Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • Fresh Blood: A Consideration of Belonging

    “Fresh Blood” is a hybrid documentary blending personal narrative and a video-essay style. The piece engages issues of Jewish racialized identity, Arab/Jewish dichotomies and the ways these come together in Iraqi Jewish culture, and the personal implications of the politics of Palestine and of the Jewish holocaust. The artist returns to a land of remembering and forgetting. With her first language lost it is difficult to communicate with her grandmother, and yet there is humour and poignancy in their resulting exchanges. In seeking out her biological father, Yael questions the significance of blood relations. She revisits and revises family memory…

  • What’s Ours and What We Are

    In “What’s Ours and What We Are,” images, motifs and words that originally served a particular political agenda are playfully manipulated to distort and re-contextualize their original status, satirically articulating the purpose of propaganda which is to ‘speak to’ and ultimately to persuade a spectator.

  • The Shouting Flower

    A work about collaboration and process, “The Shouting Flower” approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions–plant, child, filmmaker–in an attempt to model what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “work across difference.” Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child’s toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts, “No!”

  • A Letter from Huami

    In 2069, a few rolls of films were found in a regeneration center occasionally. Then scientists extracted the genes from the hair which were left on the films to give a cat -Huami a new life. With human’s consciousness and the memories which belongs to the past time, Huami wrote a letter to her owner in 2019…

  • Xam

    Xam is a sci-fi exploration on the future of surveillance and body hacking. While in the London subway, an unsuspecting man opens a strange text, rendering him unconscious and dragging him through a wormhole. He awakes, lost, on the train tracks in Kiev, Ukraine, unable to communicate with friends or family. With the help of the hacker community in Kiev, and then Paris, the man harnesses alternative virtual transmissions in an attempt to find his way home. Xam is told through an intimate, first-person frame and video collage to emphasize the increasing integration of human and technology. The story is…

  • Ofenheizung: Portrait of a Stove

    In Berlin in the year 2020, there are still homes that rely on coal stoves for heating, despite their ban in 2015 by the Federal Emission Control Ordinance. This short film is a portrait of one of those stoves, the maintenance it requires of the inhabitant of the home it’s in, and what it means for its Kiez, Kreuzberg.

  • Which Way Is East

    “A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot.” When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt. “Which Way Is East” starts as a road trip and flowers into a political…

  • Investigation of a Flame

    On May 17, 1968 nine Vietnam War protesters, including a nurse, an artist and three priests, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm. “Investigation of a Flame” is an intimate, experimental documentary portrait of the Catonsville Nine, this disparate band of resisters who chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience. A series of informal, yet charged conversations with members of the group encourages viewers to ask their own questions about the relevance of such events today. How did the photos, trial…

  • The Small Ones

    During WWII, the US Army Graves Registration Service hired the filmmaker’s Hungarian cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers. This elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of excerpts of Sandor’s letters to Sachs’ family, highly abstracted war imagery and home movies of children at a birthday party. “Profound. The soundtrack is amazing. The image at the end of the girl with the avocado seed so hopeful. Good work.”— Barbara Hammer, filmmaker Screenings: TriBeca Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Black Maria Film Fest (Award), Dallas Video…

  • States of UnBelonging

    The core of this haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank. Director Lynne Sachs creates a film on the violence of the Middle East by exchanging letters with an Israeli friend. Together, they reveal Revital’s story through her films, news reports, and interviews, culminating in heartbreaking footage of children discussing the violence they’ve witnessed. Without taking sides or casting blame, the film becomes a cine-essay on fear and filmmaking, tragedy and transformation, violence and the land of Israel/Palestine. RECENT NEWS! Oxford University…