Andreas Bachmair

Oscar Haffmans

A young man in a tram is asking a bit too much from a stranger.

Restore the classical definition of planet! Bring back planet Pluto! The solar system is twelve!

The Island is a short film shot entirely on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast of Malaysia that became the largest and longest-operating refugee camp after the Vietnam War. The artist and his family were some of the 250,000 people who inhabited the tiny island between 1978 and 1991; it was once one of the most densely populated places in the world. After the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shuttered the camp in 1991, Pulau Bidong became overgrown by jungle, filled with crumbling monuments and relics.  The film takes place in a dystopian future in which the last man on earth - having escaped forced repatriation to Vietnam - finds a United Nations scientists who has washed ashore after teh world’s last nuclear battle. By weaving together footage from Bidong’s past with a narrative set in its future, Nguyen questions the individual’s relationship to history, trauma, nationhood, and displacement.

Fixed and symmetrical shots make up the world where a beast wanders into the different stages of a scientific testing that has been exposed to. Human figures appear in harmless and impersonal spaces where they modify the animal biologically, without uttering words. Nowadays, man only seems to move around a constant improvement, a search for improving the nature that surrounds us, thinking about the possibility to taste a celestial candy.

An experimental and poetic portrait of a woman.

The film takes us through the working day of protagonists, factory workers. Their basic working tool is their body, ready to execute strenuous manual tasks. Day after day the same story, the  same faces, the same spaces, the same tasks. Feeling confined, they seek a sheet anchor, a way out, an escape. They venture into the unknown, dance, drift and float in the air.

Andy Warhol directs a single 35-minute shot of a man's face to capture his facial expressions as he receives the sexual act depicted in the title.

We live with stories. And it's hard for us to give up on these stories, which provide us our identity, a way of understanding ourselves. Reflections from three successive generations are dusted off and presented as remaining fragments. An attempt to archive thoughts on familial history, narrative traditions, human perception and "the story" from known and unknown sources.  "There is history behind it and the history becomes the story and the story becomes the pattern and the pattern becomes rigidity."