Notes before the Wind

Jonathon "The Impaler" Sharkey threw himself into the race for Minnesota governor on January 13, 2006. His "coming out" to the media as a Hecate Witch, Satanic Dark Priest and Sanguinary Vampire grabbed international attention, and his candidacy marked the beginning of the largest amount of media coverage ever given to an unknown third party candidate running for governor in American history.

Filmmaker Ian Taylor examines the impressive legacy of Hong Kong cinema -- specifically, how martial arts crossed borders and become an international phenomenon -- with the help of footage and interviews with the stars who made the genre what it is today. Director Lau Ka Leung (who helmed The 36th Chamber of Shaolin) joins in, sharing his thoughts on how certain cinematic technologies have improved martial arts films and expanded their appeal, on the set of Drunken Monkey (2003).

Jean-Claude Rousseau's Jeune femme à sa fenêtre lisant une lettre is not only his first medium-length film, but a chance to discover this filmmaker whom Jean-Marie Straub has called, along with Frans Van de Staak and Peter Nestler, the greatest working in Europe. With this newly restored print there is also a possibility to discover the relationship between Rousseau's art of filming and Jan Vermeer's famous painting. As Prosper Hillairet wrote in 1988, four years after Rousseau had finished Jeune femme ... (for the first time as we know today): «Without adopting the usual systematic spirit and form of cinéma structurel, Rousseau presents us with simple images and leaves it at that. Keeps the image in hand. A minimalist and ascetic expression of cinema: a shot that lasts.»

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Drops of fire that create a universe of magmatic asteroids. Liquid and gravitational reality. Cosmic energy. Atomized Rhythm. Neurons of a liberated unconscious. Elimination of the idea of "soul" as "everything", reducing it to the condition of units of energy in perpetual process, elementary particles, without duration, that arise in perfect dependence. The "I" as a stream of units of force in ceaseless becoming that procures the illusion of an entity. Karmic chain. The idea that eternity resides in the transitory, the eternal belongs to it instantly. Eternity not as infinite duration but as absence of temporality. Universe of a mobile, procedural, relational and interactive nature of everything that exists. Here the "object" is conceived as something that is constituted, completed, lost and recovered with the vibrating rhythm of a universe in constant production.

White Sands is a 3 screen projection 16mm film installation which reflects on the visible and invisible manifestations of the nuclear fuel chain on the land, air, water and people of New Mexico.

If Not is a meditation on love, inspired by If Not, Winter by Sappho, translated by Anne Carson. Filmed in Ephesus and Brooklyn.

Mostly dark, rejecting images which are repeated. A stone wall, the chamber of a revolver which is, at first not recognizable, a close-up of a cactus. The duration of the takes emphasises the photographic character of the pictures, simultaneously with a crackling, brutal sound. (Hans Scheugl)

Burford met Breer in February 1992 and filmed his actions. Breer manipulates some of his mutoscopes: he leafs through some cards of his film in the making, Sparkill Ave! A dome-shaped sculpture slowly moves across the space.

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.

Industrialization brings progress, but also harmful influences on the environment. Warning of the dangers of waste materials dumped into the air and the waters.

The PSA Project is a series of 15 videos that speak out against the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the act of war.

Still Life gazes unflinchingly at the violence of war, observing the eerie architecture of the West Bank and Gaza Strip collapsed under Israeli occupation. This portrait provides brutal witness to how government sanctioned destruction metes upon structures of home and State. Unlike the mediated images of current warfare, Still Life examines the effects of the destruction of Occupation through the details of cinematic landscapes and its inherent inhabitants. In its relentless questioning reaffirmed with a unique and unremitting soundtrack by composer Zeena Parkins, Still Life forces us to focus on details of devastation.

A watchman at an apartment complex in Assam, India, spends an ordinary evening. A surreal, expressionistic landscape unfolds.

Dear features the interior world of two teenage Chinese girls in New York City, whose diary entries reveal their concerns related to growing up as immigrants amidst the ever-gentrifying landscape of Chinatown.

“Past Perfect” is a spirited meditation on the elusiveness and inaccessibility of (Jewish) history as conveyed through sightseeing tours of “Jewish” Poland, a grandmother’s recollection of life in America during War II, and memoir-like “last moments” of a great aunt believed to have died in Treblinka. Shot almost entirely in contemporary Poland, “Past Perfect” lyrically portrays the relentless yet ultimately futile attempt to resuscitate a history literally gone up in smoke.

Sites Unseen is a 3 channel 16mm projection of the Jewish cemetary in Warsaw, a photograph of a great Aunt who died in Treblinka, and my late grandmother eating her morning cornflakes.

A super 8 projection which references the essay “On the Jewish Question” by Karl Marx.

This experimental video breaks the many silences surrounding lesbians and AIDS. Interweaving the voices of two friends, Internal Combustion reflects on the often unspoken tensions within this epidemic of survival and power and mourning and loss .

A story about a woman descending into mental illness.