SECULAR | Aa'La'Ma'Ni

Thoughts, sometimes just numbers, reach us from offscreen almost like music, like a mantra or a prayer. What we see are circular fragments from familiar spaces: a mirror, a magnifying glass. A day like any other day: without medication, or perhaps better with? A film like the investigation of an uncertainty principle: do we really see better with a magnifying glass? A face scratched out of the family album: the gap is draped with flowers and cut-out pictures of clothes and finally filled again by a drawing.

This documentary is not a straightforward portrait of Armenian film director Sergei Paradjanov's life, but rather a fluid celebration of his talent and creativity. Focusing on the collages he produced during his years in prison, and featuring interviews with the director himself, Cazals' film demonstrates the scope of Paradjanov's artistic vision, lovingly commemorating this rebel of art cinema.

Canadian actor and filmmaker Connor Jessup (Closet Monster, Falling Skies) profiles Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a maverick of Thai cinema who explores the slippery nature of time and consciousness with a sublimely idiosyncratic, often surreal approach to film form.

Documentary on Christian Schocher, director of the legendary «Reisender Krieger» (1980).

On The Red Carpet presents an in-depth look at the making of The Banshees of Inisherin.

Negev Desert, Israel, 1987. Bashir Abu Rabi'a works as a pyrotechnics and special effects assistant on the film Rambo III, starring Sylvester Stallone, a shoot that will have far-reaching consequences for the local Bedouin population.

A dramatized retelling of Colin Clark's experience on the 1957 film The Prince and the Showgirl, based on the diary he kept throughout production as third assistant director.

The life of actor Jack Nance, whose rise to prominence after starring in David Lynch's 1977 cult classic Eraserhead led to involvement in various further projects with Lynch.

A Hazara film director follows a gravestone maker, a water girl and a man who buried his limb, as their daily lives unfold in a graveyard.

Academy Award-winning screenwriter Robert Riskin headed up a secret film unit that sought to redefine America in the eyes of the world during the darkest days of World War II. The filmmakers created powerful short documentaries that showed America's strength not through images of tanks, but in portraits of farmers, school children and window washers. The "Projections of America" films were brilliant, moving portraits of America that were unlike any films ever made before, but seventy years later they are forgotten, hidden away in government archives.

In the years before Ronald Reagan took office, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire circumstances that inspired artists like Jim Jarmusch, Lizzy Borden, and Amos Poe to produce some of their best works. Taking their cues from punk rock and new wave music, these young maverick filmmakers confronted viewers with a stark reality that stood in powerful contrast to the escapist product being churned out by Hollywood.