Fotos, So Delicate!

A feature documentary about everyday photo habitués who traverse the streets of New York and Paris in pursuit of models to snap pictures of outside fashion shows. They are frequenters of an outside, birdwatchers of female beauty, gleaners - picking up images at the margins, at the gates of patronized culture.

Driven by adoration and loneliness, the men in the film aren't in it for the money, but are spurred on by the prospect of capturing transient interactions with the models to collect, in a hunt for images to take back home to their off-season hibernacula. In this image-coded world, they exist in ways that are equally social, para-social, and anti-social.

The film is about Longing in a culture of distantiating transparency and the mediated image, about the desire that got misplaced along the road somewhere. It’s a phenomenology of the outside: about those who don’t get to (and perhaps don’t even want to) exist on the inside—who don’t wear the badge of officialdom or the wristband of admittance.

Operationally, it is a verité documentary that is turning itself upside down; a patchwork of characters; about men who look at women, men looking at women. It would not pass a reverse Bechtel Test. Retired after 30 years, one of the characters assesses his current passion like this: ‘They ask John Dillinger why do you rob banks? And he told them, ‘because that’s where the money is. And why do you photograph female models? Well, that’s where the beauty is.’

Text by Salome Oggenfuss

Pier Paolo Pasolini travels throughout Italy, from the factories to the beaches, and interviews passersby about their attitudes toward sex. He questions them, mic in hand, on a wide range of topics: the importance of sex in everyday life, prostitution, homosexuality, and the legalization of divorce.

Season two is a Catfish-inspired documentary masked as a music video directed by Klein and Taylor Thoroski.

Pulling from the famous ‘Nella Rose’ style grwm format, they poke fun at conspiracy theories and underlying traditional values whilst utilizing techniques such as remote sensing blended with organized staged performance, poignant iconography and the repurposing of sound to transform this film into a true MTV moment. The video acts as a link to the past and present, highlighting the real dance heroes of Los Angeles and the physical and digital land black folks fight to preserve.

June 2024, Color, 47.04 min, Los Angeles

Department of Robotic Surgery. Using a joystick, a medical surgeon performs an entire operation by controlling the arms of a robot.

"When I entered the operating room, I realized how complex and heavy the role of a surgeon was, then I started filming and that's when I wondered if I should show what I was seeing."

Following the original map hand drawn by composer and writer Paul Bowles in the 1950s, a group returns to sites in Morocco where the first audio recordings of Berber music were made.

This film is told through the intercutting of collage, stills, and video captured on the journey - as well as archival footage.

It is a meditation on documentary as a form and the power and fragility of cultural knowledge passed down through generations

"...one belongs to the whole world and not just one part of it" quote by Paul Bowles.

Hal Ashby’s 1984 concert film Solo Trans, which spans some of Young’s earliest recorded music (“Ohio,” “Helpless”) to then-new masterpiece Trans.

Ummuye, Behiye, Ummu, Fatma K., Cennet, Saniye, Fatma F., Zeynep and Nesime are nine peasant women living in Arslankoy, a mountain village in southern Turkey. They spend their days working hard in the fields, on the construction site and at home. To lighten the burden of life, these women come together for a wholly different reason. They intend to write and perform a play based on their own life stories.
They gather at the local high school, which they were shy of even stepping into until that day and they work with the principal, Mr. Huseyin. They reveal their life stories that they were even afraid to tell themselves and confront. For days on end, under the curious gazes of the village men, they work tirelessly, discuss and create with much fun a play,

“The Outcry of Women!”

This documentary is about the development process of this play and the change the women went through during this period.

"This theatre never ends. We have suffered it. This will not happen to our children," is the positive statement by nine Turkish countrywomen at the end of the play "The Outcry of Woman". The performance is the result of intensive preparations, transforming their personal tragic stories into a play under the local schoolmaster's supervision. This is the first time they share these stories. One of the women tells how she was taken out of school and given away to make amends for her brother's eloping with a 13-year-old. In , director Pelin Esmer shows with contagious joy how the women find support in each other thanks to the play, overcome their fears and develop confidence. The rehearsals alternate with scenes from everyday life, in which drama and humour fight for priority. And there is a lot of chatting and bickering. On the eve of the performance, for example, a quarrel about who will give the opening speech and who can claim direction credit threatens to throw a wrench in the works after all.

