Film Categories: Portraits

  • Vision from the Edge: Breyten Breytenbach Painting the Lines

    “Listen: this is the sum of my life: I travelled all the regions where peaks are looking glasses for the absent face of God and shadows are unknown there except when whispering under the sods.” Quite the contrary of a “social documentary,” this film offers glimpses of a man who has spent his life away from the “mainstream,” with his specific, his very own Vision from the Edge. September, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands: Breyten Breytebach, poet, painter and anti-Apartheid activist, creates six panels/scrolls which will hang from the ceiling of the exhibition. These are part of…

  • Walnut Tree, The

    As a follow-up to the award-winning “Zyklon Portrait,” “The Walnut Tree” offers a striking combination of documentary and experimental approaches to examine Holocaust memory, the family, and the role of photography in history. Three girls in Dutch costumes stand posing for their father. This fleeting moment, made static in a photograph, is contrasted with the moving imagery of railway tracks – tracks that carried the death transports – now blurred with memory and time. In a matter-of-fact tone, Schogt’s mother describes how her parents tore several pictures out of the family albums when they fled the Nazis in 1943. The…

  • You Are Watching: A Film on Brecht

    “You Are Watching: A Film on Brecht” is an experimental, documentary-style animation that explores the life and ideas of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht in both a historical and contemporary context. This film/video was shot on Super 8mm film and finished on video.

  • My Life in Dance

    A romp across the filmmaker’s dance floor of life. A personal reflection on film, dance and living queer.

  • Mothercraft

    In part, a thank you to his mother, and in part a musing over how he became so “arty.” Filmmaker Roy Mitchell looks at his mother, her life, and the inspiration she gave him.

  • What These Ashes Wanted

    “What These Ashes Wanted” is one of those films that forces you to rethink the medium. There are pictures, yes, and movement, light and sound. There is however, no narrative, and yet there is emotion. “What These Ashes Wanted” is the result of several years of hard work coming to terms with the traces and fragments of a life that has ended but whose presence persists. The film draws on images and sounds gathered over the course of Hoffman’s relationship with Marian McMahon, from their early meetings in the mid-eighties to her unexpected death from cancer and beyond. The three…

  • Traces

    Stunning hand-tinted imagery intermingles with a love letter to the artist’s departed dog Mica. Bittersweet as any country song, so familiar you swear you’ve heard it before – but it’s just your heart breaking, worn and sure.

  • Songs of Youth

    A photograph from the past triggers filmmaker Konstatnin Selezen’s journey into the maze of half-forgotten memories, and prompts him to leave for his ex-homeland in search of things past. The voyage takes an unexpected turn when he accidentally meets Kostia, a victim of the post-perestroika chaos in the present-day Ukraine, who supports his blind wife and two children ( who he hopes will become famous movie stars) on small change that he earns by playing on city squares. “Songs of Youth” takes us onto Kostia’s routes to earning his daily bread, from his humble home in the village somewhat ironically…

  • Since Then

    After the love has gone, the mundane routines of everyday become the hope for a brighter tomorrow.

  • Still Here

    Made for the filmmaker’s uncle, a painter and a gay man who died violently in 2001, this silent, hand-processed film marks an enduring presence with bold brush strokes. When the body is absent the shadows remain. “Still Here” consists of a series of spontaneous, single-take performances that have been edited in-camera. It is at once a eulogy and an act of defiance against the crime that ended Davis Buller’s life.