An experimental film about narrations of two journal photos from Iran's revolution 1979. University of Tehran 1981. Two years after the Iranian Revolution. Following Ayatollah Khomeini’s order, universities were shut down. A mass purge took place. ”Non-Islamic” students and lecturers were expelled. Hundreds of people were injured, killed, exiled. Since then, all universities in Iran have been strictly Islamic. The purge is called Iran’s ”cultural revolution”. This is a requiem for a revolution.… >>>
- Director: Sahand Sarhaddi
In 2015, hundreds of academics signed a petition to demand an end to state violence in the Kurdish region of Turkey. Academics for Peace have been criminalized and put on trial with the charge of terrorist propaganda. A Defense portrays one of the Academics for Peace while preparing for her upcoming appearance in court in 2019. A psychodrama is put on stage in a house, where the person is both the state, the judge, the academic, and the cook. It's a self-portrait on the violence and absurdity of the ways in which the state sneaks into the house of an academic, forcing her to adjust her words, body, and gestures.… >>>
UNDER THE SHADOW OF AZKORRI is a visual documentary essay that investigates the spaces of images starting with a photo taken on the beach of Azkorri, Basque Country. Preoccupied with the question how a change of perspective might alter the sensibility towards an image, the video evolves around the re-enactment of a gesture from Miklós Jancsó’s movie “Még kér a nép” (“Red Psalm”, 1972), which is encountered subsequently in a photo of Russian LGBTQ+ activist Yelena Grigoryeva. The director explores that particular sign complicating its eroticism of resistance and rewriting it by drawing lines to her own queer sexuality, to the aesthetic representation of communism as well as to questions of dispossession.… >>>
TRACING UTOPIA is an odyssey into the dreams of a group of queer teens in New York City as they envision a better world. Directed by Catarina de Sousa and Nick Tyson, this short documentary imagines a form of a queer community transcending time through glimpses of a utopia made manifest in the streets, in community spaces, and online. A collaborative manifesto weaves these pasts and futures together,calling for the change that queer youth strive for today: “As queer teens in Queens, we demand this in order to build a better world.”… >>>
