Life in Loops (A Megacities RMX)

Timo Novotny labels his new project an experimental music documentary film, in a remix of the celebrated film Megacities (1997), a visually refined essay on the hidden faces of several world "megacities" by leading Austrian documentarist Michael Glawogger. Novotny complements 30 % of material taken straight from the film (and re-edited) with 70 % as yet unseen footage in which he blends original shots unused by Glawogger with his own sequences (shot by Megacities cameraman Wolfgang Thaler) from Tokyo. Alongside the Japanese metropolis, Life in Loops takes us right into the atmosphere of Mexico City, New York, Moscow and Bombay. This electrifying combination of fascinating film images and an equally compelling soundtrack from Sofa Surfers sets us off on a stunning audiovisual adventure across the continents. The film also makes an original contribution to the discussion on new trends in documentary filmmaking. Written by KARLOVY VARY IFF 2006

Ținând-o sus cu Sztroe

In this episode of HIUWTS, Hana’s birthday goes wrong! Mom throws the perfect party, but Dad spoils all the fun… Watch as the TV crew invades the family’s home and the show distorts their reality!

Animal Charm: Golden Digest

Animal Charm makes videos from other people's videos. By compositing TV and reducing it to a kind of tic-ridden babble, they force television to not make sense. While this disruption is playful, it also reveals an overall 'essence' of mass culture that would not be apprehended otherwise. Videos such as Stuffing, Ashley, and Lightfoot Fever upset the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing, revealing how advertising creates anxiety, how culture constructs "nature" and how conventional morality is dictated through seemingly neutral images. By forcing television to convulse like a raving lunatic, we might finally hear what it is actually saying.

Negativland: No Other Possibility

In an effort to cure her smoking habit a middle-aged woman discovers that she can communicate with her long lost son while watching a Halloween safety program on TV. After suffering a nervous breakdown, her husband, a used car salesman, is revitalized when he travels back in time to drive the first car he ever sold. Seventeen years later a powerful canned food manufacturer crashes the same car into a toaster truck while endorsing a brand of yams on live TV. At the funeral his clergyman experiences a crisis of faith when he and a lifelike Mexican continue their search for a married couple who have befriended an insect who enjoys drinking lime soda. They later meet a young man whose bizarre murder scheme involves four innocent members of an experimental rock band who have all given up smoking.

Between Science and Garbage

A whirlwind of improvisation combines the images of animator Pierre Hébert with the avant-garde sound of techno whiz Bob Ostertag in this singular multimedia experience, a hybrid of live animation and performance art.

The Tape-Beatles: The Grand Delusion

Produced in 1993, The Grand Delusion is one of our most completely realized works. In addition to taking the usual form of a Tape-beatles release (a CD), The Grand Delusion was also delivered in the form of an ‘expanded cinema’ presentation involving three-screen motion picture projections and sound. The screen space for this production is intended to be three times the width of the normal 3 to 4 "Edison" aspect ratio of 16mm. The presentation only uses the full width intermittently, so transitions from one form to the next has been translated here by means of a video effect. As a live performance presentation, The Grand Delusion has been screened in dozens of venues across North America and Europe.

King of the Jews

King of the Jews is a film about anti-Semitism and transcendence. Utilizing Hollywood movies, 1950's educational films, personal home movies and religious films, the filmmaker depicts his childhood fear of Jesus Christ. These childhood recollections are a point of departure for larger issues such as the roots of Christian anti-Semitism.

Short of Breath

A woman is reduced to tears. She bends over backwards trying to be a good wife and mother. Her head is cut off from her heart. A doctor picks her brain. A boy inherits his mother's depression. Short of Breath is a haunting, emotional collage about birth, death, sex and suicide. It's like a punch in the stomach.

The Smell of Burning Ants

A haunting documentary on the pains of growing up male. It explores the inner and outer cruelties that boys perpetrate and endure. The film provokes the viewer to reflect on how our society can deprive boys of wholeness.

Selbstportrait 1

Negativland: Our Favorite Things

Our Favorite Things is a new DVD/CD release from reigning Kulture Kut-up Kings Negativland. Twenty-seven years of the group's "greatest hits" have become all-new moving pictures in this amazing, years-in-the-making package. Created with 18 other filmmakers from all over the USA (and one a capella group from Detroit), Our Favorite Things is a collaborative project that takes Negativland's sound explorations into the world of film and video. What emerges is a darkly cracked look at 21st century America, juxtaposing paranoia, torture, control, power, weapons, fear, suicide, cola wars, mental illness, and intellectual property issues with the lighter side of dopey advertising, cartoon characters, cleaning products and Jesus.

Não vejo pássaros quando olho para o céu

A city is made of people. Here, the figure of the gaze establishes a central role in the relationship with the urban environment, perceiving the interferences and constant verticalization of the contemporary world. How much, in the end, is human nature contracted by the city?

Masquerade

For the first time I am animating hand-painted engraved cut-outs on a full-color background. The film is mood-filled: A duel scene in a snowy forest, obviously the morning after a masquerade ball. Harlequin lies dying, while Red Indian walks away with the wings of victory. The woman between them appears, cat-masked. The mask dissolves away. Her spirit passes into the face of the sun upon the sun upon the sun flower. But Harlequin cannot escape death. The blue world engulfs him.

Finds of the Fortnight

Cut-out animation alternated with text collages.

जान तेरे नाम

Lovely Pinky Malhotra is a heart-breaker in the college where she studies, and has a number of young men who would lay down their lives for her. Amongst them are Sunil and Vicky. She is attracted to Sunil, and both carry on a romantic relationship, hoping to get married after finishing college. Before that could happen, Pinky finds out that Sunil has been two-timing her as he is already dating another young collegian. Angered and hurt at this, she decides she will have nothing to do with him, and starts her romance with Vicky. Sunil, who does not know what has transpired, wants to talk to Pinky with a view of rekindling their romance, but Pinky refuses to speak with him. The question remains is Sunil really in love with another girl, and if so, why did he take the trouble to woo Pinky?

Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America

Baldwin’s “pseudo-pseudo-documentary” presents a factual chronicle of US intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate conspiracy theory, combining covert action, environmental catastrophe, space aliens, cattle mutilations, killer bees, religious prophecy, doomsday diatribes, and just about every other crackpot theory broadcast through the dentures of the modern paranoiac.

أنا لا أكذب ولكني أتجمل

Ibraham the industrious student fall in love with his colleague Khayriyah and she also fall in love with him, but the rich student Hani admire her. Ibrahim is trying to hide his social level because he is afraid to lose Khayriyah, and telling everybody that he is from a wealthy family, will Khayriyah find the truth someday ?.

RiP!: A Remix Manifesto

RiP!: A Remix Manifesto is a 2008 open source documentary film about the "the changing concept of copyright" directed by Brett Gaylor.

Freshman Psych

A sociopath gathers and drugs groups of college students to bring out their existing suicidal tendencies to the surface then walks among them to enjoy and record their deaths.

Blue Peanuts

A pre-internet mash-up that mixes “Peanuts” and David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.”