All Films

Portrait #04: Eliane Radigue

2006 • 15 min • Austria, France

Fourth in the IMA Portraits series, this short introduces us to the life and work of electronic/contemporary composer Eliane Radigue. Radigue discusses methods of composition, the challenges and difficulties of live electronic music, as well as biographical episodes with Pierre Henry and her own goals in soundscape production and consumption.

Merle Haggard: Live from Austin, TX

2006 • 46 min • United States of America

The Live From Austin, TX series takes the classic performances from the award-winning Austin City Limits TV show and makes them available to consumers with improved audio quality and bonus songs that were cut from the original broadcast. This fine performance delivered by the "Hag" was recorded on October 30th, 1985.

The Blue Shoe

2006 • 5 min • Sweden

A man, fishing in his boat, catches a blue lady’s shoe floating along the river. Did it belong to Andrea, the Polish berry-picker, who fled from the tyranny of the Blueberry King, supported by the Blueberry King’s own son, the poetic weakling Stig?

Tree/Gore

2006 • 4 min

A pair of doctors do some preventative maintenance on a very special tree.

Anatoly Rybakov: The Russian Story

2006 • 52 min • Russia, United States of America

The Russian Story profiles Anatoly Rybakov, a best-selling Russian novelist. His personal life follows Russia in the XXth century, a country destroyed in Stalinist purges and in the battlefields of World War II.

Genesis Antipode

2006 • 16 min • New Zealand, United States of America

The fallout from a disastrous blind date forces two polar opposites to find common ground as the rest of the world falls apart around them.

Der Kommunist

2006 • 52 min • Austria

Austria: the conservative People's Party has been in power in Styria for sixty years - but now its position is being jeopardized by the communist city councillor Ernest Kaltenegger of all people. He gives away sixty percent of his salary to the needy, Lenin pictures and Cuba flags hang in his office and people address each other as "comrades". Although this may seem somewhat anachronistic, his KPÖ has already won 21% in the local council elections with this policy and even conservative voters are secretly giving him money. In the upcoming state elections, they now want to try to transfer their successful model to the state level...

Fire and Ice: The Winter War of Finland and Russia

2006 • 56 min • United States of America

The Winter War was an epic life and death struggle that changed the course of World War II, and saved a democracy. Fire and Ice documents this timeless story of courage against all odds by a people united to preserve their freedom.

My Date from Hell

2006 • 14 min • Germany

The Devil moves into his Viagra years, hoping to find the girl to complete his life, in this atmospheric short. He discovers that blind dates, personal ads and video dating are simply pitfalls along a road of good intentions.

The Crawlspace

2006 • 55 min • United States of America

Mike wakes up to find that he is trapped and it soon becomes blatantly obvious that there is no way out. A phone rings and the games begin. The captor calls himself "The Director" as he claims to be directing a reality show in which your life is truly in danger. The show will last 3 days, and Mike will be given several random tasks to complete. If Mike is alive at the end of the third day, he will be free. But as the first task ensues, Mike realizes surviving might take more than he has.

Stravinsky: Pulcinella

2006 • 42 min

Sir Neville Marriner conducts the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields chamber orchestra and Sheldon Schwartz dances the title role in this 1980 production of Stravinski's one-act ballet, choreographed by Heinz Spoerli. The story centers on Naples man-about-town Pulcinella (Schwartz), who woos all the local maidens and fakes his own death to escape an army of angry suitors. This production also stars dancers Amanda Bennett and Loya Molloy.

The Wars

2006 • 30 min • Netherlands

In The Wars photographer Oscar van Alphen combines an adapted version of Georges Bataille's text 'Madame Edwarda' with images drawn from his archive. 'Madame Edwarda' is a story with no beginning nor an end. A male first-person narrator and a prostitute encounter in Paris by night. It's a story about lust, power, anxiety, desire, and humiliation. Van Alphen uses Bataille's text as a metaphor for the perversity of social structures, for the uncontrollability of political and economic power, and the effects of these on human dignity. He juxtaposes pictures from the decaying and almost deserted industrial regions in Northern France and of the 1968 student rebellion in Paris, with the pornographic text from the first years of World War II.

