Filmfarsi

A playful and poetic film essay journey that revives Peter Altenberg, the eccentric Viennese modernist who turned café life into an art form.

"A l likeness is a gift... it avoids... or confuses time if your prefer." said John Berger. Following this premise, 81.92 is a structuralist inquiry into the notion of presence and absence as it reveals archival radio broadcasts from former Montreal radio host Mike Wolkow. The former (the audible) is left invisible while the later (the visible) seeks to find the missing elements that trace the passage of this vocal presence. Past and present interplay in this piece that shifts between epochs, thus mimicking a radio signal that is being tuned in.

In the dressing room of the French cinema, minutes before attending a lecture, François Truffaut recalls his trajectory

The 1992 suicide of a young Iranian refugee in a small Canadian town prompted filmmaker Masoud Raouf to examine his own past as a political prisoner in Iran who helped fight for democracy, only to be persecuted by the ayatollah's regime. Raouf's documentary features historical footage and interviews with veterans of the 1979 revolution, who watched with dismay as their homeland traded a despot for a religious dictatorship.

Florent Tillon takes an anthropological lens to Las Vegas, Nevada. What he finds is some curious new species of Americana. (Dorothy Woodend, DOXA Documentary Film Festival)

Every image in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography comes from gay erotic videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism. The video provides a glimpse of young men responding to the pressures of an unfamiliar world, one in which money, power and sex are now connected.

This experimental Western horror film set in the Moravian region of Slovácko offers a new take on the legend of Saint Wenceslas. Against the backdrop of a shabby folk festival, the mythical prince Boleslav, a zombie from a wine cellar, battles his brother Wenceslas over the nature of Czech statehood and a plate of tomato soup.

The second part of the endless series about Moravia offers an even darker descent into the soul of Moravia, which is, however, intoxicating like a slightly delirious state after a sip of wine and chewing on a clod of mother earth. A visually distracting journey focused on the undercurrents of Moravian identity, whose echoes even Friedrich Nietzsche would not want to hear...

Everyday Maneuver is a video that presents the viewer with an unrealistic scenery. Shot from a drone, it shows a city at daytime, but there isn't a single human being in it. What seems disconnected from everyday life, and as artificial as a landscape created with computer graphics, is in fact a recording that was made during one of the annual "Wanan Air Raid Drills" that have been implemented in Taiwan since 1978.

A tribute to a fascinating film shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, and to the city of San Francisco, California, where the magic was created; but also a challenge: how to pay homage to a masterpiece without using its footage; how to do it simply by gathering images from various sources, all of them haunted by the curse of a mysterious green fog that seems to cause irrepressible vertigo…