"A meditative stillness experience."
A woman returning home after having a sour day decides to sleep.
Social & External
The Woman
Colossal explores the complexities of grief and the process of grieving as understood through the myth of a Man as he ventures through shifting landscapes ruminating.
At first, there was Tagalog, Gym Lumbera’s short and, to his mind, unfinished narrative about the infidelity that comes between a husband and wife in their twilight years, shot on film and reflecting his own real-life infidelity.. And then there was a storm, a real storm and not a metaphorical one, that flooded his house and submerged, and subsequently damaged, the only copy of Tagalog. This damaged version, entitled English, became the missing piece that completed the film. The new work is named after Taglish, the bastard hybrid, some say corruption, of Tagalog and English, and has become a meditation on love and language and the ways in which we betray and destroy them.
The film contains the despair of an artist’s desire for creation on ruthless censorship, rebel, and anxiety in the mid-70s when it was politically and socially depressed.
Basically an artist is also a terrorist, the protagonist thinks in an unguarded moment. And if he is a terrorist after all, then he might just as well be one. Not an instant product, but an experimental feature in which diary material is brought together to form an intriguing puzzle.
Sarah is a debt collector who lives among the inhabitants of the village of Guimbal on the island of Panay. She wants to find the young man who appeared to her in a dream and goes to the island of Negros. Here, as she interacts with the inhabitants, Sarah continues her search, gathering memories of life and war, dreams, myths, legends, songs and stories that she takes part in and at times revolve around her. She is the daughter of an ancient mermaid, a revolutionary, a primordial element, a virgin who was kidnapped and hidden away from the sunlight. “The film is a retelling of fragments of the American occupation. Dialogue, shot in the Hiligaynon language, is not translated but used as a tonal guide and a tool for narration. Using unscripted scenes shot where the main character was asked to merely interact with the villagers, I discard dialogue and draw meaning from peoples’ faces, voices, and actions, weaving an entirely different story through the use of subtitles and inter-titles.”
"Mapang-akit" is an offshoot of a documentary project made with an Icelandic filmmaker and uses the outtakes from the Hudas Hudas festival in Antique, where a community bonds over a large effigy of Judas Iscariot during Holy Week. Amidst it is a found story of a man who returns home to his death after pursuing a woman in a neighboring village.
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An experimental, no-dialogue short in which a man comes literally out of a closet, only to be held in bondage by a woman. She finally puts him back into the closet.
An isolated lake, where an old monk lives in a small floating temple. The monk has a young boy living with him, learning to become a monk. We watch as seasons and years pass by.
A teenager decides to shut himself off from the world around him after receiving bad news.
Steadily reading while/becomes treading into murky waters.
Routine imprisoned Eva in an automatism that was ingrained in her spirit. Dromomania will perhaps be the expression that best illustrates her condition. She feels absent, and her frivolous glance catalogs each one of the small details of the journey that imprisons her every day. Her apathetic state is interrupted when she crosses an object outside the street and Eva is forced to finally face her demons.
Valentino wanders through the city like an apparition, ensnared in the liminal space between nostalgia and departure. His camera fragments reality into vestiges of a nation that still lays claim to him. Spaces where memory murmurs unfulfilled promises. In a discourse that transcends mere conversation, words entwine with eloquent silences and in that fleeting exchange, the inevitable emerges: farewells foretold, inscribed before they are ever uttered.
Features four distinct, bizarre, existential tales about people whose lives are in transition, who are each asking questions about themselves, their environments, and about God(s).
A bride walks on the desert. She takes off her bridal ornaments and turns into a harlot. A multitude of people crawl on their bellies, become sick and soon die. A volcano erupts. White ashes of lahar cover the earth. The bride remembers her betrothal and repents--symbolically paving the way for the resurrection of her people. A final bridal march into a new heaven and earth takes place.
A man obsessed with motivational and right wing culture war videos goes on a hollow road trip of discovery.
In an alternate reality where the decline of nations has given rise to corporatist regimes, any trace of culture or tradition is suppressed by these new leaders to prevent the masses from reclaiming a national identity. However, rebel cells have emerged to counteract this agenda.
The camera gets lost in the deserted streets and lonely reflections of the city lights. Without words, it captures the loneliness of souls who, although surrounded by crowds and concrete, remain invisible and disconnected. Every corner, every abandoned detail, every step echoing along tells an untold story, where the silence of the night is the only interlocutor.
