Short docs on film and art
In this year’s edition of American Shorts, the short films play out like snippets from private letters exchanged with, and about, cinema itself. These are love notes of youth, tender postcards from the past, fragmentary dispatches from everyday life, and bracing manifestos of reckoning. The filmmakers may differ in their formats and mediums, their sensitivities and aesthetics, or even their politics, but what unites them all is an intimate, deeply personal relationship with film and television. Within this diverse, self-referential tapestry, different moments and spaces reflect back on each other, ranging from postwar Vietnam to mid-90s Los Angeles, and present-day Beirut. Here, Maria Schneider crosses paths with David Hasselhoff, low-budget westerns by R.G. Springsteen lend their soundtracks to daily realities, and, unexpectedly, the celebrated director Francis Ford Coppola simply doesn’t know how to eat a mango. Cinema in these films is above all a meeting place: sometimes a window that invites us into another world, sometimes a mirror for seeing our own world anew, or a door to step through and explore the far side of the screen. While its presence is woven inseparably into the lives of both the creators and their onscreen counterparts, for each of them film means something singular - asking different questions about the relationship between the real and the reel, and drawing ever-new boundaries between cinema and reality.
After the screening on November 8th: discussion about American cinema with Portal Immersja.
Manal Issa, 2024
In an interview inspired by the one Maria Schneider gave in 1983 to French television, Lebanese-French actress Manal Issa uncompromisingly reflects on actors’ evolving ethical considerations amid worldwide upheaval.
Ode to R.G. Springsteen
The film, composed of impressionistic fragments of everyday life, serves both as a tribute to a somewhat forgotten B-movie genre filmmaker and as a series of intimate letters to a friend, film critic Benjamin Crais. The low-budget cinema becomes the soundtrack of daily existence, while the project itself is an attempt to realise a cinephile's fantasy of the inseparable intertwining of life and art.
We Were The Scenery
How did a group of Vietnamese refugees end up on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now after escaping postwar Vietnam and landing in a camp in the Philippines? Poet and filmmaker Cathy Linh Che turns to her parents to uncover memories of that surreal moment, asking about their time as extras, Coppola’s eccentric culinary habits, their thoughts on the finished film, and, ultimately, what truth in cinema means to them.
The Contestant
Visual artist and filmmaker Patrick Bresnan unearthed home video footage from 1996, when, as a young boy, he entered a contest organized by a local TV station. The grand prize? A backstage pass to one of the most iconic shows of the 1990s: Baywatch.
Big Money: A Spiritual Manifesto
Oscar and 7x Grammy winner Jon Batiste crafts his most personal album with legendary producer No ID, blending joy, lineage, alchemy and protest into something deeply revelatory. Big Money: A Spiritual Manifesto is an intimate look at Jon's creative process, where American musical tradition plays radical reinvention.
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