Genres: experimental

  • our voices in reverse (portrait of mama)

    My first analog film, filmed from the roof of my mother’s home in west Texas in summer 2013. An experiment in reversing roles, and the precursor to a feature film that came several years later. Edited in camera on Super 8 black and white reversal film.

  • Sister Mother Lover Child

    A house of women adjusts to life in the aftermath of an event unnamed.

  • Echolocation

    The rain in Oakland, my grandmother’s home in Baghdad, my aunts’ voices in What’s App, my daughter learning to count to 10, my brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas, the walls of my studio, the search for new forms.

  • Dark Star Entropy

    A black hole, first thought to be “dark stars” that we couldn’t see, are the most powerful objects in existence which bends light, time and reality to its will. Dark Star Entropy is a handcrafted on 35mm film made to be a short meditation on the impossibility of truly being able to comprehend on an intuitive level these galactic behemoths.

  • Herzsofort.Setzung II

    “Michael Brynntrup’s series of 56 media generations is no return to nostalgic idealized natural state or a search for transcendental inwardness. By playing with momentum within the aesthetic possibilities, Brynntrup researches into a spiritualism inherent in the media. It’s however less the emanation of technological media when regarding calculability and precision, but more the potential of coincidence and the chaotic character that connect themselves in the series of pictures with Brynntrup as a person. In a manner seeming to be naive, Brynntrup asks the question on authorship within reproducible and digital technologies.” – Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart program notes

  • Babash

    “Babash” is a parrot who speaks mostly Farsi but ­sometimes mixes English and Azeri into his ­conversations. A singular language resulting from the place where he lives: a house in Los Angeles shared with an Iranian family. The same place where Behrouz Rae developed a friendship with Babash over the years. This short film is an associative portrait about a special relationship and the ­domestic surroundings in which it grew. An ­assemblage where household objects, daily movements and playful intimacies are mixed with a dauntless montage, precise sounds and a sensitive gaze. Observing this genuine cross-species friendship between Babash and…

  • Water Fields

    Water Fields is a rhythmic audiovisual composition, taking place in California’s dry landscape.

  • ELEMENTAL VISION or a film for the rest of my life

    “Elemental Vision or a film for the rest of my life” is ‘about’ light and time – moments captured in their passing, light events shot in various rhythmic patterns. It is about light and not particularly about the objects lit. The congruence of film’s basic properties with how we experience reality (in time/motion, through light) has been a guiding factor in my approach to filmmaking. Of course, there are people and other natural subjects filmed – incorporated -coming into view – a surprise. Intertitles mark sections, create pauses and breaks. They come from various sources suggestive of film terminology and…

  • Tracks I-III

    Inspired by phantom rides—films from the late 19th century shot from the front of moving trains—“Tracks I-III” follows old and new technological traces that have shaped movement and representation. Historical landscapes once captured along railway lines are now reimagined through a carefully fragmented scenery, where motion splits, diverges, and advances in all possible directions. Truttmann’s playful exploration of spatial and temporal dislocations is grounded in a specific location and its history: a section of the “Ischlerbahn,” one of Austria’s first major long-distance rail lines, which was closed in 1957 despite strong protests from all segments of the population. Originally a…

  • The Courser

    We see white stone structures and hear the sound of horses at full gallop, snickering from afar. The sound volume increases rapidly and sets the large group of lithic sculptures in motion. Heavy traffic noises eventually mix with the animal sounds and just when they are about to take over the soundscape entirely, images and sounds introduce the actual location: Shanghai, at the intersection of Yan’an Elevated Road and Inner Ring Elevated Road, two major, multi-leveled, urban freeways. Amidst the massive architectural structures and immobile horses underneath it, we may remember Eadweard Muybridge and his early moving image studies.