Five teenage girls gather for a party. Tensions mount as the guests exchange makeovers and hurl accusations. Tears in the bathroom lead to a ghostly kiss. In a circle around the Ouija board, they invoke a spirit. Their faces float in blackness. Five pairs of painted nails caress the planchette as it moves, swirling pale arms behind it. Our host becomes possessed. The characters overlap. Which of these women is not herself? Uzi's Party is a short experimental narrative written, directed and edited by Lyra Hill. All five characters are played by her sister Johanna Hill. Uzi's Party was filmed entirely in-camera on 16mm film, by means of intricately plotted multiple exposures and a cast of thirteen body doubles.
Exploring the duality between friendship and loneliness, this intimate narrative short tells the story of David, a bright young boy struggling with a broken home life, as he tries to reconnect with his childhood best friends as they search for something to do in their small suburban town.
In a suburban landscape, the lives of several families interlace with loss, despair and personal crisis. Esther Gold has lost focus on all but caring for her comatose son, Paul, and neglects her daughter and husband. Lawyer Jim Train is devoted to his career, not his family. Helen Christianson wants to find a new spark in life, while Annette Jennings tries to rebuild hers.
Four siblings' lives change drastically when their ailing mother takes a turn for the worse over the holiday season.
Feeling awkward and isolated, an imaginative and strong-willed teenage girl runs away from home with an older punk rock drifter.
A poor, struggling South Carolinian mother and daughter face painful choices with their resolve and pride. Bone, the eldest daughter, and Anney her tired mother, grow both closer and farther apart: Anney sees Glen as her last chance.
In order to be reinstated to the bar and recover custody of her daughter, a hotshot lawyer, now in recovery and on probation, must take on the appeal of a woman wrongfully convicted of murder.
A psychotherapist helps a law student cope with schizophrenia in one of five interconnected tales dealing with mental illness.
The government gets wind of a plot to destroy America involving a trio of nuclear weapons for which the whereabouts are unknown. It's up to a seasoned interrogator and an FBI agent to find out exactly where the nukes are.
During World War II in North Africa, a group of British commandos disguised as Italian soldiers must travel behind enemy lines and destroy a vital Nazi oil depot.
When seventeen-year-old Hannah stumbles upon a website about Thinspiration--an online community devoted to anorexia as a life choice--she becomes an obsessive follower of the site founder, ButterflyAna. By the time Hannah's family realizes what is happening and get Hannah the help she needs, the disease has fully taken hold and Hannah is refusing to eat. Will this family be able to exorcise the demon of anorexia from their lives?
Years after her son's suicide, a woman longs to confront both the past and a friend of his who took his business idea.
94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein tries to rebuild her life after the death of her best friend. As a result, she moves back to New York City after living in Florida for decades.
An aging Hollywood star, Joe Scott, lives a life of narcissistic hedonism, observed by his laconic personal assistant, Ophelia. The death of his childhood best friend, Boots, takes our protagonist, and the movie, into an extended flashback to a sea-side town in 1970s Britain.
Suffering from a severe case of depression, toy company CEO Walter Black begins using a beaver hand puppet to help him open up to his family. With his father seemingly going insane, adolescent son Porter pushes for his parents to get a divorce.
An odyssey through time and memory, centered on a place in New Jersey where—from wilderness, and then, later, from a home—love, loss, struggle, hope and legacy play out between couples and families over generations.
More interested in partying and flirting with young musicians than work, veteran rock journalist Ellie Klug has one last chance to prove her value to her magazine’s editor: a no-stone-unturned search to discover what really happened to long lost rock god, Matt Smith, who also happens to be her ex-boyfriend. Teaming up with an eccentric amateur documentary filmmaker, Ellie hits the road in search of answers.
A drama set in the American South, where a precocious, troubled girl finds a safe haven in the music and movement of Elvis Presley.
A terminally ill mother invites her family to their country house for one final gathering, but tensions quickly boil over between her two daughters.
Young teen girl Xiu Xiu is sent away to a remote corner of the Sichuan steppes for manual labor in 1975 (sending young people to there was a part of Cultural Revolution in China). A year later, she agrees to go to even more remote spot with a Tibetan saddle tramp Lao Jin to learn horse herding.
Defiant young activists take the women's suffrage movement by storm, putting their lives at risk to help American women win the right to vote.
The legendary Roberto Duran and his equally legendary trainer Ray Arcel change each other's lives.