Amancay

2006 • 18 min • Switzerland, Argentina

A film about the return of a woman to a house where a drama took place – the return to her memories, her fears and her intimacy.

Scoring the Silence

2006 • 16 min • United States of America

Documentary featuring an interview with Howard Shore, composer of the score of the film "The Silence of the Lamb" (1991).

Hummus Curry

2006 • 58 min • India, Israel

For many years now, traveling to India has been a rite of passage in Israeli life. We hear so much about the Israelis in India that we sometimes forget there are actually Indians living ...

Super-Herói Fora de Série

2006 • 20 min • Brazil

Marcelo Osíres Carvalho is a 30-year-old boy, shy and without any social life. His great hobby is comic books, but Marcelo ends up getting too involved with this fantastic universe and decides to transform into a superhero to fight crime. What seemed like a simple daydream ends up working and the new hero ends up being recognized by the whole city. And, just like in the world of comics, reality also saves mysteries and revelations for the last pages.

Between Worlds

2006 • 54 min • Switzerland

The revealing life story of Güli Dogan conveys impressively and in exemplary pictures the long and difficult path of a successful integration. Between the Worlds is the portrait of a woman who is very well integrated professionally and socially in Switzerland, but who is emotionally strongly connected to her village, which hardly exists anymore.

La cosa nuestra

2006 • 16 min • Spain

La Cosa Nuestra is a journey to the most hidden and surreal face of the bovid-bullfighting universe. Fun and tremendous, operating in iconographic cannibalism. It is a work that shows another reading of the national holiday, demystifying it. Confronts the Spanish bullfighting culture with the visions and uses of the bull in other civilizations. This video creation immerses itself in the aesthetic, ritual and cultural universe of the world of bullfighting, rebuilding it critically, but at the same time with healthy irony.

Spring

2006 • 4 min • United States of America

The scattering of Steve Lacy’s ashes at Long Island, NY on March 21, 2006.

The Shack

2006 • 22 min • United States of America

Two murderous hillbillies underestimate the stabbing ability of a girl camping with friends at night.

Codehunters

2006 • 9 min • United Kingdom

In 2005, Ben Hibon, with Stateless Films and Blinkink, created an animation for MTV Asia's weekly film show called MTV Screen. After a very good response, MTV Asia commissioned his company to produce a short film on the back of it. “As I was creating concepts drawings,” explains Ben Hibon, “MTV Asia was starting to plan their annual Music Awards. They then came up with the idea of ‘launching’ our project by using it to brand the show; posters, banners, trophy design and intro/bumper animations. So the brief changed from ‘short film’ to ‘branding package’ for the MTV Awards show.” It formed into a seven-minute prologue / intro animation to the world of ‘Codehunters’, an on-going MTV/BLINKINK project launched around the MTV Asia Awards 2006 in Bangkok.

Portrait #2: Trojan

2006 • 5 min • United States of America

The Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, with its 499-foot tall cooling tower that loomed over its otherwise bucolic Columbia river setting, is the only commercial nuclear power plant ever built in the state of Oregon, at the cost of $450 million in the 1970's economy (almost 3 trillion dollars in today’s money). [...] "Portrait #2: Trojan" is a sublime representation of the surrounding environment leading dramatically up to the moment of demolition. Sam Coomes’ flawless score provides stunning sonic context for the happy ending of the Oregon nuclear skyline. The film is an effective prescription in prevention of politically-triggered anxiety and depression in post-modern Cascadia.

Zone of Initial Dilution

2006 • 31 min

A study of the changing Chinese landscape around the Three Gorges Dam project, where the world’s biggest hydraulic dam is being constructed. In anticipation of its completion in 2008, this film focuses on the small towns on the Yangtze River - some have already been abandoned or are in ruins, others are full of life - and tries to determine the consequences for the landscape and the population when the lake fills with water.

Confini d'Europa 2: Rio de Onor

2006 • 54 min • Italy