The Arrival of the First Train in Alma Ata

Dog Star Descending Images and objects warp under the scrolling gaze of a scanner bed. Photographs, shredded and reassembled, spark reminiscences in the artist’s voiceover, which relates the intertwined stories of a family trip to the island of Imbros and of his education at a bilingual German-Turkish public school. The coiling timeline of present experience overlaps with other stories detailing the complex intersection of these two cultures, and of personal and intergenerational memories.

(No Subject) A film about a zookeeper and his renewed relationship with his estranged daughter is fragmented and interrupted by the filmmaker’s own voice, reading an email to his sister about the roots of this story in their own shared history with an absent father. Through memory, dreams, and fiction, (No Subject) probes the various ways of representing the past in order to process and break free of it.

Kaboul, au coeur des Tal...

Do Not Circulate The timeline and vertical aspect ratio of social media set the formal parameters for Tiffany Sia’s essay film, which follows the image trail of a single event in Hong Kong from the 2019 protests. Reckoning with this event, a relentless voiceover reframes archival media salvaged in the midst of disappearance and erasure, drawing upon a traumatic media memory, summoning ghosts and occult forces alongside disinformation and rumor.

The Berliner Philharmoni... The annual New Year’s Eve Concert is one of the highlights in the calendar of every classical music fan in Berlin and beyond. On New Year‘s Eve, the Berliner Philharmoniker invite an exceptional soloist for a festive gala. Together, the musicians bid farewell to the old year and welcome the new. The 1998 concert was conducted by Claudio Abbado and featured Marcelo Álvarez (tenor), Mirella Freni (soprano), Simon Keenlyside (baritone), Christine Schäfer (soprano) performing: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro (Excerpts), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni (Excerpts), Georges Bizet: L'Arlésienne (Excerpts), Gioachino Rossini: La gazza ladra: Overture, Giuseppe Verdi: Rigoletto (Excerpts), Giuseppe Verdi: Un ballo in maschera (Excerpts), Hector Berlioz: Le Carnaval Romain, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin (Excerpts), Giuseppe Verdi: La Traviata (Excerpts).

Instinto Devasso

Dreams Under Confinement Frenzied voices on the Chicago Police Department’s scanner call for squad cars and reprisals during the 2020 uprising in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as Google Earth tracks the action through simulated aerial views of urban spaces and the vast Cook County Department of Corrections, the country’s third-largest jail system. In Christopher Harris’s Dreams Under Confinement, the prison and the street merge into a shared carceral landscape.

ELLE Hovering between the commonplace and the mysterious, ELLE follows a father and daughter on an early spring visit to the Kyoto Botanical Gardens. At once highly formal and thrumming with life, the liminal space of the Garden becomes the stage for a series of fleeting encounters, which director Luise Donschen explores with a precise sensitivity to the seen and the unseen.

Carnaval das Taras

38 Vivid interruptions of sound and images fragment the psychic landscape of a 38-year-old woman who becomes obsessed with the social media presence of the young woman who broke up her relationship. The latest entry in Chew and Durand’s ongoing examination of the embodied experience of our hybrid online-IRL existence, 38 mines contemporary life’s nuanced exchanges between longing and looking, voyeurism and the desire to be seen.