Transit

A shop by the side of the road. One after another, people enter and exit the small building. The randomness and illogical nature of the action feels unreal. The sense of timelessness and of being in an unnamed place further heightens the dreamlike nature of the scene. The nearly motionless black-and-white camera records a fragment of life in a place torn from the context of the world.

The only things they left behind were their personal belongings. They speak volumes about what kind of people they were. What they liked. Who was close to them. What hobbies they had. A film without words. Footage of objects belonging to people who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of the island of Lampedusa in 2013 and 2015 - people whose lives were extinguished for good.

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.

This film gives one of the many refugees who were unjustly imprisoned in detention centers located close to European borders a chance to tell his story. His horrifying experience is reflected in the static, well-composed, deep focus shots, which reveal traces of lingering suffering in the abandoned buildings.

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.

This conceptual work reconstructs the memories of a hotel room in the so-called red-light district in the city of Makati in the Philippines. The objects which dominate the author's perspective are pillows and blankets. However, extreme close-ups reveal other objects in the room and what is behind them.

After a dam flooded a village in northern Iran, one island remained. There’s a grave on it. On a hill above the new lake, an old woman looks out at it. An intimate look at the daily routine of an Iranian woman who has survived modestly for twelve years alone in a house at the base of the mountain.  She waits for permission to visit the island.

An essay filmed against the backdrop of lyrical images of feather plucking or drawing with chalk presents the clerical orders of Islamic women and how they rein in their impure desires. As a subversive element of Islamic fundamentalism, the director recites a poem by Iranian feminist writer Forough Farrokhzad.

A young filmmaker sets off for the unknown territory of an African enclave to gather true stories of its inhabitants. Motionless scenery carries human imagination to heights where unforgettable moments of human life unfold. The meditative character of the film’s imagery captures the unique atmosphere of Lesotho. 

During the day, Oxana paints frames as a man; at night, she puts on her female skin. Oxana is a transsexual living in Moldova, where even expressions of tolerance towards sexual minorities can be dangerous. This short film is an intimate look at gender and at the social isolation of people denied to right to their own identity.

Saudi Arabian cinema only recently emerged from thirty-five years of being an underground phenomenon. Before it was legalized, Bentley Brown used his childhood home movie camera to record filmmakers working in the town of Jeddah. The film’s melancholy mood is underscored by the voiceover of the women who form most of the film crew.

The film assembles images from the daily work of livestock breeders in the unhospitable Hungarian steppe, where the universal laws of time have ceased to apply. The interplay between the panoramic shots of the landscape combined with details of daily farm life create a gloomy vision of a place that dooms all who live there, human and animal alike, to decay.