Video Essay/The Essay Film: Some Thoughts of Discontent

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

Runtime

2h 20m

Director

Lars von Trier, Barbara Albert

Cast

Alan Rees, Safia Aggoune, Abel Alves

Pole, who are you? This film collage that combines archival and contemporary materials, documentary and staged pictures, press reports, social announcements, sale offers and speech excerpts is an attempt to answer this question. Referring to the Polish tradition of a creative documentary in the style of Wojciech Wiszniewski, the film p...

Runtime

41m

Every image in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography comes from gay erotic videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism. The video provides a glimpse of young men responding to the pressures of an unfamiliar world, one in which money, power and sex are now connected.

Runtime

19m

In 2010, an obsessed gamer designed the perfect game of Sim City. Achieved through a repeating pattern of clustered high rises, “Magnasanti” exposes the hellish consequences of top-down civic design. In his new documentary, John Wilson explores how New York City is creeping closer and closer to realising this fictional metropolis.

Runtime

15m

Cast

John Wilson

For Kyrgyz director Melis Ubukeyev, making a full-length feature film of the Kyrgyz national epic Manas was a lifelong dream. He spent years working with the National Academy of Sciences of Kyrgyzstan to gather material for the project, which ultimately never came to be. His efforts, though, were not in vain. He made several documentar...

Runtime

1h 14m

Director

Melis Ubukeyev

Cast

Gulnara Chokubaeva, Shaabai Azizov, Bolot Beyshenaliev