Film Categories: Religion

  • States of UnBelonging

    The core of this haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank. Director Lynne Sachs creates a film on the violence of the Middle East by exchanging letters with an Israeli friend. Together, they reveal Revital’s story through her films, news reports, and interviews, culminating in heartbreaking footage of children discussing the violence they’ve witnessed. Without taking sides or casting blame, the film becomes a cine-essay on fear and filmmaking, tragedy and transformation, violence and the land of Israel/Palestine. RECENT NEWS! Oxford University…

  • The Initiation Well

    The Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal is a huge estate that has two wells for performing initiation ceremonies built into the ground. This film takes us into one of them. Sound design by Samuel La France.

  • Even the Sun Practices Time

    A bedtime story for the chronically aging. — In “Even the Sun Practices Time” I am exploring the creative possibilities and limitations of misunderstanding, as well as ways of communicating with the empirically absent, divine or earthly. I bring together multiple found footage sources to listen across purposes, forming a kind of speculative listening. My hope is that the film becomes a kind of third space that allows me to access a place outside of forgiveness and condemnation. Found footage gives me a collaborator. I am working with this footage not to decontextualize it, or detourn it, but to have…

  • God Straightens Legs

    Filmmaker Joële Walinga documents a moment of faith and waiting in the life of her Christian mother, a French-Canadian living in the Bible Belt who has opted to forgo cancer treatment.

  • Matin Dans Une Foret de Pins (Morning in the Pine Forest)

    The lives of six young people unfold in a journey through different worlds revealed and interwoven, where the boundaries between documentary and fiction, reality and dream cease to exist. The volatile and seductive landscape of urban and rural Latvia was treated as a rich context for the complex relationships one has with the world – inviting the viewer to come upon the questions that bind us in our common need to understand our humanness. This film is based on the lives of HELENA, EVA, JANKA, GUNTIS, ANNA and GALC.

  • Gags N’ Gals: Male Order

    A short experimental film inspired by the paintings of biblical women from German Renaissance painter, Lucas Cranach. The film reimagines Cranach’s paintings through a modern, critical lens, exploring female sensuality and their ability to use it as their own personal weapons.

  • Hier und Dort

    Since I arrived here in Germany from Korea, I always find myself in the unlearning situation. While I encounter completely different cultures, languages, situations, I have had to throw away a lot of what I have already learned and at the same time take away a lot of what I need to learn anew. I am already a learned person, but at the same time an unlearned person here.

  • Toronto, Old and New

    Allegedly “bursting at the seams” for over a century now, Toronto is cacophonous, cosmopolitan, and often confusing. A landscape shaped by generations of dreams and desires, the metropolis bears the overlapping imprints of capitalism, colonialism, conflict, community and celebration. Juxtaposing found footage, paper ephemera, and newly shot 16mm material, “Toronto, Old and New” explores the relationship between past and present in Canada’s largest city.

  • Facing the Music

    FACING THE MUSIC:ABOUT A MAN WHO ESCAPED STALIN AND HITLER—AND PUTIN’S RESURRECTION OF BOTH STALIN AND HITLER IN UKRAINE. Wolodymyr joined the Ukrainian partisans in 1939. They were hiding cultural lead- ers who would otherwise be persecuted or murdered by Stalin. After Hitler invaded in 1941, Wolodymyr was abducted to Germany, surviving forced labour and incar- ceration in a concentration camp. Extrapolating from Wolodymyr’s story, the film shows how the atrocities he experi- enced via Stalin and Hitler have been the ‘blueprint’ for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s Wagner Group mercenaries were named after Hitler’s favourite composer: Richard Wagner. The…

  • The Wind Probably

    A human is observing the deserted streets of his hometown on the edge of the Apocalypse. The world is on the verge of being absorbed by the Black Hole. Familiar places in the ruins are difficult to recognize and it’s hard to find the clues to understand is it a reality or dream. The sensation of “not quite real” is the sensation experienced during a catastrophe. In a person’s attempts to orientate the disintegrating reality, the only one with whom he can discuss what is happening is artificial intelligence.