English

How do our perceptions of disease and health reflect on us as a society? Travelling throughout history and across cultures, Ira A. Goryainova’s fascinating essay offers a philosophical reflection on humankind’s view of illnesses. From the Ancient Greek theory of “black bile” to the victim-blaming language of medicine as demonstrated by Susan Sontag, Bile explores the notion of the human body as political metaphor. The Moscow-born director draws from intimate material, intertwining the story of her mother’s cancer and death in post-Soviet Russia with a vast range of medical archives. Her expert collage establishes intriguing connections between physical disorders and the social cancer of the 20th century: fascism.Read More »

A young escort from Brooklyn meets and impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, her fairy tale is threatened as his parents set out for New York to get the marriage annulled.Read More »

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Impure Version. Features a voiceover as screened at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.

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An ultra-realistic, multiplayer FPS game follows a group of mercenaries using baby faces as avatars. Tasked with entering mansions of the rich and powerful, players must explore every rabbit hole before time runs out.Read More »

John Erdman reprises his role as “Old White Male” from The Lobby, joined by a filmmaker and a robot version of himself, exploring absurdities of human existence through philosophical musings on cinema, technology, apocalypse, and more.
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First document about a tibetan meditation that preserves the body from days to weeks after traditionally considered death.Read More »

In the near future where parenthood is strictly controlled, a couple’s seven-day assessment for the right to have a child unravels into a psychological nightmare.Read More »

“I have been working in film and photography for over twenty-five years. In that time I have tried through my journey to perfect my alchemy / my art / my life.

It is in the spirit of an experience and not of experiment that my work has been viewed these past 25 years, seized in moments of visual detachment during periods of emotional contact. These images are oxidized residues, fixed by light and chemical elements, of living organisms. No plastic expression can ever be more than a residue of the experience. Yet, that residue is recognition of an image that has somehow survived the experience, recalling the event, like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames.Read More »

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Hsieh is an artist whose medium of expression is not words or sounds or paint, but his own life. His work consists of five “One Year Performances,” done between the years of 1978 and 1986, and “Earth,” a thirteen-year performance that stretched from the end of 1986 to the end of 1999. Each of these Performances involves a particular vow, a particular constraint, and a particular mode of being. Each of them is meticulously documented in a manner appropriate to its content. And, although Hsieh never explicitly states his rationales for his pieces, each of them implicitly raises profound, difficult questions about life and art and being, and about what it means to live in the world we live in.Read More »

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TV commercials collector Jean Marie Boursicot’s (who might be known to you by his Nights of AdEaters) compilation of advertising films and commercials produced by famous film directors. Featured directors; Vol 1: David Cronenberg, Tim Burton, Luc esson, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Giuseppe Tornatore, Wim Wenders, David Lynch, Roman Polanski, Francis Ford Coppola, Tarsem Singh, Jean Jacques Annaud, Ridley Scott, Emir Kusturica, Wong Kar Wai, Michel Gondry, Tony Scott, Jean Luc Godard, Tony Kaye, Jan Kounen; Vol 2: Hugh Hudson, Martin Scorsese, Claude Lelouch, Jean-Luc Godard, Carlos Saura, Franco Zeffirelli, Claude Chabrol, Jean Jacques Annaud, Roman Polanski, Ridley Scott, Federico Fellini, Giuseppe Tornatore, Patrice Leconte, Andrei Konchalowski, David Lynch, Helmut Newton, Nikita Mikhalkov, Jean Jacques Beineix, Jean Pierre Jeunet and William Klein.Read More »