On Memorial Day in 1973, Sammy Davis Jr. hosted a national telethon to raise funds for the Highway Safety Foundation. It wound up losing nearly three-quarters of a million dollars, thanks in no small part to Sammy Davis Jnr’s insistence on having the telethon relayed to over fifty television stations in order to ensure good exposure for himself. Even more curious was the rumoured involvement of the favoured foundation in the production of pornographic films, with filming taking place on a.o. the Highway Safety Foundation bus. But Everson’s Telethon is really about two talented acts waiting to perform in this ill-fated telethon...

Male alienation and isolation are recurrent themes in Mark Raidpere’s work. Ten Men shows a series of prisoners flexing their muscles and flaunting their tattoos for the camera, but also smiling in embarrassment and looking away in hope of solidarity.

When the Serbian artist Ivan Grubanov began his residency at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam in 2002, this coincided with the start of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague against his former president, Slobodan Milosevic. For two years he visited the Tribunal regularly. Confronted with the man and the events which had shaped his life, he looked for a way to capture the intensity of this experience. He started to make drawings, in an attempt to relate to this chapter in history. Again and again, from the same angle Grubanov draws the man who dominated his life, although he had never met him before. Gradually he developed a sensitivity for Milosovic’s slightest gestures. The intimacy of the drawings is insidious...

Dear Advisor shows a man in a tailored suit with a hat, wandering through the desolate centre of Chandigarh - India, designed by Le Corbusier. The ordinary little man goes on a pilgrimage to the ruins of the modernistic age. The buildings renew their purpose and offer the man an excuse to escape from the everlasting ‘now’.

Pieter Geenen travelled to the controversial Three Gorges Dam in China and filmed the submerged society. While the search- lights of a cruise ship register the remnants of a flourishing industry, a rich cultural history and a beautiful scenery, the artist takes us to an underwater world that has become the silent witness of what once was a bustling community.

“Based on the true story of the wallpaper in my bedroom.”

A 70-year old man lives in a remote part of Scotland. His obsession with Darwin and the urge to completely understand his theory result in an isolated existence in the woods.

Many pre-modern theories consider crystals as an interme- diate form between the mineral, vegetative and animal king- doms. Rekveld worked on this project for 8 years and developed software that simulates the growth of crystals. This resulted in a hallucinatory trip through an unbelievable palette of colours, enchanting mandalas and abstract shapes.

Bernadette Devlin, one of the key figures in Northern Ireland’s republican and civil rights movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s, was known for her temperament. She slapped the Home Secretary when he forbid her to address the parliament after Bloody Sunday...

Disguised as a traditional documentary the film mocks the G8 Summit at Saint Petersburg. While Bush compliments Putin on the beautiful location, the largest cemetery in the city is turned into a strategically sensitive location...

Colburn preaches animated calamity about the consequences of crystal meth use in the American countryside. She associates the feelings of invincibility during intoxication and the degeneration of the body caused by the addiction with the extreme Puritan faith of the seventeenth century.

A troubled relationship between an oversensitive cat and her husband, a mouse, set in the distant future. Highly digital, but so human...

One of Marie Losier’s films about avant-garde filmmakers. DreaMinimalist takes a look at the life of the eccentric Tony Conrad while he tells stories, sings, dances and recollects childhood memories.

1859 was the year that solar flares were first observed. LSD is illegal, 1859 isn’t.

Hundreds of people gather in the Mojave Desert on the thirteenth of every month to see The Virgin Mary appearing in the sun. Afterwards, polaroids, film and photos are compared and interpreted.

Deze in één take opgenomen film toont een processie in Malobi, Suriname. Een hedendaagse interpretatie van het werk van Jean Rouch, antropoloog en een van de pioniers van de Franse Cinéma Vérité.

‘Magnetic Sleep’ was the term used in the 19th Century to describe hypnosis. A collage of techniques (animation, photography, film and painting) creates the world of a woman who both loves and fears her hypnotic powers.

