Negotiating Amnesia

Negotiating Amnesia is an essay film based on research conducted at the Alinari Archive and the National Library in Florence. It focuses on the Ethiopian War of 1935-36 and the legacy of the fascist, imperial drive in Italy. Through interviews, archival images and the analysis of high-school textbooks employed in Italy since 1946, the film shifts through different historical and personal anecdotes, modes and technologies of representation.

Nighthouse

Shot in Havana and processed at Phil Hoffman's Film Farm, Marcel Beltrán Fernández's Casa de la noche explores those same histories from the point of view of an insider, as a lived experience that is evocatively mirrored through ripped and torn celluloid.

Journey to the West

In 2014, Tsai Ming-Liang was invited to make a film for the MarseilleFID, Marseille International Film Festival. Since he was not familiar with Marseille, he decided to make a film as tourist, capturing the beautiful Mediterranean sunshine in the late summer of that year. He also invited famous French actor, Denis Lavant, to appear alongside Lee Kang-Sheng playing Xuanzang. "Journey to the West" was invited to be the opening short film at the Berlin International Film Festival the same year.

Horizon: How Does Your Memory Work?

You might think that your memory is there to help you remember facts, such as birthdays or shopping lists. If so, you would be very wrong. The ability to travel back in time in your mind is, perhaps, your most remarkable ability, and develops over your lifespan. Horizon takes viewers on an extraordinary journey into the human memory. From the woman who is having her most traumatic memories wiped by a pill, to the man with no memory, this film reveals how these remarkable human stories are transforming our understanding of this unique human ability. The findings reveal the startling truth that everyone is little more than their own memory.

Fragments de route

How to Remember

The story of a young Kurdish man who tries to remember his past traumatic experiences. A young migrant struggles to remember the memories of post-2015 Turkey while faced with the commemoration practices of the Holocaust. The film takes place in present-day Krakow, Poland, particularly in the former Nazi concentration camp in Plaszow.

The Last Days

Five Jewish Hungarians, now US citizens, tell their stories: before March 1944, when Nazis began to exterminate Hungarian Jews, months in concentration camps, and visiting childhood homes more than 50 years later. An historian, a Sonderkommando, a doctor who experimented on Auschwitz prisoners, and US soldiers who were part of the liberation in April 1945.

Pythéas, l'astronome voyageur

Their Houses

Filmmaker Cam Archer examines and explores his ordinary, suburban neighborhood in search of hidden truths, new narratives and a better understanding of his fading, creative self. Combining heavily degraded video with personal photographs and real life neighbors, Archer re-imagines the concept of 'home video'. In an attempt to distance himself from his subjects, actress Jena Malone narrates the piece as Archer in the first person.

Les Trésors de Marcel Pagnol

The works of Marcel Pagnol are a veritable monument of French cultural heritage. Based on previously unseen archive material, film extracts, novels, plays, interviews and letters, the film pays tribute to the major author and popular filmmaker, who made his life a work and his work a life's project.

7 Vidas

A community of cats lives in the Soledade Cemetery Park in Belém. "7 Vidas" follows these animals through a fictional letter written by one of them to his former owner. With real images of the cats among graves and trees, the film builds a sensitive narrative about abandonment, freedom and memory, revealing the poetry hidden in the coexistence between life and death.

Hometown: A Portrait of the American Opioid Epidemic

An intimate look at the human faces of America's current opioid epidemic. Seen through the eyes of a mother and the lens of a small town.

Heredity

Flora, 30, is a French geneticist. She analyzes what is transmitted or not between generations. She lost her parents who were fervent Maoists within the proletarian Left from the end of the 1960s. She must now sort through her parents' apartment: what to choose to keep or not from their memory?

Beyond Me

A film that explores the power of childhood adventures through the lens of Super 8 film reels to inspire life in the moment, cherishing the times that shape our lives. Through the recollection of childhood adventures and family journeys, this documentary captures timeless beauty of memory, reminding us to live in the moment.

Les Enfants de la Bonne Mère : Rue d'Aubagne

Ali's Story

For DJs, life revolves around records. Around sounds. Every life is a story, every DJ is a narrator. Every stack of records is an endless collection of stories, myths, and memories. Can we know someone’s life through their records? For some, we can even know their impact.

(Sol)ar Memories

To process grief, a young adult revisits fragments of their late grandmother’s life to restore the version of their own inner child when she still remembered them.

Remembering Port Chicago

In California's Bay Area, a painful memory lingers of the Port Chicago disaster of WWII, when hundreds of the Navy's first Black Sailors perished, and the White officers in charge were protected by the chain of command.

Mary Remembering

A short animated documentary featuring archival recordings of the filmmaker's Volga-German Great-Great-Grandmother, Mary Frank Lind, in which she recalls key memories of childhood—her father's windmill, warm rains, wolf sightings, bone trading, and her passion for carpentry, which broke gender norms but was supported by her father.

Adrift by the Towers

Vila das Torres was a self-built community based on one of the largest urban gardens in Rio de Janeiro, below the energy towers of the Light Company and next to the train lines. Eight years after its removal for the construction of Parque Madureira, former residents report their memories.