Returning from the World Cup to his country, the winner of the diving competitions Afsal Deman learns that a military coup has taken place in his homeland. Having never been involved in politics before, the hero, having decided to fight the dictatorship, becomes a journalist. The film takes place in a small Asian country in the late 70s.

Images of moral panic, cult followings and the edges of madness from sex and death.

A short horror film about a young woman who finds herself trapped and tormented by an entity from the great cosmos. She is forced to understand the miracles of childbirth.

300 miles off the coast of North America, in the dark waters of the Atlantic Ocean, a group of ships have come together at the site of the Titanic. Experts from the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France have convened with one goal, to conduct the first full-scale investigation of the Titanic Disaster.

“It may be worse than Portugal,” observes cinematographer Henri Alekan about a Los Angeles film lab while on the set of Wim Wenders’ The State of Things (1984). A legendary production and a transitional work for the New German Cinema director as his work became increasingly international, Wenders set out to make a film about filmmaking as funding stalled on the American production of Hammett. The State of Things deals with American and European sensibilities about cinema, and he enlisted Lachman to film and document the film being made in Los Angeles. Made for German television, completed in 1985 and unseen outside of Germany, Lachman’s portrait of Wenders at work features striking filmmaking and location photography of Los Angeles in the 1980s, and serves as a candid glimpse into European encounters with American culture at the time.

Opening of the Internet Saga Pavilion. At Palazzo Foscari Contarini, Venice. May 6 and 7, 2015.

With the grand opening of Disneyland just a matter of days away, Walt Disney brings us an update on the construction of the new magic kingdom. Winston Hibler narrates scenes depicting the construction on the attarctions and settings in the park as work speeds up to meet the deadline before opening day.

In Mirai (The Abyss), Gabriel Andrés De Simone works with striking economy, drawing on the visual and affective world of Ghost of Tsushima to shape a compact meditation on conscience under pressure. Beginning from a textual intervention, the film opens onto a reflection on what prolonged exposure to violence does to judgment, feeling, and moral resistance. Its brevity gives the work concentration. De Simone introduces friction into the game’s dramatic logic, shifting attention from action to aftertone, the emotional and ethical residue left once repetition has drained experience of its force. What happens when violence no longer registers as rupture but begins to organise the atmosphere of experience? Mirai (The Abyss) addresses that question with notable precision. Its mood is one of quiet corrosion. The work draws its force from restraint and from the sense that deeper forms of transformation often occur incrementally, through attrition. De Simone uses the game world to think through the dulling of response itself: the dangerous normalisation by which the intolerable becomes ordinary.

A coming-of-age tale of two boys trying to survive amidst rampant corruption and gang violence.