Ernst Karel

She was born in a cave, more than 60 years ago. Now she lives in a village, with many children and grandchildren to look after. Sometimes, she dreams of her dead mother calling her home – to the cave.

Trapped in museum archives, Ancestors bend time and space to find their way home. History, spirituality, and the law collide as tribal repatriation specialists fight to return and rebury Indigenous human remains, offering a revealing look at the still-pervasive worldviews that justified collecting them in the first place.

Experience the bustle of Istanbul street life through the eyes of three stray dogs – Zeytin, Nazar and Kartal.

A short documentary that captures the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, The Yellow Bank takes you on a contemplative boat ride across the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China. Filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki, who lived and worked in Shanghai nine years earlier, uses the eclipse as a catalyst to explore the way weather, light, and sound affect the urban architectural environment during this extremely rare phenomenon.

In northeastern China the Songhua River flows west from the border of Russia to the city of Harbin, where four million people depend on it as a source of water. Songhua is a portrait of the varying people that gather where the river meets the city, and an ethnographic study of the intimate ways in which they play and work.

Explores the landscape and stories within the community of Krabi, Southern Thailand. A major tourist destination in Thailand, the filmmakers want to capture the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the more recent past and the contemporary world collide, sometimes uneasily.

Four young travelers embark on a trip to Kanchanaburi to see the museum, but pass the time in other ways when they find out it's closed for refurbishment.

An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, revealing a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.

In 2045, a filmmaker lands on Mars and tries to make a film. “Home… Far away from home”, he recalls faces of people, thus a collection of moving images emerge.

Constructed from the audio archive of the 1961 Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea: In the encounter with the Hubula people, this work reflects a parallaxing image of the histories of field recording, ethnographic film, and colonialism.

A portrayal of a hidden enclave of auto shops and junkyards fated for demolition in the shadow of a new baseball stadium in Queens. The film observes this vibrant community of immigrants – where wrecks, refuse, and recycling form a thriving commerce – as it struggles for daily survival and contests New York City's development scheme.

Combining high definition and Super 8 footage, Lampedusa is composed of interwoven narratives based on a series of real events. In 1831, a volcanic island suddenly erupted from the sea a few kilometers off the southern coast of Sicily. An international dispute ensued, as a number of European powers laid claim to this newfound “land”. The island receded below sea level six months later, leaving only a rocky ledge under the sea…

In Myanmar’s first and only country-wide environmental movement, Indigenous women activists and punk rock pastors defend a sacred river from a Chinese-built megadam through protest, prayer, and Karaoke music videos.

Electro-Pythagorus is an intimate and subjective portrait of the late Martin Bartlett, the Canadian electronic music pioneer who studied with Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, John Cage, and Pandit Pran Nath. His contribution as an interdisciplinary composer, educator, and founding member of Western Front, though undoubtedly extensive, is in danger of being erased from cultural memory since his death from AIDS in 1993. Navigating an array of archival materials including letters, correspondences, notebooks, personal photos, and a huge body of unreleased music and field recordings held at the archives of Simon Fraser University, Electro-Pythagoras is a journey through the evolution of Bartlett’s musical time and space, softly guided by Luke Fowler’s insightful camera and montage—creating an experimental portrait that defies one-dimensionality.

Phases of Matter follows living and inanimate residents of a teaching hospital in Istanbul, moving from the operating room to the morgue, between life and other states, the real and the virtual.

“Ah humanity! reflects on the fragility and folly of humanity in the age of the Anthropocene. Taking the 3/11/11 disaster of Fukushima as its point of departure, it evokes an apocalyptic vision of modernity, and our predilection for historical amnesia and futuristic flights of fancy. Shot on a telephone through a handheld telescope, at once close to and far from its subject, the audio composition combines excerpts from Japanese genbaku film soundtracks, audio recordings from scientific seismic laboratories, and location sound.”—Ernst Karel, Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Brett Story's visionary look at New York City as it braces for an uncertain future.

A static camera records the coming of day as a flock of sheep cross the titular stream in a painterly pastoral to restore the senses through a tradition of old.

A throng of believers all crowd together in front of a stage. The speeches have ended. They are enraptured. The 'new' Indonesia.

Single Stream explores a recycling facility in the Boston area, where hundreds of tons of refuse are sorted daily. Blurring the line between observation and abstraction, Single Stream plunges the viewer into the steady flow of the plant and the waste it treats, examining the material consequences of our society's culture of excess.