Koho – Utopia Forssasta

A documentary about Kari Aro, the distinctive manager of Koho -hockey-stick factory, whose visions were to change the world. Story about the fairy-tale -like success, the destructive power of money and Aro's faith in goodness of people.

Spokespeople

For Los Angeles natives living in the early 1900s, bicycles and streetcars shared the road as our primary modes of transportation. But the arrival of the freeway effectively wiped them out. Today, a collective of cycling communities fight for protected bike lanes and road safety, determined to bring a new era of mobility justice to the city.

1974, l'alternance Giscard

In May 1974, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing became the third President of the Fifth Republic. An alternation of power that did not speak its name opened the doors of power to a reforming president. Abortion, divorce by mutual consent, lowering the age of majority to 18 - in less than two years, the youngest President of the Republic - at the time - carried out reforms with a vengeance, without a united majority in Parliament, before failing in the economic sphere and losing the battle against unemployment. At the age of 90, the former President of the Republic has agreed to look back on these years and gives us a valuable account of his time in power.

Das Netz

Explores the incredibly complex backstory of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. This exquisitely crafted inquiry into the rationale of this mythic figure situates him within a late 20th century web of technology—a system that he grew to oppose. A marvelously subversive approach to the history of the Internet, this insightful documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting countercultural responses to the cybernetic revolution.

Desert Utopia: Mid-Century Architecture in Palm Springs

Southern California’s Coachella Valley, including the communities of Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Desert Hot Springs, boasts hundreds of extraordinary midcentury modern homes, public buildings and commercial structures. Modern designers such as William F. Cody, Albert Frey, William Krisel, John Lautner, Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler, Donald Wexler, E. Stewart Williams left their collective mark on this desert paradise. Desert Utopia: Mid-Century Architecture in Palm Springs traces the history of modern architecture in Palm Springs from the first bold forays into modernist design to the preservation challenges facing the region today. Director Jake Gorst’s film features rare archival images and footage as well as interviews with historians, homeowners and the architects who helped create this mecca of modernism.

All Creatures Welcome

All Creatures Welcome explores the world of hackers and nerds at the events of the Chaos Computer Club, Europe's largest hacker association. The film dispels common clichés and draws a utopian picture of a possible society in the digital age.

Sanctuary

Sanctuary explores queer spirituality and utopian sexualities through the figure of Purusha Androgyne Larkin (1934–1988), a monk, pioneering gay filmmaker, and self-proclaimed cosmic-erotic mystic. Larkin’s 1981 book, 'The Divine Androgyne According to Purusha', challenged repression with a spiritual vision rooted in eroticism and presented a radical path to cosmic-erotic consciousness through ‘extreme’ forms of sexual pleasure. Sanctuary explores Larkin's attempt to form a utopian, pleasure-based spiritual community, and considers the complex legacies of his ideas in queer culture. Shot on 16mm, the film weaves together the voices of Larkin’s friends and followers, creating a portrait in absentia of a figure ahead of his time.

Orbainak

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

Bambi

Bambi was born Jean-Pierre Pruvot in a tiny Algerian village in 1935. Even as a child, she refused to meet the expectations of her extended family, choosing instead to find a way to become the woman she always knew herself to be. A Cabaret Carrousel de Paris performance in Algiers in the 1950s proved to be all the encouragement she needed to emigrate to the French capital, assume the stage name of ‘Bambi’ and lead the life she longed for on the music-hall stages.

Orange Sunshine

The never-before-told story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love – a spiritual group of surfers and hippies in Southern California that became the largest suppliers of psychedelic drugs in the world during the 1960s and early 1970s. Bonded by their dreams to fight social injustice and spread peace, this unlikely band of free-spirited idealists quickly transformed into a drug-smuggling empire and at the same time inadvertently invented the modern illegal drug trade. At the head of the Brotherhood, and the heart of this story, is the anti-capitalistic husband and wife team, who made it their mission to change the world through LSD.

Qu'est-ce qu'on attend ?

The new documentary from director Marie-Monique Robin about the French village Ungersheim.

I'll See You Again

A group of artists settle in a swamp on the banks of the Indre River. Meanwhile, a voice describes a utopian world.

Felicidad

Fliegen und Engel

Ilya Kabakov is considered one of the most important contemporary artists worldwide. Born and raised in the Ukraine in the period between Stalin and Gorbatschow he left the country in the 80s. In his Installations and his numerous paintings Kabakov creates a world of its own, which leaves the heaviness of socialist and post-socialist life far behind. The film links Ilya Kabakovs artistic spaces with insights into Russian everyday life, which itself sometimes appears like an installation by the artist.

The Lack of It

How does mobility reflect social status and racism? A story of two African American women working to provide and improve mobility in their community, as they tell the history of the Safe Bus - formerly the biggest black-owned transportation system in the world.

The Liberal War

The Vietnam War during the JFK years and beyond. Made in 1972 in the filmmaker's apartment, without documentary footage of the war, metaphors are created through the animation of images and objects, and through guerrilla skits. By rejecting the authority of traditional documentary footage, the anarchist spirit of individual responsibility is established. This is history from one person's point of view, rather than a definitive proclamation.

A Land Betrayed

Produced by Alfred Higgins Productions with assistance from the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Academic Support Center Film Library, Keep America Beautiful, Inc., and Keep Los Angeles Beautiful, Inc., the 1963 short film A Land Betrayed examines the various ways people have spread the “cancer of ugliness” across America and offers call-to-action solutions to combat the nation-wide problem.

Double Around the Interlude

A flock of memories activated by various musical exercises, to strike the past to the heart, to build something utopian: the future, a sonic architecture. Music as a tool, transcriptions of YouTube tutorials as poetry, percussion exercises as descriptions of reality.

Druid Heights

Druid Heights is a short documentary film by Marcy Mendelson about a wild & wooly place. California’s hidden bohemia. Where sex, drugs and philosophy thrived among the eucalyptus just a few miles north of the Golden Gate.

Supersurface: An Alternative Model for Life on Earth

Produced for the 1972 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Lanscape, Supersurface was the first of five films planned by Superstudio as a "critical reappraisal of the possibility of life without objects." Superstudio envisioned a "network of energy and information extending to every properly inhabitable area". According to the artists, this network would bring about the destruction of objects as status symbols, the elimination of the city as an accumulation of formal structures of power, and the end of specialized and repetitive work as an alienating activity. "The logical consequence," they write, "will be a new, revolutionary society in which everyone should find the full development of his possibilities".