Drawing upon cinematic memories: restored classics, films about film, experimental works, installations and retrospectives.

IFFR 2018

Bárbara Virgínia

Bárbara Virgínia's only short film is about an orphanage. She adopted a perspective exceptional for her era by filming at the children’s eye level.

Deep Focus

Regained

Aldeia dos Rapazes – Orfanato Sta. Isabel de Albarraque

Frans Zwartjes

In true Zwartjes style, the filmmaker creates an intoxicating, surreal microcosm – this time through a bizarre pantomime featuring extras in heavy makeup.

Behind Your Walls

Hypnotic, repetitive film featuring Trix, Zwartjes' regular partner in crime – and in life. The second 'turtle dove' is a piece of a toy between her fingers.

Birds

Xu Bing

Chinese artist Xu Bing’s directorial debut could be described as <strong>The Truman Show</strong>, but in Real Life. He weaves a story of a boy and a girl in modern-day China out of security camera footage. This by turns shocking and poetic, but always fascinating, experiment reflects on our obsessive visual culture.

Dragonfly Eyes

Pierre Hébert

In 1958, influential film critic André Bazin started his own film project, about Roman churches. He died a few months later, leaving his dream project in the form of photographs and notes. This documentary essay reanimates (quite literally) the uncompleted script. Pondering ruins and restoration, we are forced to acknowledge the passing of time.

Le film de Bazin

To mark his ninetieth birthday, EYE has restored Zwartjes’ very first film, originally shot on Super-8 and long thought lost.

Film II

Matsumoto Toshio

Capturing the fervour of 1960s counterculture in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan's queer classic is a delightfully chaotic film that follows hostess Eddie, the transgender star of Bar Genet, who radiates confidence and sexuality. This 4K digital restoration celebrates its influential director, Matsumoto Toshio, who recently passed away.

Funeral Parade of Roses

Donal Foreman

Donal Foreman had virtually no contact with his father, Arthur MacCaig, who devoted his entire career to documenting the conflict in Northern Ireland. After MacCaig’s death, Foreman re-establishes their relationship by diving into his father’s archive, also taking up the camera – both as a weapon and a means of reconciliation.

The Image You Missed

Rona Sela

An essayist documentary that includes never-before-seen images of Palestinian history  looted by the Israeli army from archives in Beirut.

Looted and Hidden – Palestinean Archives in Israel

Grace Winter

Luc Plantier

To avoid prison, Marquess Robert de Wavrin flees to South America in 1913. There, he not only shoots an array of exotic animals, but also captures unique footage. Gradually, the adventurer becomes a fearless ethnologist and filmmaker, the first to visit many tribes.

Marquis de Wavrin, du manoir à la jungle

Romano Scavolini

Outsider Romano Scavolini debuted in 1966 with what became Italy's most forbidden film. The censorship is hard to understand today, yet this deliciously subversive anti-film about a young man who finds a pistol and seeks a victim still retains its drive 50 years later. Finally, a restored version.

A mosca cieca

Paul de Nooijer

Working with one of his most talented students, Zwartjes animated a series of photos to create an obsessive study of a favourite motif: the female nude.

Moving Stills

Boris Yukhananov

Aleksandr Shein

The 2006 World Cup final wasn’t just a match that ended in a red card for Zinédine Zidane and a loss for France: it was a divinely directed play with a message for humanity. In-depth analysis of the run-up and main players exposes the metaphysical essence of the 'headbutt final'. A totally offbeat football film.

Nazidanie

Mario Abbade

The career of Brazilian filmmaker Neville D'Almeida (Belo Horizonte, 1941) is full of ups and downs, scandals and successes, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll (or samba), censorship and fierce criticism, but also artistic innovation and lust for life. An intriguing piece of Brazilian film history, this documentary is filled with interviews and NSFW film fragments.

Neville D'Almeida – Chronicler of Beauty and Chaos

Nika Autor

For many, the idea of a train implies the connotation of travel in pursuit  of happiness. No surprise then that refugees also like to share in this  dream.

Newsreel 63 – The Train of Shadows

Anton Corbal

Spiritual director Oliver Laxe (<strong>Mimosas</strong>) once again appears in front of the camera. In this debut long documentary by Anton Corbal, we see Laxe working on his new 16mm film while renovating his grandparents’ dilapidated home in the idyllic Spanish village of Vilela.

Santos #2, Work in Progress

Tommy Haines

Andrew Sherburne

It's the last place you'd expect to find a lost film by Georges Méliès: a junk shed in Iowa. The man who saved this film from the incinerator turns out to be an amiable storyteller and custodian of the renowned Brinton collection. An exceptionally sympathetic rediscovery of the film business during the pioneer era.

Saving Brinton

Erik Fox

A film with no action, comprised of outtakes from what might have been action  movies. The landscapes are those of the Vietnam War and the Korean War.

Scape

Frank Scheffer

Rather than a documentary about Zwartjes, Scheffer made a film with him – a feverish dream of his major motifs. And a final moment of eye contact with the camera.

Tribute to Art #2

Oppressive black-and-white study of a man in pale makeup surrendering as apathetically as a zombie from a German Expressionist film to primitive, childlike playing with food.

Visual Training

Luísa Sequeira

Having only made one feature-length film and one short, Bárbara Virgínia was for decades a neglected figure in Portuguese film history. She was, however, the first woman to direct a film during the dictatorship – as well as being the sole representative of her country at the very first Cannes Film Festival in 1946.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025