movie program one

In 2015, Finnish/Egyptian artist Samira Elagoz placed an ad on the classified site Craigslist seeking men who would agree to let her videotape their awkward first encounters. Elagoz soon found herself in the homes of several eccentric men in Amsterdam, Berlin and Tokyo, including a magician, a porn director, an aging sadist, a dance instructor, and a webcam exhibitionist. With a keen eye for detail, Elagoz captures these fraught connections and the spaces they unfold within.

Adult siblings Julian (Noel David Taylor) and Sunny (Sophie Kargman) live in a suffocating codependent relationship, rarely leaving their cramped apartment. Their domestic routine is suddenly threatened when Sunny begins dating David (also Noel David Taylor), who looks exactly like Julian. Under the hypnotic influence of TV infomercials, brother and sister begin to unravel. Amanda Kramer's triumphantly weird, low budget psycho thriller is a funny and unnerving study of fractured identity. Through a minimalist narrative, uncanny compositions, and an almost playfully nightmarish tone, Kramer examines Sunny's desperate struggle for independence and its psychic fallout.

Ursula K. LeGuin moved her first steps as a writer in the male-dominated literary industry of the 50s. She was then one of the very first women writing science fiction, a genre held in disregard by the Hemingway-loving editors of the time. Rebellious and determined to prove that another kind of literature was possible, LeGuin kept conjuring up alternative worlds and universes that finally were acclaimed as a literary revelation by an increasing number of readers. Arwen Curry’s directorial debut is a careful reflection on LeGuin’s legacy as a world-builder and the result of an almost decade long conversation with contemporary authors such as Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville as well as Ursula K. LeGuin herself.