Rok 2002 - 478

On May 1, 2002, the narrator and his friend set off from Budapest in a thirty-year-old “White Power” Wartburg for a barn rave in Őrség, joined en route by a solar-tanned couple, the film’s composer and a handful of Amiga-loving party-goers. What begins as a laid-back Labour Day celebration - stew, pálinka, makeshift metal blasting from a boombox - rapidly swells into a nationwide legend as more revelers, a troublemaker and a student duo join in, even as the local police, an unforgiving schedule and baffled villagers threaten to shut them down. By dawn, amid flying profanity and folk-metal riffs no one can hear, they’re left asking each other: what story will this wild night become on film?

Six young lesbians and gays tell their stories, from the difficulty of being oneself when one feels different, to announcing one's homosexuality to oneself and to others (coming out), to the social rejection (homophobia) and the deafness or even hostility of the families, schools and institutions with which the young people are confronted, this film, made during the Euro-Mediterranean Summer School on Homosexuality in July 2000, recounts the journeys of three young lesbians and three young gays.

Hyun-jung lives with her friend named J who has both male and female’s sexual organs. She gets deeply involved in J’s life and conflicts break out. The film starts off as Hyun Jung’s raw curiosity about androgyny, but it leads to a subtle psychological drama. This film offers a chance to consider relationships between a person who lives in normal life and who wants to live a normal life.

The small ethnic group of the Wana Wewaju live in Indonesia in the eastern part of Sulawesi (Celebes Island) among the dense equatorial rain forest of the Tokkala Mountains. The film documents the traditional healing practices of the Wana shamans. This film is the result of fifteen years of research and constitution of ethnocinématographic archives about the shamanism of Wana People from Sulawesi (Indonesia).

Among the Senufo people of northern Côte d'Ivoire, the balafon (xylophone with calabash resonators) is an emblematic musical instrument. The music of the balafon is a source of joy while the young men are doing collective work in the fields, at age-group ceremonies, for the poro initiatory society, for the catholic mass and during young people's dance evenings. Musicians and non-musicians, young and old, talk about the different occasions for which this instrument is an indispensable presence marking the rhythms of life for this agricultural people. Traditional balafon music is far from dying out, and its extraordinary vitality and importance are evident in the activities of the younger generations.

The film is about the encounter between tradition and modernity. In a small village of Papua New Guinea three exceptional men rival with each other in the field of rituals and artistic creation in order to win over their neighbours. They send a last letter to their dead who have abandoned them and who may have emigrated to a rich country from which the film-makers come.

Early 20th century romance in Périgueux. A woman separates from her young lover.

In the film by Sergei Miroshnichenko, the classic of Russian and world literature Alexander Solzhenitsyn reflects on his human and writer's fate: "... well, a lot has already been done in life. Maybe I'm on the last stretch, and the river doesn't promise me any elbow ahead yet… But the heart does not submit to the last mold." The writer appears before the audience as a husband and father - the head of a large and friendly family.

To understand Detroit's passion for the game of hockey one needs look no further than the ice at Joe Louis Arena. There inscribed in bold letters is one word, "Hockeytown".

Three male native speakers endlessly correct a woman's foreign pronunciations of English, French and Polish. It seems that the absolute pronunciation of the national texts is represented at its best in the cacophony of three languages overlapping female and male recitations of the anthems. These nonsensical exercises of the mouths problematize the meaning of certain politically charged words.

During the 10:00 minutes of this silent video there is a close up image of the eye that most of the time looks straight into the camera lens. The eye occasionally blinks, looks down and is covered with an eyelid for a few seconds. It is a paradoxically peaceful video. There is a certain promise and visual tension that something is about to happen, but nothing ever happens. The image of the eye fades out to black after ten minutes. The question remains: is this videotaped omnipresent eye providential or ominous?

A solitary fisherman carves and sketches to pass the time. But this day his drawings seem to have a life of their own. Fish fly off the pages and leap into the sea. An island appears on the watery expanse, and the poles around his boat begin to move ominously. His own creation seems to give rise to a strange, surreal and ultimately fragile two-dimensional world, guarded by a tribe of stiltwalkers.

Unwound had their last show and broke up on April Fools' Day in 2002. Live in Thekla, Olympia, Washington.

The filmmaker observes large piles on the streets of her city during bulky refuse collection day, while passersby inquire as to what she's doing.

Key West is located near the southern tip of Florida, not far from Key Largo. In contrast to Key Largo (John Huston, USA 1948), Key West has no need of gangsters to reveal this paradise on earth to be an illusion. Looking back from a distance of nearly 50 years, it is sufficient to reconnect those images which – each in itself – represented a longing view of this paradise: images of boat-like cars sailing down the highway, of bikini-clad girls on the beach, of surfers riding the waves. A moral lesson? Possibly.

"Varela’s use of the diptych form suggests many things: a Warholian endorsement of dispersed attention, a citation to image-in-image news media, an act of forced similitude. Unlike Warhol’s treatment of the diptych, Varela is not ambivalent to these images, which shift between personal observation, archival materials, commercial and news images, all cited to state an unambiguous outrage[...] the whole of it is weighted with heavy omens, that this age of cruelty and menace is still only in its infancy." -Stephen Broomer

Faces of Death inspired "Voodoo" mondo

"In my impression, the sea is the most mysterious one. It is also the one that brings the greatest bondage to mankind. Hence the theme of my second film, people living on islands. We chose Penglai, Shandong, chartered a boat, spent about a month running around the Changshan Islands, and finally chose the farthest island from the mainland. The population of the island is about 1,000, and there are many more Work from abroad. I have always believed that the most important part of a film should be people's lives, not the plot. The plot that is divorced from life is unbearable, and the reason why I like documentaries is precisely because of this preference. Human behavior dictates everything, and if you look carefully, you will discover the many details of life that make up our complex lives and hint at everything that has happened and will happen." --Douban