Paradocs: where art and documentary meet
Paradocs showcases the year’s non-fiction film art, in which visual artists and filmmakers present their explorations into non-fiction filmmaking.
This year’s selection of 16 titles explores the world through bold formal experimentation, genre-bending, and unexpected perspectives. In Susanne Regina Meures’s art feature film Eternity, a hedonistic escape to a glacier is interrupted by apocalyptic climate change and existential anxiety—with the film adapting the performance art of Florentina Holzinger. In The Case Against Space, Graeme Arnfield offers a reconstruction of the first “strike” in space, reframing the astronaut hero through a critical lens on capitalism and surveillance. Johann Lurf’s Forever...Forever presents an overwhelming vision of the cosmos in motion, with an ever-accelerating timelapse of the sun’s path filmed over 22 months—to be shown on 70mm in Eye Filmmuseum.
The selection also includes works by several collectives. Ãsheghetam by Filmsaaz blends computer animation, fiction, and documentary in a kaleidoscopic portrait of queer love in Tehran. In Together, ecofeminist art collective NEOZOON uses archival and social media footage to explore the tension between communal life and the desire for private property.
The Calf Doll, dir. Ankur Hooda