Directed by French author Geroges Perec, Les Lieux d'une fugue is an autobiographical account of the writer's experience of running away from his aunt's house at age 11. As much a meditation on the streets of Paris as it is personal narrative, Les Lieux d'une fugue examines how Perec's verbal games play out alongside a movie camera.

The times they were a-changing.

Pablo Martín Weber’s video essay forges a link between the creative abundance of computer imaging and artificial intelligence and the speculative cosmologies of Philip Henry Gosse, a 19th-century naturalist and advocate for science. Just as Gosse became obsessed with reconciling the geological record with the Biblical account of the Earth’s creation, Weber attempts to understand the digital image’s new world of infinitely malleable data.

A translation to film of Raymond Williams’ 1973 book of the same title which traces images of ‘nature’ and ‘town’ through 200 years of English literature.

Poetic film illustrating man’s discovery of the world and his conception of his own place in it by means of the primitive art of India, America, Africa, and Oceania.

The film begins with images of a protest in a street. These are immediately followed by shots of a motorway, filmed from above. The accompanying text is revealing: "Of the street not much is left but a traffic road - a movement machine, as Le Corbusier described it[...] The habitable space of the city, the street, has degenerated into a pure locus for traffic." The car has destroyed the street and community life, and the images reinforce this story of loss. Shots of Belgian cities, overrun by cars and trucks, alternate with idyllic sequences of places in Italy where children spend entire days on the street. In short, the film is a vivid case against motorized traffic in our cities.

Shireen Seno’s video essay explores the transformation and commodification of nature through archival photographs from the American colonial occupation of the Philippines in the first half of the 20th century. These images testify to what the voiceover calls “the sticky relationship between humans and nature and their entanglements with empire”—an ambivalent dependence on natural resources that drives the colonial project and implicates photography, with its concurrent processes of preservation, transmutation, and destruction.

A movie essay using theory fragments from porn studies pioneer Linda Williams, radical gender theorist Paul Preciado, feminist theorists Hortense Spillers, Karen Barad and more. A variety of hazy, lo fi clips rub up against an isolated digerati immersed in temporary pornutopias. Why not name it a small collection, a modest archive of sexual imageries and pleasures? The relationship between monopoly capitalism and sexual imaging is laid bare, along with the production of a gendered subject, the question of post-pornography and its new identity formations.

This is a film both about the spectacle and the space, about how the spectacle has caused the mutation of the (physical and phycological) space in which we reside. This film is determined to be the ‘film on space’ of our times, an epic theater, the general observation of the geological structure of this time. I therefore invent or re-invent some terms for my purpose: Archae(now)logy; Ruinology; space bankruptcy; theater of life -- theater of cruelty -- theater of spectacle; the body-film; the New Berlin Wall - Iron Curtain; and “refugees without camps”, ‘the plants”, “the ghosts,” the asthenosphere, dark energy... I have stolen a great amount of found footages/ready materials or already existed films. This “stealing” is exactly the way to get connected with history and the history of film, to construct an “echo film”.

Émilie Serri was born in Canada. She had only visited Syria, her father’s country, a few times prior to the start of the civil war. Following her grandmother’s death, a desire grew within her to form a stronger connection to this country of which she knew so little. Serri studied old family photos and films, interviewed members of her family and other Syrians forced to flee their homeland, and in this documentary mixes her own memories with theirs. For some, Syria remains as alive and present as the scent of jasmine, while others' memories have already faded. They don’t usually talk about it, wishing to spare their children the traumas of the past: “They must look to the future.”

On the one hand, the beyond-Tropicália surreal, wild, ecstatic universe of Khavn de la Cruz, the Philippines’ internationally most venerated underground filmmaker. On the other, the Frankfurt School dialectics of Alexander Kluge, self-proclaimed arrière-guard eternal of 1960s modernist moviedom, Gandalf of all essay cinema. For Happy Lamento, Kluge mixed some of his weirder TV skits on electricity, the circus, revolution and early cinema (featuring Fassbinder-regular Peter Berling, theatre genius Heiner Müller, and DaDaism’s last man standing, Helge Schneider, among others) with some of the more outrageous scenes from Khavn’s 2016 Ang Napakaigsing Buhay Ng Alipato. Some 2017 G20 shots of Merkel and Trump et al inject the already heady brew with current affairs urgency.

Encounters on a rail line crossing north to south thru Paris and its outskirts: A cleaning lady, a scrap merchant, a writer, a nurse, a follower of hunts and the filmmaker herself.

John Berger presents his insights on how people see. Through examples of Art History Berger shows how our very sense of sight has been transformed. By discovering why this is so, according to Berger, "we shall discover something about ourselves."