De Mojave Woestijn. Achter een omheining registreert de camera hoe eindeloze rijen zonnepanelen langzaam draaien en hun omgeving weerspiegelen. Een stem vertelt ons de verzonnen waarheden die de lokale bevolking over deze vreemde machines uitwisselt.

Hidden webcams used for the surveillance of launderettes, universities and workshops are Optimal Vacuum’s point of departure. These images can be found on the internet, but usually they are inaccessible. The intimate diary of the artist Stephen Mathewson serves as a soundtrack. This film offers a reflection on voyeurism, control and the human urge to be watched.

Lossless is a series of works that looks at the dematerialization of film into bits, exposing the residual effects of the process that makes file sharing possible. The makers want to show how much digital versions can differ from the original films.

Images of cheerleaders, firearms demonstrations and stagings of historical battles form the story of colonel William Rankin, who miraculously survived a fall out of a fighter plane. Rankin is the starting point for Stratman’s contemplation on the American society. She reveals the relation between the ideal of freedom and the USA’s selfperceived manifest destiny: spreading that ideal using every possible means, even violence. The extent to which violence has permeated society becomes painfully clear.

A Necessary Music is a science fiction film about modernist social housing. A musically conceived piece, referencing the video operas of Robert Ashley, the film explores the social imaginary of a utopian landscape through directed attention to the voices that inhabit it. A collaboration with Alex Waterman. Narrated by Robert Ashley.

A Necessary Music is a science fiction film about modernist social housing. A musically conceived piece, referencing the video operas of Robert Ashley, the film explores the social imaginary of a utopian landscape through directed attention to the voices that inhabit it. A collaboration with Alex Waterman. Narrated by Robert Ashley.

This documentary assembles seven young Israeli men who once shared the same military experiences. What starts off as an ordinary reunion of friends soon turns into a recollection of deep-seated memories. This manifests itself when the group re-enacts the manoeuvres that were indelibly printed in their memory.

Cobra Mist explores the enigmatic relationship between the landscape of Orford Ness and traces of its unusual military history. It’s the location of the UK’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. The place has a sinister atmosphere, accentuated by Chris Watson and Benedict Drew’s superb soundtrack.

Let Me Count the Ways is composed of short segments compressed into a 20-minute exploration of the lead-up to, the confusion about, and the aftereffects of the Hiroshima bombing. The title simultaneously references the countdown to the dropping of the bomb and suggests anticipation. Minus 10 juxtaposes footage of the artist’s father in los Alamos and on the way to Tinian island with an interview with a woman in Japanese about the bombing. Minus 9 aligns an American nurse’s eye- witness account of the bombing and its aftermath with aerial landscape shots blocked by a blinking blue circle which could represent a mutant sun, an eye, planet Earth, an afterimage, or the inverted “rising sun” of Japanese national symbolism. Minus 8 and Minus 7 show excerpts from a documentary, The Growth of Plants (c.1950), overlaid by running text describing radiation-induced botanical mutations. In recalling past histories of warfare, Thornton’s current work urges the reexamination of contemporary politics, and artistic practice, by building delicately balanced emotional and narrative arguments. (Trinie Dalton) 

“A search for a non-existent image, a desire to create an image where there is none,” culminates in a critical reflection on the relationship between documented history and non-registered memories. Through interviews and diverse archive material, Tajiri goes in search of her family’s story during WWII, as thousands of Japanese Americans were taken to internment camps. She explores the influence of images in the construction of memory and identity, asking herself why certain images grow into historical symbols, whereas others are obstinately suppressed.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even the past”. This quote by American writer William Faulkner could situate quite accurately the work of Matthew Buckingham. In his installations, he assembles and reinterprets historical documents and representations as a way to question the relationship between past and present. Situation Leading to a Story is based on four amateur films from the 1920’s that Buckingham found on the streets of New York. The search for the origin and context of these private images leads to a criticism on the ways in which images of the past are used as a fantasy of history.

