Play Dead!” also negotiates his own role as a father.

Filmed mostly on a Mini DV camera Gavin has thought of a quick way to become successful and be the master of the world but he has to wait for it all to fall into place… he has to wait for the postman to start production documenting the process of being master of the world.

Reminiscences of a trip to Čáslav

A loose collection of scenes in Hong Kong shot over a five-year period, this film begins with the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and ends right before the summer of 2019, when large-scale social unrest and violent resistance erupted. The everyday scenes capture the ambience and the landscape of change in the city, standing as a quiet prelude to the ensuing conflicts.

This short, started early on into sobriety, finished about nine months in, is a collage of diaries and notes, collected from within addiction and into recovery.

The day with the sky neither too blue nor too grey. With a hint of red. The train crowded and the backpacks between the feet. The loves on every corner, the ones we pretend not to see.

A short documentary project that attempts to encapsulate what it looks and feels like to be an American Teenager in 2022.

A personal documentary questioning the ways in which family imposed narratives force us into roles that we spend our lives either rebelling against or conforming to.

This short experimental diary film reveals my struggles with mental illness in my adolescence and queer adulthood while simultaneously reflecting upon my joyous childhood experiences. I investigate when and how my depression began and explain that my relationships with the people I love have supported me through my harder times. The film incorporates footage shot over May and June 2023 and archival home videos. Overall, I aim to resolve my "growing pains" through the medium of diary film and by reconnecting with my younger self.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

This film is a recording of the events of the ideal school's science fair in 2024, showing the conversations and events that involved the people involved in the event.

Sara and Alberto spend their days at home. They look out the window and watch: spring is approaching and the sun is setting later and later. Alberto entertains himself by playing with the light, the shadows and the nooks and crannies they leave on the living room. Sara goes out on the balcony in the evenings and examines the neighborhood with her camera. When they are in bed, they talk about what worries them. About job expectations. About being creative and why keep trying, if someone else has done it before you. About living in confinement, but at the same time, realizing that things haven't changed as much as they seem.

One entry from a daily visual journal.

A letter of love to my past self who discovered himself.

Filmmaker Jon Beaton has always felt like an outsider. When TikTok’s powerful algorithm starts sending him content from the app’s autistic community, he has an epiphany – could this explain everything? My Diagnosis explores the tension between self-diagnosis and institutional validation through an intimate blend of personal vlogs and fictionalised recreations.

Blending candid interviews, experimental moments, and reflective narration, this 55-minute personal doc explores what it means to grow up when the people who love you also struggle to accept who you are. Through screen-recorded calls with friends, street interviews, and distant footage of everyday life, I examine my upbringing as a queer non-binary trans person—where love, expectation, and shame often coexisted—among a sea of other stories about adolescence. Anchored by a conversation with a close friend and fellow artist, the film sits in the tension between care and rejection, asking if anyone is even really special—or maybe all of us are.