El miedo y la esperanza: utopías y distopías en la cultura de masas

Sanctuary

2024

Sanctuary explores queer spirituality and utopian sexualities through the figure of Purusha Androgyne Larkin (1934–1988), a monk, pioneering gay filmmaker, and self-proclaimed cosmic-erotic mystic. Larkin’s 1981 book, 'The Divine Androgyne According to Purusha', challenged repression with a spiritual vision rooted in eroticism and presented a radical path to cosmic-erotic consciousness through ‘extreme’ forms of sexual pleasure. Sanctuary explores Larkin's attempt to form a utopian, pleasure-based spiritual community, and considers the complex legacies of his ideas in queer culture. Shot on 16mm, the film weaves together the voices of Larkin’s friends and followers, creating a portrait in absentia of a figure ahead of his time.

Supersurface: An Alternative Model for Life on Earth

1972

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 Liberal War

1974

The Vietnam War during the JFK years and beyond. Made in 1972 in the filmmaker's apartment, without documentary footage of the war, metaphors are created through the animation of images and objects, and through guerrilla skits. By rejecting the authority of traditional documentary footage, the anarchist spirit of individual responsibility is established. This is history from one person's point of view, rather than a definitive proclamation.

Koho – Future from Forssa

2022

A documentary about Kari Aro, the distinctive manager of Koho -hockey-stick factory, whose visions were to change the world. Story about the fairy-tale -like success, the destructive power of money and Aro's faith in goodness of people.

A Land Betrayed

1963

Produced by Alfred Higgins Productions with assistance from the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Academic Support Center Film Library, Keep America Beautiful, Inc., and Keep Los Angeles Beautiful, Inc., the 1963 short film A Land Betrayed examines the various ways people have spread the “cancer of ugliness” across America and offers call-to-action solutions to combat the nation-wide problem.

Felicidad

2025

The Scars

2019

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

I'll See You Again

2022

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

Leisure, Utopic

2024

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.

Tie Your Plow to a Star

2017

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.

Druid Heights

2015

Druid Heights is a short documentary film by Marcy Mendelson about a wild & wooly place. California’s hidden bohemia. Where sex, drugs and philosophy thrived among the eucalyptus just a few miles north of the Golden Gate.

Beyond the Sea

2020

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.

Wolfsburg - mobility transition town

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In August 2022, a handful of creative activists went to the “lion's den” in Wolfsburg, the heart of the automotive industry, for two years. Their goal: to break up the automotive consensus - to open a window of opportunity through creative campaigns and colorful actions together with militant workers. Their goal was to reach the conversion of production to things we really need - and socialization - the factory for those who work in it. The film, with some action scenes and many interview passages, shows the effectiveness of direct action on social awareness. “It doesn't take many to make a difference,” the activists and workers are convinced. It's about thinking about the social and ecological issues together and acting accordingly.

Flys and Angels

2009

Ilya Kabakov is considered one of the most important contemporary artists worldwide. Born and raised in the Ukraine in the period between Stalin and Gorbatschow he left the country in the 80s. In his Installations and his numerous paintings Kabakov creates a world of its own, which leaves the heaviness of socialist and post-socialist life far behind. The film links Ilya Kabakovs artistic spaces with insights into Russian everyday life, which itself sometimes appears like an installation by the artist.

Star Trek: Insurrection

1998

When an alien race and factions within Starfleet attempt to take over a planet that has "regenerative" properties, it falls upon Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise to defend the planet's people as well as the very ideals upon which the Federation itself was founded.