<3 / Less Than Three

A grassy area fills with arriving cars. The passengers are given bread and wine and a programme for the religious service. All they have to do is tune in their radio to the right station, and the Sunday service begins. In Daytona Beach, Florida, the concept of drive-in theatres has been adapted for an unusual purpose. DeFilippo’s observational documentary takes a look at this modern church.

This animated documentary revives the story of Rudolf Bělohoubek in the form of moving “comic” drawings with commentary. After the Second World War, the son of a Czech father and German mother witnessed the execution of his parents by the Revolutionary Guards, who even had some of the family’s neighbors amongst their ranks. 

This experimental film shows natural phenomena in their raw form. Views of the sea are a multifaceted metaphor for birth, loss, madness, and death. Archetypal sequences accompanied by a cacophony of sound blend with the filmmaker’s intimate shots. The mysteries of life are presented in nineteen minutes.

The Memory Atlas refers to the unfinished work of Aby Warburg, a mentally ill German art historian. A surrealistic flow of ideas from his authentic writings from his stay in the Bellevue psychiatric hospital in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland commingles with the medical records of his psychotic states, tracing the border between madness and genius in one zoom out.

Extinction of monarch butterflies in the US became a topic of a film based on manipulation of found footage. The director adjusts archival recordings of butterflies or planes spreading fertilizers through double exposure, scratching, colouring and so don, coming up with a purely visual micro-essay asking who is really the pest and who is the infested in this ecosystem.

The story of a young girl looks into the issues surrounding the self-harm phenomenon. It seems that physical pain relieves inner anxiety and loneliness. Teenagers perceive their own bodies as the only thing they can influence and control; pain and blood can induce a sense of independence and true existence. Despite the scars all over her body, our heroine finally manages to find a way to come to terms with herself and her life.

A three-hundred-kilometer unmaintained dirt road is the only way to reach the nearest hospital from a remote African village. Through naturalistic observational camerawork, the film captures the journey of an ambulance driver in southern Ethiopia struggling to overcome all possible obstacles in order to safely deliver a laboring woman to the doctors.

Two elderly gays spice up their relationship with a series of sex games that include a quirky game of father and son. The protagonists not only talk about their sexual habits, but also even demonstrate them for the dispassionate camera. Depictions of intimacy in film are once again pushed to their limits.

During the Soviet era, Ukraine was a difficult place for members of the LGBT community, and even today the country remains less than welcoming to sexual minorities. Working with archival interviews of women from the past thirteen years, the film brings together two eras and thus contributes to a discussion of today’s situation.

This film is the video diary of a Ukrainian mother from Mariupol, a city close to the turbulent Donetsk Region. A series of several-minute long records of commonplace views from a window, following tracks in the snow, and strolls in the surroundings form a loving visual message for her daughter in Kyiv.

The film is a skit on the parallels between a caretaker and a security guard embodied by the character of a young man who keeps watching over everything all the time. Repetitive and automated everyday tasks are accentuated by monotonous aesthetics of the camera and a slow-moving pace, introducing the audience into the world of Korean pragmatic mentality and sense of responsibility. 

This short accompaniment to the intermedia project Serial Narratives reveals the real price of cheap goods from China. The testimony of an anonymous worker harmonized with hypnotic images draws attention to the frighteningly elaborate choreography as all phases of manufacturing process undergo rigorous mechanization.