Experimental film, guided by the feeling of oppressive, paranoid, obsessive life of its characters. An essay on the oppression and dehumanization of the Brazilian people.

Glitches, errors, ideologies and unexpected readings by AIs working in a museum of contemporary art.

Members of a natural history society in the south of England take care of bats and measure trees, in this documentary shot mostly in close up.

This film shows the way in which a Costa Rican woman has organized herself to survive, both in rural areas and in urban centers. It denounces the marginality suffered by these workers and urges them to know and fight for their rights. All this within a great diversity of places, environments and activities that show a global panorama of the difficult condition in which the poor woman of Costa Rica lives.

How can structures, which take up defined, rigid portions of space, make us feel transcendence? How can chapels turn into places of introspection? How can walls grant boundless freedom? Driven by intense childhood impressions, director Christoph Schaub visits extraordinary churches, both ancient and futuristic, and discovers works of art that take him up to the skies and all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. With the help of architects Peter Zumthor, Peter Märkli, and Álvaro Siza Vieira, artists James Turrell and Cristina Iglesias, and drummer Sergé “Jojo” Mayer, he tries to make sense of the world and decipher our spiritual experiences using the seemingly abstract concepts of light, time, rhythm, sound, and shape. The superb cinematography turns this contemplative search into a multi-sensory experience.

A discussion of infidelity told through confessional interviews of sex, marriage, and adultery. The film explores our hunger to find fulfillment through acts of committing to—and straying from—our partners and how the secrets we keep--and the lies we tell--in our search for love and desire reveal who we are. It is also the story of the director’s unexpected transformation, as she discovers her future partner through the process of making the film.

This short piece for the television station Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) is highly relevant to Farocki's later work. Zwei Wege is a cheeky description of a picture; Farocki shows us an image, a religious allegory showing the 'right' and the 'wrong' path for a Christian. The one path leads to heaven, the other to hell. Farocki uses the camera in effect to dissect the picture; he shows close-ups of the paintings various motifs, which he underscores with rhymes. This method of breaking down an image with the camera reminds us of similar sequences in his essay films, namely Wie man sieht and Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges.

A journalistic story inspired by Volodymyr Vernadsky about the genesis of life in the universe — from the physical elements of the primordial broth to the civilization of intelligent man.

The filmmaker Jeppe Rønde has invited 10 of the world's foremost researchers - and a robot! - to rethink our relationship with technology and its dilemmas from the outside. Philosophers, anthropologists, archaeologists and programmers show us through their thought experiments that our relationship with technology is just as much about our relationship with ourselves.

Tradition and contemporary practice of Bauls, Bengali mystic minstrels, are explored in Calcutta filmmaker and author Ruchir Joshi’s essay film.

Comprised entirely of archive material, drawing on a rich seam of documents to reveal how Swiss filmmaker and travel writer René Gardi left his mark on how a whole generation viewed Africa from the 1950s onwards. The film doesn’t just highlight Gardi’s colonialist way of thinking, but also functions as a reflection on the projections of Africa of today.

The film is a travelogue of sorts. Ostrovsky’s personal family footage meets the archives of Soviet propaganda footage. The result is a kind of Khruschev-era mix with a collage of Soviet music and a voice-over of my reminiscences of the Cold War era.

The ghosts of two legendary Hungarian filmmakers talk about film and personal history.

At the height of the Cold War, Gilligan's Island depicted seven Americans living in an analogue of a post-apocalyptic world where the survivors have to rebuild civilization. Remarkably, the society they create is pure communist. Interviews with the show's creator and some of the surviving actors, as well from professors from Harvard, reveal that Gilligan's Island was deliberately designed to be dismissed as low brow comedy in order to celebrate Marxism and lampoon Western democratic constructs.

The Day I Disappeared is a film essay based on the personal story of the filmmaker, who fled from Iran and travelled through what was a completely new and unknown world for her: Europe. It is also an effort to shed light on an internal process of alienation, an individualisation of the term 'refugee' or 'asylum-seeker'. The unconventional narrative uses the patterns of Persian poetry, with visual metaphors and rhymes and rhythms between the scenes. A lot of the material is found 16mm and 8mm footage that mirrors the director's memories of her own trip through Europe more than twenty years ago. The images of the main character’s dance also reflect on the alienation of the individual. The combination of all these creative approaches evokes a special world between reality and fairytale.

An amusing study of the antics of German drivers in their cars.

Multimedia artist Laurie Anderson reflects on her relationship with her beloved terrier Lolabelle.

"Brides of Nothingness: Female Terror." What connects Magda Goebbels with Ulrike Meinhof? - Both women represent a different side of modernity: continuity and fractures of a female mentality story in which the unconscious of history is sedimented. The fanaticism of both women was a publicly lived love story with politics.

