Director
After Scarcity is a sci-fi-essay film that tracks Soviet cyberneticians (1950s-1980s) in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy, an attempt that finds traction today as a way of defying financialization. If the problem of socialism was time loss—too much bureaucracy, too much conversation, too many meetings—a socialism-on-speed, counting electricity plus statistics, could move past this limit. The film recounts the history of a moment in time when, against all odds, it seemed feasible to plan for the whole system at once—collective ownership of global resources with the programmed and networked efficiency of Wal-Mart.
Director
Cinema devolved into the slow-motion industry: spectacles repeat. Ultima Ratio speeds up by slowing down the image-fix. Traversing the crime-enriched Bekaa valley, the camera uncovers the age-old industries of hashish, models for altering what we see. So too, the camera follows futures, a flash-forwarded optic that seeks to perceive what can be seen anew, cut, particled into vivid fields of matter. “In hashish there is no likeness,” only zero-sites for vision-production then, now as visual senses submitted to the rule of reason. The new reason, as this cinematic skin sees it, is not dead old technology, power and blood, not accelerated nothingness, hype and retro-fascism, but technology, each and every instance, as a talking with the dead – emotions, optics, hashish, radio transmitters, melodramas, fiber optic telecommunications, ideologies – and now, hashish as primitive technology, the Now as a science-fiction beyond the double binds, the bad infinities of u-/dys-topia.
Writer
A volcano spews lava that slowly crawls through the streets of Tehran. Thousands of miles away, an Iranian boy and his dad take a road trip through the American Midwest. Two seemingly unrelated journeys are juxtaposed in this rich meditation on diaspora, memory, and loss.
Director
A volcano spews lava that slowly crawls through the streets of Tehran. Thousands of miles away, an Iranian boy and his dad take a road trip through the American Midwest. Two seemingly unrelated journeys are juxtaposed in this rich meditation on diaspora, memory, and loss.
Writer
Maryam is an Afghan immigrant, living with her young son in Canada. After a fire breaks out in their neighborhood they both become entangled in the consequences.
Director
Maryam is an Afghan immigrant, living with her young son in Canada. After a fire breaks out in their neighborhood they both become entangled in the consequences.
