The Sea Serpent

Night Soil - Economy of ... Economy of Love centres on a Brooklyn-based women’s activist movement that approaches sex work as a way for women to reclaim their power in a male-dominated pleasure zone. Their emphasis is on nurturing, educating and empowering both sexes around the power that lays within the female orgasm, advocating for a shifting vocabulary around sex work and gender roles and moving toward mutual respect and understanding of the body and spirit. —Tate Modern

Goddess of Wind Black magician Umbul Suko trains three disciples to become powerful warriors and they use their powers to wreak havoc on neighboring villages. Nyi Roro Kidul, the Queen of the Southern Seas, also becomes involved.

Self-Portrait Jonas Mekas reflects on his life.

Reminiscences from Germa... A narrative presented non-chronologically of Jonas Mekas's time in German forced labour camps and displaced person camps from 1944 to 1949, in which he quotes his diaries, as well as the German wartime writer Wolfgang Borchert.

Western Union: Small Boa... Isaac Julien’s 2007 multi-screen installation Western Union Small Boats is a work where individual voyages, journeys and travel are explored locally, in order to allude to the global scenario.

Ten Thousand Waves TEN THOUSAND WAVES is a 9-screen installation shot on location in China. The work poetically weaves together stories linking China’s ancient past and present. Through an architectural installation, the work explores the movement of people across countries and continents and meditates on unfinished journeys. Conceived and made over four years, TEN THOUSAND WAVES sees Julien collaborating with some of China’s leading artistic voices, including the legendary siren of Chinese cinema Maggie Cheung; rising star of Chinese film Zhao Tao; poet Wang Ping; master calligrapher Gong Fagen; artist Yang Fudong; acclaimed cinematographer Zhao Xiaoshi; and a 100-strong Chinese cast and crew. The film’s original musical score is by fellow East Londoner Jah Wobble and The Chinese Dub Orchestra and contemporary classical composer Maria de Alvear.

Vertigo Sea Vertigo Sea is a three-screen film installation that explores what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls 'the sublime seas'. Fusing archival material, readings from classical sources and newly shot footage, Akomfrah's piece focuses on the disorder and cruelty of the whaling industry and juxtaposes it with scenes of many generations of migrants making epic crossings of the ocean for a better life.

Quarta-Feira da Cinzas After the Brazilian carnival, in the melancholy aftermath of Ash Wednesday, the ants begin their own profane, multicolored feast to the rhythm of matchbox samba.

I'm in Pittsburgh and it... Anecdotally, Andy Warhol once asked the Velvet Underground that the record bearing his name be inscribed with a purposeful skip during the song “I’ll be Your Mirror.” Listeners, faced with the endless repetition of that particular lyric, would be forced to rouse themselves and manually drive the needle onward. The group declined this request. I’m in Pittsburgh and It’s Raining honors the concept: both the act and the idea of being caught in a reflexive moment. This video is an experimental portrait of a lighting stand-in/body double whose work and corporal self appears in films even if her name does not. Through a purposeful masking of the (sometimes subtle) differentiations between performance and acting, famous Hollywood actress and her double, character, actual person, audience expectation, and cinema magic this video offers a look behind the silver screen.

My Best Thing A relationship developed on random online sex chats is the starting point for this feature-length computer animated film in which the artist and a young Italian individual assume the avatars of computer-generated dummies. The situation developed through their remote correspondence is explored throughout a series of episodes in which each shares stories, ideas and emotions in a disconcerting intensity that often clashes with the nature of the presented images. —Vdrome