Looking for movies, shows, games, or books similar to J.? Check out these recommendations on mosaic.
A survivor of the Holocaust and an impoverished aboriginal boy have just died. United in their displacement, they become caught up in the flux of transmigration. A nomadic fugue, they wander timelessly among the naked souls of Winnipeg's desolate North End.
Drawing on issues of memory, decay, palimpsest and the rubbing together of archive, fiction and situations, pilgrimage was constructed from found strips of 8mm amateur footage gleaned during a residency in Sydney, Australia. The original footage—a tourist’s voyeuristic, filmed impressions of a pilgrimage in a crowded urban space, where the faithful painfully stumble before the entrance of a temple—was reworked using an optical printer and other hand-made techniques.
Silent 16mm loop made for the situated cinema project at ArtSpace in Sydney, Australia. Composed of old footage from the directors' families.
Hannah is about to have her third miscarriage. Working as a social worker at the Mission to Seafarers, she discovers a stowaway drifting aimlessly in the harbour, and decides to give the young man shelter in a decommissioned, cold war era nuclear fallout bunker that is being redesigned by her partner Antonia to serve as an archive dedicated to hagiographic graphology (the study of the saints through their handwriting). Hannah then retreats to a secluded cottage deep in the woods to confront pain and illumination alone.
Polish land taking in the Jewish dead. Beneath the streets of Warsaw, under the garden of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, are the lost writings of The Ash Kodesh (the holy fire), Rabbi Klonimus Kalmish Szapiro, a Chassidic master who was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. His lost aphorisms float through the hallowed trees and shadow architectures that sheltered jewish fugitives during the Shoah. In the forests, unmarked graves await commemoration; through glitch and balagan we are pulled into subterranean landscapes that emerge as fragmented archives of silence.
The everyday life of a couple at the twilight of their lives.
Silent 16mm loop made for the situated cinema project at ArtSpace in Sydney, Australia. Filmed in an unlit abandoned music hall in Sackville, NB.
"Like a world seen in sleep - a paradox of wakefulness and delirium, part lucid dream, part sunshine through sleep-heavy lids - the treated footage in Solomon Nagler's perhaps/We follows a cycle, with motifs of the ever-present twilight in a steel-blue Warsaw set against what could be (but probably isn't) archive footage, of an old woman asleep on a day-bed and an overgrown, forgotten Jewish Cemetery. Found sounds and field recordings join scratched records to create a soundtrack as plaintive as Nagler's manipulated film stock, a lone voice introducing and concluding the film: I float/ Above the world/ In my sleep/ In my dreams / And every time I dream, I loose half my body. A rumination on loss and memory, or memories half-forgotten, whilst perhaps/We isn't figurative, it offers and account of humanity, peopled by ghosts - undoubtedly the ghosts of the Holocaust: mournful yet never peevish, never mawkish." - Adam Pugh, Programmer Aurora Film Festival, Norwich England.
A short film that weaves together original and archival material to create an ethereal narrative texture, Black Saltwater Elegy intimately links the discordant threads of a popular history of dispossession (Africville) with the solitude of its protagonist's graveyard-shift fantasies. After opening with disquieting archival footage of the demolition of Africville, the film shifts to an austere observational portrait. A palatable sense of the duration of midnight work slowly shifts into subtle gestures that hint towards choreographed events. Eventually, a breech occurs as the protagonist fuses with an emergent dreamscape, where ruined landscapes and a resurrection of an extinct community intertwine. Using the protagonist's disembodied point-of-view, the audience floats above a reconstructed Africville, one forever present, nesting in a bed of saltwater fog.
It's 1903, and Otto Weininger, Vienna's most infamous self-hating Jew has decided to kill himself in a room containing Beethoven's deathbed. He has just published his first book Sex and Character, and has yet to witness an acknowledgment of his self-assured genius. Haunted by the damning statements within his own book, he holds a gun to his head, and takes a leap towards the great unknown.