Jérusalem : porte de Jaffa, côté Est

The short documentary looks at some innovative approaches to providing services and accommodation for battered women in rural, northern, and Native communities. Filmed in Thompson and Portage La Prairie, Manitoba, and West Bay Reserve, Ontario, the film introduces the women who operate and use various types of accommodation such as transition houses, transition apartments, and safe houses. The shelter on West Bay Reserve is singled out as a project that was built by women for women to stand as a reminder that the Reserve will not tolerate violence against women. A Safe Distance is part of the The Next Step, a 3-film series about the services needed by and available to battered women.

In 2008 and 2009, Clarissa Thieme travelled through Bosnia-Herzegovina, setting up her camera at places where war crimes took place during the nineties. Now she returns to the same locations a decade later: what traces are left behind by a violent past?

Through its rhythmic montage and mix of observational and surreal imagery, Malembe forges oblique linkages between the United States and Venezuela, conveying the strange dissociation of being uprooted, of living between places. As a knife cuts through sky, through snow, and through fruit, quasi-ethnographic footage—with its conventional markers of music, food, ritual—joins with home-movie auto-portraiture of a New England winter, communicating a sense of dislocation at once vertiginously queasy and absurdly comic.

This film is a look at the disappearance of religious and industrial cultures in a small town (Scardovari) located in northern Italy (Po Delta). This erasure, together with the economic situation, pushes the men and women to return to the water to survive. The image as a representation of the memory of a place, of an inner landscape, of a mystery. A narrative that belongs to the world of exegesis, to an infinite world of relationships, of networks where each image enters into correspondence with another, opening up the meaning ever more and breaking the unity of history.

A mysterious light appeared in the city and quickly disappeared.

Like the best USIA films, The Wall distills political events into an emotionally clear and compelling ideological "story". In 1962 Walter de Hoog gathered footage from U.S. and German newsreel sources and crafted this taut short film about the first year of the Berlin Wall. Straightforward, keenly balanced narration portrays Berliners as "accepting the wall but never resigned to it". The extraordinary footage of the first escapes was propaganda enough- His challenge was to make the politics human.

Erik Satie’s work is at the heart of modern music. However, who was Satie? An elusive genius or a visionary misanthrope? The film tries to sketch an identikit of the musician through his notes and the places he lived in. Musicologists mostly agree in describing Satie’s music as inhabited by voids and holes. The long pauses between one musical passage and the other are musical structures unto themselves; therefore, the filmmakers create a dissonant Satie-like universe in which empty spaces are adjacent to eloquent passages. Like a mysterious flower visible only to the eye that is willing to dance with its charm, the film unfolds little by little through mental associations and creative juxtapositions. There are no answers in the universe inhabited by the ghosts of Satie’s creations. Architectural forms and recollections from desires and acts of creative hubris compete to create a new world, which ultimately is the image of a new and more seductive pleasure principle.

Likely in June 1897, a group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

A train speeds through the country on its way to Berlin, then gradually slows down as it pulls into the station. It is very early in the morning, about 5:00 AM, and the great city is mostly quiet. But before long there are some signs of activity, and a few early risers are to be seen on the streets. Soon the new day is well underway. It's just a typical day in Berlin, but a day full of life and energy.

Filmed at the time Hockney was painting Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, Portrait of David Hockney is made up of a limited number of shots, observing the periphery details of his flat and studio. Each view is held so as to focus on its particular qualities and composition and, with the accompanying soundtrack of off-screen phone calls, conversations and musings, builds up a picture of Hockney’s daily life.