A record of the epistolary encounter between French artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire and Maxim Gvinjia, former Foreign Minister of the breakaway Caucasian state of Abkhazia, Letters to Max is both a chronicle of a developing friendship and an ingenious, unusual essay film about the inherently speculative nature of nationhood.

Nothing but silence. Nothing but a revolutionary song. A story in five chapters like the five fingers of a hand.

Evaporating Borders is a poetically photographed and rendered film on tolerance and search for identity. Told through 5 vignettes portraying the lives of migrants on the island of Cyprus, it passionately weaves themes of displacement and belonging.

A palpably rendered audiovisual essay draws together the distinct sensibilities of filmmakers Peter Mettler (The End of Time) and Emma Davie (I am Breathing) and philosopher David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous) to forge a path into the places where humans and animals meet.

As an essay film, 'Tarpaulins' is a minute look at Los Angeles' tiniest inhabitants, termites, and at the same time a zig-zag attempt to grasp the macrocosm of the city's vast landscape.

A photographer is fascinated by the concept of time. He captures self-portraits with a large clock, trying to frame moments. During this journey, he discovers different ambiances and landscapes, gradually facing the mystery of time and trying to touch the enigmatic moments of life.

The most beautiful paintings are those which you dream about when you lie in bed smoking a pipe, but which you never paint.

In 'Nefandus' two men travel by canoe down the Don Diego river in the Colombian Caribbean, a landscape of 'wild' beauty. The men, an indigenous man and a Spanish speaking man, tell stories about 'unspeakable sins' and 'abominable crimes'; acts of sodomy that took place in the Americas during the conquest. It has been documented that Spanish conquistadors used sex as a weapon of domination, but what is known about homoerotic pre-Hispanic traditions? How did Christian morality, as taught by the Catholic missions and propagated through war during the Conquest, transform the natives' relationship to sex? 'Nefandus' attentively looks at the landscape for clues of stories that remain untold and have been stigmatized in historical accounts.

Su Friedrich has taken up the camera again in her ongoing quest to film the battleground of family life. Her mother Lore--who played the lead in The Ties That Bind (1984), a film about her experiences growing up in Germany during the Second World War--plays the lead again, this time kicking and protesting against being moved at the age of 94 from her home in Chicago to an “independent living” facility in New York. Friedrich and her two siblings fill out the supporting roles, cajoling, comforting, and freaking out.

A deceased hoarder, reconstituted through technology, recounts a difficult childhood as inhabitants of a virtual world struggle to reconcile materialistic tendencies. A scientist leads an effort to understand the passage of time, but the data is unreliable. The question remains, what happens to our things after we are gone? In this video, materialism, emotional presence and the adaptive nature of human beings are broadly considered through the lens of time.

Magic for Beginners examines the mythologies found in fan culture, from longing to obsession to psychic connections. The need for such connections (whether real or imaginary) as well as the need for an emotional release that only fantasy can deliver are explored.

Hasan Hourani, a Palestinian poet and illustrator, died aged 29 in Jaffa while trying to rescue his nephew from the sea. Shortly after, the filmmaker Mais Darwazah discovers his drawings and poems and feels drawn to Hourani's world— a universe outside space and time; a place of wonder, discovery, and freedom. Motivated by this kinship, Darwazah embarks on a journey to her homeland, Palestine: a place she has never known.

Writer James Baldwin tells the story of race in modern America with his unfinished novel, Remember This House.

The second installment of Anton Vidokle’s trilogy on Russian cosmism, The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun, looks at the poetic dimension of the solar cosmology of Soviet biophysicist Alexander Chizhevsky. Shot in Kazakhstan, where Chizhevsky was imprisoned and later exiled, the film introduces Сhizhevsky’s research into the impact of solar emissions on human sociology, psychology, politics, and economics in the form of wars, revolutions, epidemics, and other upheavals. It aligns the life of post-Soviet rural residents and the futurological projects of Russian cosmism to emphasize that the goal of the early Soviet breakthroughs aimed at the conquest of outer space was not so much technical acceleration, but the common cause of humankind in their struggle against the limitations of earthly life.

On a talkshow, actor and German TV ikon Joachim Fuchsberger recalls how the games for his show "Nur nicht nervös werden" (Don't Get Nervous), first broadcast on West German TV in 1960, were developed along the lines of American psychiatry. Asked "So how many crazy people watched you?", he responded: "A whole crazy, psychologically disturbed nation". Why were the Germans or to be more precise, the West Germans, a psychologically disturbed nation at that time? This is a film about cheerful and serious games, therapies for re-education and self-imposed re-education, as well as the history of the idea of permanent revolution. Those appearing include directors and producers of gameshows, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and the diversely paranoid.