utopia

Dr. Splits, a brilliant scientist, creates a time machine, but a critical error results in the fragmentation of his personality into distinct and competing parts. As these divided aspects clash with one another, an internal conflict unfolds. The ultimate question remains: which personality will emerge victorious in the end?

A flock of memories activated by various musical exercises, to strike the past to the heart, to build something utopian: the future, a sonic architecture. Music as a tool, transcriptions of YouTube tutorials as poetry, percussion exercises as descriptions of reality.

A group of artists settle in a swamp on the banks of the Indre River. Meanwhile, a voice describes a utopian world.

Following a pandemic, the irreducible spectators of the Cinémamecque are forced not stay in their favorite cinema. The director of the Cinémamecque decides to keep his moviegoers inside the theater, in quarantine. These confined cinema-goers, tested negative, are determined to take advantage of the new confines that projection allows them. What if the cinema was a drunken boat of new horizons?

Short documentary about Emmen, one of the first planned cities in the Netherlands, a home for workers in the textile and metal industry. Emmen was one of the first planned cities in the Netherlands, a home for workers in the textile and metal industry. A city as a social experiment: it had to become the embodiment of a committed, happy and united society. But the planned idyll did not last long or perhaps never existed. A poetic, science fiction-like quest for a never materialized utopia.

Produced for the 1972 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Lanscape, Supersurface was the first of five films planned by Superstudio as a "critical reappraisal of the possibility of life without objects." Superstudio envisioned a "network of energy and information extending to every properly inhabitable area". According to the artists, this network would bring about the destruction of objects as status symbols, the elimination of the city as an accumulation of formal structures of power, and the end of specialized and repetitive work as an alienating activity. "The logical consequence," they write, "will be a new, revolutionary society in which everyone should find the full development of his possibilities".

The first episode in a series of “adaptations” of poet Bernadette Mayer’s book Utopia that artist Beatrice Gibson envisions to undertake over the next decade, producing a series of small, quotidian films that together, and over time, will constitute an epic. This first film is drawn from Chapter 4, entitled “The Arrangement: of Houses & Buildings, Birth, Death, Money, Schools, Dentists, Birth Control, Work, Air, Remedies, and So on” and was shot at home during the pandemic.

In 1923, a group of rebellious workers from Rjukan, Norway, led their families deep into the Brazilian jungle to build a utopia. Instead, they found ruin, suffering, and catastrophe. One survivor warned those back home, calling it “a hell beyond compare.” A century later, a filmmaker sets out to reconstruct the forgotten story. After many false starts and setbacks, the project becomes a utopia of its own, not an ideal society, but a fragile dream that seems almost impossible to bring to life.

In 1997 the Argentine filmmaker Fernando Birri returned to his home country to film a documentary on the 30th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara and the relevance of utopias at that time. Carmen Guarini decided to record those moments. A rough edit of this film was hidden away on a fragile VHS tape for twenty years. Today, these images come to life and shed some light on the life of this Latin American poet and master filmmaker, who, at the age of 92, still refused to give up on his own utopias.