Up-and-coming French actress-filmmaker Mati Diop's Tiger-award winning film is a strange and sensual short about a fraught adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses, where disappearances yield new beginnings.
Gabriel Abrantes transposes Aristophanes' The Birds from 414 B.C. to a mournful, present-day Haiti shot in luminous 16mm.
A gorgeous, black-and-white homage to the Golden Age of Europe's silent cinema, the intoxicating Blancanieves relocates the tale of Snow White to a sweepingly romantic vision of 1920s Spain, where a young girl escapes from her wicked stepmother to find fame as a matador.
autrement, la Molussie is an award-winning philosophical fable that draws on Günthers Anders' amazingly prescient anti-fascist novel The Molussian Catacomb and is presented on nine reels of dreamy 16mm film shown in random order.
Taking inspiration from the collaborative 1967 militant anthology film Far from Vietnam, five of the boldest and most prominent American militant filmmakers unite to create this searing (and seething) omnibus work, employing a variety of approaches to reveal the hidden costs of the United States' (and Canada's) most expensive and longest-running war.
In their follow-up to the remarkable Altiplano, co-directors Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth create a mystifying, surrealistic tale of a mountain village where spring refuses to come, inspiring the villagers to ever more desperate and bizarre measures to save their land and their lives.
Jean Benoît, the last official member of the French Surrealist group, receives Deco Dawson's signature visual treatment in this biographical documentary that fantastically illustrates the artist's formative (and highly sexual) childhood memories.
A Bosnian immigrant who fled to Toronto after the civil war returns to his homeland in search of a missing friend who has been implicated in war crimes, in this quietly chilling and finely surreal meditation on confronting traumas of the past.
Part memoir, part city symphony, part noir-ish B-movie adventure, the new feature from critically acclaimed filmmaking duo João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata (To Die Like a Man) is a sensual, shape-shifting ode to one of the world's most mythic, alluring and exoticized cities.
In the very waters where Melville's Pequod gave chase to Moby Dick, Leviathan captures the collaborative clash of man, nature, and machine. Shot on a dozen cameras — tossed and tethered, passed from fisherman to filmmaker — this is a cosmic portrait of commercial fishing as it's never been seen.
An ill young woman's surroundings become increasingly unstable as she sits at a quiet diner counter. The ensuing chaos, as her world literally turns upside-down, triggers an ominous sequence of events.
The new film from Thai master and Palme d'Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul is at once a soothing lullaby, a film à clef, fragments from an unrealized project, and a fascinating experiment in collaboration.
One of the world's most distinctive film voices, the late, inestimable Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz (Mysteries of Lisbon) casts a longing look back to his childhood memories — while anticipating his own imminent death — in this imaginative cinematic memoir.
In the frigid isolation of winter an elderly man braves the elements to hew his cord of wood with nothing but an axe and a wheelbarrow. What first appears as a landscape study soon becomes an elegy for nature's sacrifice to fuel man's existence, in this lyrical documentary.
The first feature film by notorious Canadian musician and performance artist Peaches is a wild transsexual rock opera, screening in conjunction with a new installation and a night of performances.
Lauded artist-filmmaker Heinz Emigholz (Schindler's Houses) offers an exquisite excursus on the work of pioneering French architect Auguste Perret, including privileged views of his innovative concrete structures in Algeria and such magnificent landmarks as Paris' Art Deco Théâtre des Champs Elysées.
Maverick director Carlos Reygadas presents his most ambitious, personal and controversial work yet with this disorienting, kaleidoscopic vision of a family torn between tenderness and violence.
A biography of French surrealist Jean Benoît and an animated plea to free Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi anchor a profoundly cinematic programme of shorts-tied together with incredible art direction, masterful mise-en-scène and imaginative storytelling.
The perennial theme of family is spotlighted in this programme, linking stories of a father seeking to reconnect with his son through antiquated technology, a young Cree girl planning to be a mother, and a 3-D animated documentary about a woman's decision to give up her children.
In this poetic, richly allegorical debut by Colombian director William Vega, a teenage girl flees to a rundown inn after being driven from her home in the Andean highlands by civil war, as the violence engulfing the country creeps ever closer to her remote refuge.
The entrancing new film by Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes (Our Beloved Month of August) travels from a modern "Paradise Lost" to an exotic, magical "Paradise" as it intertwines a chronicle of illicit love with a sly overview of Portugal's colonial history.
A metaphor for mourning as much as it is a reminder to slow down, Tsai Ming-liang's stunningly beautiful Walker features his acteur fétiche Lee Kang-Sheng as a red-robed monk barely locomoting through the bustling streets of Hong Kong.
Bookended by Thomas Demand's astonishing 100-second animation Pacific Sun and legendary experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr's no-holds-barred trip into painterly abstraction Auto-Collider XV, this programme traverses fabricated worlds marked by shifting weather patterns, stylized mythic backdrops, paper folds and cross-cultural magic carpet rides.
Works by Luther Price, Ben Rivers, William E. Jones and others resuscitate materials and curios from archives both public and private, pointing up their forever changing context and attendant shifts in meaning.
Rendered in raw, intimiste strokes, these portrait films bask in the paradoxical experience of being an artist whose aspirations belong to this world, as much as beyond. Artists include: Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia, Tito & Tito, Francesca Woodman, Friedl vom Gröller, Vincent Grenier and Festival favourite Nathaniel Dorsky.
Recently restored prints of influential intermedia artist Aldo Tambellini's Black films set the tempo for a programme exploring contours through holes, legacies through sustained viewing and dynamic force-fields from the inside out. Artists include: Aldo Tambellini, Josh Solondz, Paolo Gioli, Christopher Becks and Peter Miller, Jim Jennings, Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan, Anna Marziano, and Johann Lurf.