LaJoye Watkins, a reclusive black woman living in Brooklyn, is determined to tell a secret she has harbored all her life: electronic music was actually started by black southerners in the 1920s.

Between 1961 and 1971, James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. Shot in Istanbul, Turkey, this portrait of the writer and thinker finds him discussing his work, sexuality, and complex feelings about the United States.

“Pakay’s little-known cinematic gem records the writer’s movements through the city of Istanbul over a three-day period in May 1970 and frames Baldwin’s assertion with seductive photography of private interiors, city streets, and a boat ride on the Bosporus. Like no other existing documentary, the black-and-white film captures the profound paradox of Baldwin’s transatlantic vantage point by showing how he both belongs and remains an outsider in the teeming half-European, half-Asian Turkish metropolis,” wrote film scholar Magdalena Zaborowska in her 2009 book, James Baldwin′s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile.

They came to the world for a purpose. To injure & destroy...

The ‘OGBANJE’ is a well-known phenomenon in some African societies, a situation where evil spirits plague families with children that would come, stay a short while and then die. It brings pain and anguish to families. This is the situation David household finds itself, until the latest child came. His wife so determined to keep the child, will do whatever it takes to placate the child and make her stay.

Starring: Liz Benson, Shola Fashodu, Genevieve Nnaji, Nkiru Sylvanus

Marlowe Drive is an experimental film that explores the terrain of video games as a context for documentary filmmaking. A director, Adam Kesher, fresh from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, lands in another fictional Los Angeles. It's in this Hollywood movie landscape recreated by Rockstar Games that this director sets out to find someone to talk to. He's looking for a bridge between the real and imaginary worlds. The film takes place on the game's multiplayer platform to meet "real" characters. It gathers information on the individuals who inhabit this space and reinserts the process of documentary filming into a virtual world. Moving back and forth between staging and raw footage, the protagonist allows himself to be swept along by the current of a chaotic world that fascinates him but gradually overtakes him. Through his character and his encounters, we ourselves discover a virtual world. An autonomous world is strangely close to a form of reality.

A 1981 animated film about Howard, a mallard duck, who finds that he must depend on an unlikely coalition of animals when he misses his southbound flock and is forced to winter in New York City.

Based on the book Howard by James Stevenson

The Dupes by Tewfik Saleh tells the story of three Palestinian men of different generations who attempt to cross illegally from Iraq into Kuwait in a desperate search for employment. Adapted from the novella “Men in the Sun” by Palestinian writer and PFLP spokesperson Ghassan Kanafani, the film was released in 1972, the same year Kanafani was murdered by Israeli Mossad in a car bombing alongside his niece. Banned for decades due to its uncompromising portrayal of the treatment of Palestinian refugees in neighboring Arab countries, and newly restored, it is a staggering and unfortunately enduring adaptation of a timeless text - encapsulating the dangers of political inertia and suspension of time against an urgent struggle… and the trial by fire of migration in exile.

It tells the excruciating story of three Palestinian refugees from different generations who attempt to cross into Kuwait in a water tank in search of employment to alleviate the conditions of their lives and support their families. Saleh’s portrayal of the Palestinians’ harrowing journey illuminates the myriad effects of the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 on the livelihoods of Palestinians and its obstructions of their fundamental human rights and desires. The film was released in 1972; that same year, Kanafani was murdered with his niece by Mossad in a car bombing in Lebanon. The film itself was banned in Syria due to its criticism of various Arab regimes, which spelled the fate of the three characters as many Palestinians after them.

Today, the carousel of history remains in motion- aside from the blatant brutality by Israel, sanctioned by the US and other countries in the West, we are witnessing a similar inertia on behalf of Arab states. Protestors head to the Egyptian consulate to demand Egypt open the Rafah border and allow aid into Gaza amid fears of yet another mass displacement into Egypt.

