Singin

Margaret Kilgallen: Heroines

★ 9

"I especially hope to inspire young women, because I often feel like so much emphasis is put on how beautiful you are, and how thin you are, and not a lot of emphasis is put on what you can do and how smart you are. I'd like to change the emphasis of what's important when looking at a woman." Filmed in San Francisco in 2000, Margaret Kilgallen (1967-2001) discusses the female figures she incorporated into many of her paintings and graffiti tags. Loosely based on women she discovered while listening to folk records, watching buck dance videos, or reading about the history of swimming, Kilgallen painted her heroines to inspire others and to change how society looks at women. Three of Kilgallen's heroines—Matokie Slaughter, Algia Mae Hinton, and Fanny Durack—are shown and heard through archival recordings. Kilgallen is shown tagging train cars with her husband, artist Barry McGee, in a Bay Area rail yard and painting in her studio at UC Berkeley (source: Art21).

Tribal Strands

Tribal Strands is about two self-made Brooklyn hair artists, who create authentic hairstyles, leading the anti-hair discrimination movement. In addition, they inspire Black people to embrace their natural hair worldwide while exploring the intersections between modern and ancient African indigenous hairstyles.

Basquiat, Une Vie

2010 · ★ 8

From Brooklyn to the Bronx, Soho to Greenwich, Union Square to Wall Street... Join us and the friends, collaborators and gallery owners who supported Jean-Michel Basquiat throughout his life. The first ever recognized graffiti artist, who saw international success as a neo-expressionist painter in the 80s, Basquiat is a true contemporary hero who died at the peak of his career.

A Test of Violence

1969 · ★ 6.6

Stuart Cooper's short about the work of Spanish artist Juan Genovés is an inspired introduction to the works of this extraordinary artist, exploring its minimalist aesthetic and storytelling qualities through a variety of cinematic techniques, including rostrum, animation, news footage and live action recreations.

Anthropo-Cynical Farce

1970 · ★ 6.7

Dog racing is used as a metaphor for the futility of human existence.

Why Try to Escape from That Which You Know You Can't Escape From? Because You Are a Coward

1970 · ★ 5.1

A man is being haunted by a masked stranger. The only language used in the movie comes from three (inter) title cards and a few sentences of sermon-like talk in Danish. Some of the talk is modified citations from the bible and similar sources.

A Flower

1971 · ★ 4.7

A boy grows a seed into a flower while the world around him marches on.

Avant-garde

2021

1984, Franco-German border. A Berlin gallery owner transports the flagship sculpture from his collection for a major exhibition. Faced with the object, the French customs officer hesitates: is it really a work of art?

Brutal

1980

The concrete costs for culture and creativity is here illustrated in punchy images.

Metastasis

1971 · ★ 5.6

Writes Matsumoto, "I used the Erekutoro Karapurosesu (Electro Color Processor), which is mainly used in the field of medicine and engineering, to create moving image textures Metastasis, I was interested in layering images of a simple object and its electronically processed abstraction. The electronic abstract image is manipulated in a certain rhythm, depicting an organic process."

MD+IA=?

2023

Co-directed by Max Devereaux and Igor Amokian, MD+IA=? is a sonic and visual collage that fuses circuit-bent electronics, broken tape loops, glitching drum machines, and free-improvised guitar. Amokian’s footage of modified CRT televisions generating unruly abstractions is layered with Devereaux’s processed iPhone videos, altered through datamoshing and glitch-editing apps. The result is a vivid collision of sound and image—a colorful flux of patterns and distortions where technology’s failures become raw material for improvisation.

Moving Together

2023

Moving Together is a celebratory love letter to music and dance that brims with kinetic life and energy. This documentary explores the intricate collaboration between dancers and musicians, moving seamlessly between Flamenco, Modern, and New Orleans Second Line.