Myth

It's the time of celebration and merriment in the Alto Xingu. The dry season is coming to an end. The smell of the damp earth is mixed with the sweet perfume of pequi. But it has not always been like that: if it had not been for a death, the pequi would possibly not exist. Linking the past to the present, Kuikuro filmmakers tell a tale of dangers and pleasures, of sex and betrayal, where men and women, hummingbirds and alligators build a shared world.

Direction: Takumã and Maricá Kuikuro

Photography: Takumã, Mariká, Amuneri, Asusu, Jairão and Maluki

Behind the yellow gates is a realm that sparkles like diamonds under a desert sun. It is a realm ablaze with outrageous flowers, fragrant and poisonous… A realm populated by bare skin scared by flashing swords and marked with stone idols… It is that subterranean consciousness; a land of Mind-in-Time that sends unholy incense up toward Heaven. 

Kuchar makes it to the Isis Oasis resort just in time to catch the marriage vows of his friends Rebecca and Steve. Transposing the myth of Isis in their union, Kuchar tries to make sense of this recreated paradise, this gathering of God’s creatures, and the fates of Rebecca von Hettman and Charlie Sheen—in this humid, steamy, stained story of the transmigration of souls.

Endless Dreams and Water Between is a feature film with four fictitious characters sustaining an epistolary exchange in which their “planetary thought” is woven with the physical locations they inhabit, visual and aural characters in themselves: the island of Manhattan, the island of Majorca, in Spain, and the islands and peninsula that form the San Francisco Bay Area. The characters’ reflections and dreams enact what could be described as “an archipelagic mind,” linking worlds, time, and space.

La Intolerancia en el Jardín de las Mentiras y el Pecado (The Intolerance in the Garden of Lies and Sin) recounts the rupture of the relationship between friends due to the ambition of the prized object. The baroque and the renaissance are stylistic references that Bobe uses in his compositions and this will be no exception. Mythology, Botticelli, a black ephebe, and The Three Graces are the ingredients that make up this work.

Based on a Swedish folk tale, The Sausage tells the humorous story of two sisters, three wishes, and a calamitous obsession with a sausage. The Sausage is the first completed episode of Fairy Fantastic!, a fairy and folk tale series presenting gender fluid adaptations of classic tales.

Taking its title from the sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey—the treacherous spirits whose sweet voices lured sailors to their death upon the rocks—Sirens presents four hallucinatory scenes, visual puns authored by a mischievous agent. Mocking laughter that shatters the illusion and causes viewers to doubt the assumptions implicit in their viewing disrupts stills of what seem to be unpopulated landscapes.

Experimental but heartfelt, all fiction + mostly video.

Featuring: phantoms, parakeets, some animation, much smoke, Super 8 hi-jinks, several actors.

A myth illustrated on the stones of a waterfall, the reconstruction of a great communal hut, the attempt to recover objects kept for years in a museum in Manaus. In IAUARETÊ, Waterfall of the Jaguars the Tariano Indians, of the North-western Amazon, after decades of missionary catechism, decide to make a cultural record for future generations.

Direction: Vincent Carelli

Photography: Vincent Carelli and Altair Paixão

Editing: Joana Collier

Production: IPHAN / Vídeo nas Aldeias

"Love at first sight, one night, down at Silverror’s Saloon!" Mickey R Mahoney and jonCates direct Silverror’s Saloon, the next film in the 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) Glitch Western series of films and games. Written by Emily Mercedes Rich and jonCates, this experimental film queers, glitches, and questions the Western film genre. We encounter characters caught in a glitched cinematic magic moment: a love scene. First dance with a stranger. Home and far from home.

For their first collaboration, artist duo eteam and the Hong Kong Puppet and Shadow Arts Center have developed a powerful opera-play that combines ancient stories and analog story-telling technologies with the digital tools and scripts we have available now.

This title is only available on Kip Fulbeck Selected Videos: Volume Two.

It is in Pan’s playground where one hears lyrical words that echo in deep realms of imagination where one can dance with inspiration.  But it is not all fun with fulfillment. The playground has vegetation with thorns that inflict the brain with a fever…

The Island Weights is a two-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the two channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.

Based on a Swedish folk tale, The Sausage tells the humorous story of two sisters, three wishes, and a calamitous obsession with a sausage. The Sausage is the first completed episode of Fairy Fantastic!, a fairy and folk tale series presenting gender fluid adaptations of classic tales.

Taking its title from the sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey—the treacherous spirits whose sweet voices lured sailors to their death upon the rocks—Sirens presents four hallucinatory scenes, visual puns authored by a mischievous agent. Mocking laughter that shatters the illusion and causes viewers to doubt the assumptions implicit in their viewing disrupts stills of what seem to be unpopulated landscapes.

A myth illustrated on the stones of a waterfall, the reconstruction of a great communal hut, the attempt to recover objects kept for years in a museum in Manaus. In IAUARETÊ, Waterfall of the Jaguars the Tariano Indians, of the North-western Amazon, after decades of missionary catechism, decide to make a cultural record for future generations.

Direction: Vincent Carelli

Photography: Vincent Carelli and Altair Paixão

Editing: Joana Collier

Production: IPHAN / Vídeo nas Aldeias

"Love at first sight, one night, down at Silverror’s Saloon!" Mickey R Mahoney and jonCates direct Silverror’s Saloon, the next film in the 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) Glitch Western series of films and games. Written by Emily Mercedes Rich and jonCates, this experimental film queers, glitches, and questions the Western film genre. We encounter characters caught in a glitched cinematic magic moment: a love scene. First dance with a stranger. Home and far from home.

This is a rhythmic invocation of the ancestral fire, in which dazzling flames reanimate bones and natural elements. This is the shining of color.

Little Spirits is about a young girl who plays a trick on a friend, unaware or uninterested in the possible consequences.

This title is also available on Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 2

Phalloi Phaerie emerges from the wood. Forest nymphs with carnivorous flowers begin their mating rituals in a playful, polymorphously perverse return to arcadia. A meeting of Jack Smith and Sid and Marty Krofft in an early Kate Bush music video on a sylvan summer day in southwestern Pennsylvania.

In the center of the rising Temple, the history, myth, ancestral and infrareal combine their rhythms into the cycle life of ritual cinema. Trance and shamanic visions arise into the ancient Teocalli.  

In this surreal experimental narrative, there’s something wrong with a patch of sky. As it travels over Southern England, objects cast up into it come down hugely enlarged, bloated. Meanwhile in London, the patch is in fact a troubling scab on a crippled old man’s head. As the scab develops, all he can do is wait, going through the changes, led on gently by the idiot-savant son with his childlike multiple identities.

We hear a female voice with a subtle Jamaican accent speak about her life. Sometimes we see an image; a bird, two birds, fire, someone digging a giant hole, cake, a red anvil with an effervescent essence, and sometimes we are left in the dark with only our imaginations in this sound-driven video. Along the way we consider the nature of human existence, the transfiguring power of sex, and the physicality of words.

At this time even the flowery wars are ready to begin and the flowery atavism begins to flash. The flowers, the skulls, the moon and the sun are ready for the sacrificial trance. Part of Tonalli.