Saleh’s The Dupes hardly deviates from Kanafani’s text, except for one crucial distinction at the end. In the novel, the final lines consist of the lorry driver shouting into the desert: why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? only to be answered by his own echo in the silence of the desert. Whether or not the refugees attempted to make a sound to alert the lorry driver is implicit. Saleh instead chose to show the three men banging on the door, their sounds drowned out by the drone of the AC. Saleh has said that he changed the ending as he wanted to depict the refugees resisting, counter to what he deemed Kanafani’s fatalism, or perhaps to remain more in line with the resistance movements of the 70’s..

On October 27, Israel cut off Internet and telecommunications in Gaza; videos and voice notes came out from people in Gaza asking - can they hear us? Does anyone see us? Despite feelings of helplessness, the most important thing to do is to listen and stay attuned to what is happening as Palestinians continue to resist despite the seemingly impassive silence of the desert around. The film negates the echo of the desert, imploring us to use our voices to respond and continue telling this story.

Text by Laila Qaddumi

Airtime is pleased to bring you IN THE AIR TONIGHT in partnership with LE CINÉMA CLUB as an encore to our screening event which took place September 20th, 2023.

Not the legendary fax story about Phil Collins, but another one. This urban legend teleports us to a night in '80s LA.

“An atmospheric standout of the Sundance and the New York Film Festival shorts programs, Andrew Norman Wilson’s IN THE AIR TONIGHT unfurls a ghost story beneath the night skies of Michael Mann’s Los Angeles. The film recounts the apocryphal tale behind Phil Collins’ 1980 superhit “In the Air Tonight,” which, legend has it, should be told aloud as the song builds to its climactic drum break.

Wry narrator Slipperman (voice actor David George) sets the scene: he’s accompanied Collins to Los Angeles for a jaunt through its cocaine-fueled nightlife. Slipperman’s hypnotic British baritone—which he admits is prone to mythmaking—gives a second life to Wilson’s assemblage of transitional shots from ’80s movies, including American Gigolo, 8 Million Ways to Die, and One from the Heart. A full moon rising, a fax machine, a notebook with “Not Hallucinating” scrawled in pen: all of these images lead Slipperman, and Collins, to a fateful swim in Malibu.”

-Excerpt text from Le Cinéma Club written by Chloe Lizotte

Anyab (Fangs) is Mohammed Shebl’s 1981 adaptation of Rocky Horror Picture Show.

A girl and her fiancé are on their way to a party on New Year’s Eve, but they get into an accident. Looking for help, they find nowhere to go except a strange castle. Their host for the evening is count Dracula, who instantly falls in love with the girl, wanting her for himself. The two lovers discover that Dracula is in Egypt in many forms. Anyab was the passion project of director Mohammed Shebl, and also a socio-economic commentary of the times in his country.

After my father died, the details of his life get lost in silence. My need to get to know him, uncovers a story marked by sexuality and political activism.

Jaime recorded everything, even his own death. From him, her daughter received more than one hundred hours of home videos and many uncertainties. Because as many people of his generation, Jaime was a clandestine person. But in his case, probably two times clandestine. The images recorded by Jaime, resignify to give place to questions around desire, sexuality, family and freedom. "Silence is a Falling Body" is the trip to a intimate and filial past, but also to a political one.

"For many years making this movie was for me a dilemma. How to tell your own story when it ́s also the story of others? Why to tell secrets,when for a long time there was so much effort in keeping them as they were and not precisely with guilt or pity? Why try to make others tell that that makes them so uncomfortable?
A few years ago when Argentina sanctioned a law allowing gay marriage, an activist said that that triumph was not only ours, because we walked over footsteps. Everyone in my movie, in my story, left a print . Together we built an net of affection and activism that i hope after watching "Silence is a Falling Body" keep printing out more footsteps to keep walking over." Agustina Comedi

"I was one of the lucky ones, I spent lockdown watching a film a day. I also started writing to my first penpal, Cecilia Estalles, a young queer woman in Buenos Aires who works for the Archivo de la Memoria Trans, an amazing archive of decades of photos of and by trans women in Argentina. Cecilia introduced me to the films of Agustina Comedi. Silence is a Falling Body is a tender, vulnerable homage of a film. Deceptively simple in form, it is first of all a home movie, but it transcends the normal description. It explores the notions of family, of love, of desire, and of activism. When her father died, suddenly Agustina discovered that he’d had an entire other life, that of a gay man. With Silence, she pays tribute to her beloved father and to his capacity to live out his range of desires. But it’s also a film about repression, about the persecution of the queer community in Argentina by the government and by the political leftist parties, who operated with their own form of homophobia. This film is a jewel in the canon of queer cinema."

