Beautiful University

Inspiration The Estonian Jubilee Song Festival is shown as a source of creativity that influences the creation of a painting. The documentary material is linked to the animation.

An Almost Unbelievable S... Workers declare a strike. The factory owner employs monkeys instead. But the greedy boss loses the expected benefits.

Dio salvi la regina

Women Are Mean An embittered man-child rails against women for being so mean.

Eu armrio de mim... A woman close to things asks about the ways of existing. the body, the name, the house, the thickness in which the subject is inscribed and daily modeled.

Passagens I A woman is followed as she walks through a building and up sets of stairs.

Algonquin Park, Early Ma... The sublime, seductive landscape in Algonquin Park, Early March 2002 takes shape through a slow zooming out of the camera, starting with a monochromatic white screen (in fact a pure projection of light) and only revealing the full picture at the end. Location, subject, and especially the viewer’s position (a cliff high above a lake), evoke the effects of C. D. Friedrich’s Romantic painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818. The sequence of revelations moves from the pure abstraction of the film’s beginning to the actual scenery and culminates in the final scene of a group of skaters on a small, distant oblong of ice. Even as the movement of the skaters disrupts the contemplation of the motionless landscape, their position off-center reminds us of the background in Pieter Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow, 1565.

Partage des Eaux At first glance, Jean-Claude Rousseau’s films seem like quickly outlined sketches. They are snapshots of various situations and locations, as in this program of nine miniatures, shot in hotel rooms and parks, at the shore of a lake, and – in the longest contribution – on a restaurant terrace. Rousseau’s observations of everyday life, however, are about precision rather than contemplation. With each minute that passes, they sharpen the view of the observant and expectant outsider for a moment of surprise – be it a jump into the water or a huge crucifix.

Before This War Among ruptures of memories, geographical and affective displacements, we revisited with Bruno the incursion into a city full of noise but that still emits a minimal murmur of love.

Hear the Cyclone Among grand mal seizures and geomagnetic storms in São Paulo, André looks for his mother and his lost affections.