Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • Patriotism 2

    In a way a portrait of Dave Shackman with the American flag. The ending is a stop-motion animation of a set table with food moving and swirling and finally gathering together in a ball. Looking back at the film, the animation sequence seems to foreshadow Dave Shackman’s early death. He died shortly after the film was made.

  • Perestroyka

    Shot in the spring of 1992 in St. Petersberg and Moscow, “Perestroyka” is a collage of conversations with Russian people, mostly artists, about life in Russia and about their hopes and fears for the future of their country. The position of artists and filmmakers in contemporary Russian society, the position of women in the new Russia, problems of unemployment, the politics of sexuality, and the erosion of traditional values are debated and discussed. Appearing in the tape are (in order of appearance): Sergey Letou Jazz Band, Vladik Mamyshev Monroe (performance artist), Bella Matveeva (painter), Alexandr Sakurov (film director), Liubov Polga…

  • Pierre Vallières

    He delivered three essays, without stopping, except for reel change and camera breakdown: 1) Mont Laurier; 2) Quebec history and race; 3) women’s liberation. Everything which happened is recorded on film. It was a one-shot affair, I either got him on film or I missed. What we see on film is the mouth of a revolutionary, extremely close, his lips, his teeth, his spittle, his tongue which rolls so beautifully through his French, and finally the reflections in his teeth of the window behind me. (JW)

  • It’s Not Brakhage

    It’s Not Brakhage is a feature-length parafiction film, structured around an unnamed narrator’s investigation of a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Shrouded in speculation and actively contested, the film reel is believed to be the sole remaining artifact from a cancelled 1959 film festival, co-organized by Brakhage and military-industrial giant DuPont chemical. The story follows the narrator’s forensic deconstruction of the film reel’s history, sifting through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have arisen since its discovery, and connecting the artifact to DuPont’s wider networks of military-industrial research and artistic…

  • Salvage Archives

    Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems. Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste. As both narrators’ grandiose…

  • Two or Three Saprophytes

    Two or Three Saprophytes is a video essay that traces a speculative history of the industrial revolution, its ecological backdrop, and its intellectual legacy of growth-based thinking. Breaking from strictly didactic or documentary forms, the film defracts its historical research through a hallucinatory poetic lens, mixing critique and fantasy to frame the interconnected histories of mushrooms, trees, coal, chemicals, machines, and capitalists as a kind of ecological ghost story. Visual and textual motifs of circles, spirals, hexagons, and “revolutions” punctuate the film, sketching associations and contrasts between historical movements, economic patterns, rotational pistons, chemical diagrams, and ecological balance. Posing a…

  • Teta, Opi & Me

    Filmed entirely with an iPhone, Teta, Opi & Me is a tribute to conformity, tolerance and courage. It is a poetic, meditative, multilingual, and feeling-driven short film, documenting the intricacies of the artist’s playful process in capturing her grandparents’ enduring romance through social, political and racial adversity. He comes from Bethlehem, Palestine and she comes from Vienna, Austria. Incorporating poetic filmic scenarios, vérité scenes, interviews, and home movies, the work is an intergenerational dialogue that explores themes of family, love, and the intermingling of cultures.

  • Night and fog in Kurdistan

    Night and Fog in Kurdistan is a documentary by a Kurdish female filmmaker that follows seven Yazidi teenage girls who survived the 2014 ISIS genocide. The film traces their five-year journey from refugee camps in Turkey to resettlement in Europe, showing the effects of genocide, displacement, and the challenges of migration. Using illustration, self-storytelling, and first-person perspectives, the film lets the girls share their own experiences of survival and adaptation.

  • Dear Moritz

    A short film essay that invites you to observe and reflect along a chance encounter between an artist, police and two friends in public space. A spontaneous moment attached to a loaded location, reflecting upon power, privilege, colonial pasts and present realities.