-Nan Goldin

It all happened on a dark night. The Man was too tired to be a stranger, too tired to be insulted by others simply because he spoke Arabic with a wife who spoke French with their beloved mixed race son.
He looked at the sky and shouted. But that night, far in the cosmos, a voice answered. The Blue Star promised them a new world; safe and without fear. He starts to dream about escaping forever there...

«A night like this one, a man screamed, the man couldn’t stand being different, being the outsider. Far out in the universe, someone heard his call.» The film opens with the story of this desperate cry, as are, perhaps, all the cries of exile. The story of a «brown man» who dared to love a white woman. He speaks Arabic, his wife French, their distant voices intermingle, like a whisper, to tell us about their banished love. Valentin Noujaïm dives into his family’s archives to question the history of immigration in France, a country where his family has never been able to truly find its place. The film begins with images of a seemingly happy past - the birth of a forbidden love, a vacation by the sea... - but this happiness will soon turn to despair. The Lebanese man, exhausted by the rejection of his new country, implores the sky to show him a parallel universe. A promised land for those who do not find their place on earth. The family film thus becomes a fantastic story and a political tale of an unexpected color. A blue star.
Elena López Riera - Visions du Réel

It is an adaptation of Arkin's own short story, and stars his sons, Adam and Matthew. Matthew comes into the kitchen one afternoon and finds Adam hard at work creating some sort of frightening concoction. After waiting ten minutes for the potion to sit, Adam gets Matthew to be his test subject, and gets a surprising result.

People Soup (1969) was nominated for an Academy Award for live action short film in 1970.

The late Alan Arkin, a legendary actor who passed away in June at the age of 88, excelled in various fields such as acting, directing, writing, and improvisation. He was recognized with numerous accolades for his acting craft, including an Academy Award and multiple Tony awards. His notable directorial work in the 70s, particularly the film Little Murders, explores the absurdity of reality and is unmatched in its satirical brilliance.

Hello Asli; 

I’m touched that you have some affection for PEOPLE SOUP.  I’m happy to give you permission to show the film, but I’m not sure I have the rights to it.  I’m pretty sure I sold it to Columbia Pictures about a century ago.  In any case I cant imagine they would have any objection to your showing it if they even remember that they own it.  But if it’s my permission that you want,  you’ve got it. 

Best

Alan Arkin

Sent from my iPad

PEOPLE SOUP first existed as a story I wrote when I was in a hospital for a few days, and had nothing else to do.  I’d never written anything before, and didnt think I was a writer, particularly, but sent it out anyway, and it was bought by Galaxy Magazine. A friend of mine, who was a producer, read it and said it would make a film.  I’d never directed a film before, but thought if I financed it myself, I could learn something about film directing without costing anyone anything other than myself.  I had written the story with my younger brother and sister in mind, but it easily translated into my sons Adam and Matthew, who happily agreed to do it.  We commandeered a friends house in New Jersey, hired a really good cinematographer and a chicken wrangler, and that was that.  It was bought by Columbia Pictures and shown around the country to go along with a feature, and were lucky enough to get an Oscar nomination for best short.  .. And that was that.  

Sent from my iPad

Rough day for Beads Kew

Untitled is an investigation into an anecdote the artist heard about a house near Algiers: that it was abandoned by its wealthy owners during the political unrest in the 1990s and occupied by a terrorist group. The idyllic landscape we are shown is in fact a series of full-scale inkjet prints, which the artist photographed and used to wallpaper a life-size model of the house for his film set. Actors playing the landlord of the house, the gardener and the neighbors give conflicting accounts of what the terrorists had done there, how they lived, how they ate. More importantly, they question why the group chose to live in a house with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on all sides. This re-imagined scene is typical of Beloufa’s exploration of the hazy shades of narrative, make-believe and truth that underpin the representations of real-world events.