Hoffman’s first film already presents all the characteristics of his later diary filmmaking: a fascination for family history and the reconstruction of memory, but also a complex temporal structure that dismantles the conventions of documentary filmmaking. A series of photo portraits is the basis for an intimate investigation on the way identity relies on the familiar system of role play, projection and fantasy. Hoffman breaks the thin ice between document and fiction, fact and imagination, past and present, revealing the fissures and rip tides that hide beneath the misleading calm surface.

In the guise of a historiographical study on an failed expedition to the Arctic in 1897, Baron investigates the limitations of images and other forms of documentation as a historical referent, and the paradoxical relationship between the temporality of the moving image and the stillness of photography, between historical time and “real time”. Or how the image, regarded as a necessary condition for both memory and history, says everything and nothing at the same time .

1937: the year that Nora Dagabian’s father was arrested in Yerevan the capital of Armenia, during the Stalinist ethnic cleansing operations by the Soviet Army. Martirosyan combines interviews with Nora, now 70 years old, with archive images and re-enactments. The different temporalities overlap; stories and words become mixed up; images pass from one to the other; voices are superimposed, dubbed, transferred from one body to the other. A reflection on the process of remembering and the relationship between individual and collective memory.

Dit video-essay suggereert een postnucleaire toekomst waarin de mensheid veroordeeld is tot een verblijf in de kosmische ruimte. De verteller in de film is een fictionele afstammeling van Anjalika Sagar, een van de leden van de Otolith Group. Ze blikt terug op verscheidene generaties van vrouwen uit haar familie en verbindt haar eigen ervaringen met die van Anjalika’s grootmoeder, een Indische feministe in de jaren 1960. Haar poging om vat te krijgen op de meervoudige dimensies van het historische en het evolutionaire genereert een variëteit van beelden, die tal van gefragmenteerde geschiedenissen en utopische aspiraties uit de twintigste eeuw omvatten. Otolith presenteert een “toekomst uit het verleden” en maakt hierdoor een alternatief perspectief op het heden mogelijk. 

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This video essay suggests a post-nuclear future in which humankind has been confined to outer space. The narrator is a fictional descendant of Anjalika Sagar, one of The Otolith Group members. She looks back at several generations of women from her family, linking her own experiences with those of Anjalika’s grandmother, an Indian feminist in the 1960’s. Her attempt to understand the multiple dimensions of the historical and the evolutionary generates a number of images, which include the fragmented histories and utopian aspirations of the 20th century. Otolith presents a “past-potential-future”, making possible an alternative perspective on the present.

A cinematic essay on race and civil disorder in 1980s Britain, Handsworth Songs takes as its point of departure the civil disturbances of September and October 1985 in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and in the urban centres of London. Running throughout the film is the idea that the riots were the outcome of a protracted suppression by British society of black presence. The film portrays civil disorder as an opening onto a secret history of dissatisfaction that is connected to the national drama of industrial decline. “To make sense of the debris in Handsworth, BAFC had to reconstitute the fragments, and in doing so, words, sound and image came alive in an audio/visual style.”

“The feeling of disjuncture is reflected not only in the jump cuts of the film’s narrative discontinuity — moving between archival photographs, newsreel fragments, media reportage, and on-site interviews — it is also deeply anchored by the sombre aural pulse, the disjunctive syncopation of the snare drum beat, the mournful reverb of the dub score that sustains a quiet rage. Though ostensibly addressing the issues of policing, Handsworth Songs reflects more profoundly the agency of the oppressed; it narrates their stories, not purely from the point of view of the event from which it derives its name, but equally through an archaeology of the visual archive of minoritarian dwelling in Britain. As is often the case in BAFC’s work, the ghosts of those stories inform the notion of a historically inflected dub cinema whose spatial, temporal and psychic dynamics relays the scattered trajectories of immigrant com munities.” (Okwui Enwezor)

With a rich source of found and original footage, this short film presents several versions of tragic events in the rural South.