Inspired by the Ancient Greek mythical, half-bird, half-woman creatures who were depicted as luring sailors to their demise with the sound of their music, Siren Song (2021) by artists Sarah Khan and Nadia Tehran is an audio-visual narrative that explores lineage, cultural assimilation, and embodied forms of resistance. Drawing on their family histories of displacement, including through the Islamic Revolution and the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, Siren Song critiques the echoes of colonial legacies, refusing the call of the siren to embrace dominant cultural forms by reclaiming selfhood, agency, and spatial expansiveness. The video combines a text monologue, trancelike wedding footage, and an atmospheric sound piece which features a recording of Nadia’s parents watching and reacting to their own wedding film. Together, these elements signify the to-and-fro between distraction and commitment, revisiting and unlearning, destruction and rebuilding.

Sarah Khan is an artist-filmmaker and writer. Drawing on her lived experience and collective memory, she explores themes of cross-cultural identity, embodied resistance, and the boundless potential of worldmaking when exclusion is confronted by the ‘othered’. In both her daily life and practice, she is committed to undoing Western constructs of binary logic and relearning through a decolonial praxis. Sarah is a co-founder of the London-based collective Baesianz which centres artists of Asian heritage.

Nadia Kardar Tehran was born in Jönköping, Sweden and is currently based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Nadia is a performance artist, using music, text, sculpture, video and photography to explore themes of identity and migration in relation to her own personal history. Notions of separation, longing, rage and escape are recurring themes in her oeuvre. In 2019, she released her debut album Dozakh: All Lovers Hell which was nominated for album of the year at the Nordic Music Prize.

This film documents the legendary SoHo restaurant and artists' cooperative Food, which opened in 1971. Owned and operated by Caroline Goodden, Food was designed and built largely by Matta-Clark, who also organized art events and performances there. As a social space, meeting ground and ongoing art project for the emergent downtown artists' community, Food was a landmark that still resonates in the history and mythology of SoHo in the 1970s.

1972, 43 min, B&W, Sound, 16 mm Film on HD Video

Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Branco lives on a high, windy hill in Valparaíso. It links his childhood to the adult world into which he’s thrown despite himself, as well as the dreams and nightmares of the Chilean people’s painful past. The fog, haunted by the memory of Pinochet’s dictatorship, blends these worlds into a poem where the changing winds blow, at times fanning the flames of the youth’s revolutionary hopes and at others preventing them from escaping traced out destinies.

23min/2022/Produced by Le Fresnoy

"I was born in Vitry in July 1992. I am of French and Chilean origin.
Born into a family of political exiles, I film those who live between multiple temporalities and multiple peripheral spaces in works that borrow the codes of both documentary and experimental cinema. For me, it is about the necessity to make visible those who have disappeared from our age. As ghosts, they resist and disguise reality to seek refuge in ambiguous palaces, hybrid products of their imagination and restraining fictions that society imposes upon them. Thus, for them (who actively participate in the creative process), these stories are a means to draw from their dreams and give them a shape. They take hold of the space of the film to reveal the per- manent battle between chosen and suffered representation, between their desires and their everyday life. Subjectivities, mine and that of the people I film, interlace. A large part of the fiction is written alongside the protagonists.
Raised on South American tales where the ogre’s name is Pinochet, I am interested in the way imagination gives meaning to an often violently absurd or tragic reality. These questions, this to-and-fro between documentary and fiction, implies certain forms and pro- cesses. The switch between film and cellphone footage, between natural backdrops and conspicuously artificial set designs, as well as the use of costumes, all work to create a mosaic of vibrant images where the familiar and shapeless, the usual and the hallucinato- ry, blur together. I attempt to bring about increasingly immersive experiences that, like in a dream, brings the viewer a sense of mea- ning that is their very own."
-Anaïs-Tohé Commaret