Religion/Spirituality

El jardín del amor (The garden of love) is a celebration of life and love, religious ecstasy, where animals, humans and nature coexist in harmony.

Get ready for a smorgasbord of mishaps perpetrated by misfits choking on missteps in life… Add to this a dash of bitter memories sprinkled with love affairs gone stale, and you’ve got a heap of slop for mental indigestion. 

This movie is food-for-thought you can choke on; an eye-filling, ear-stuffing digital dish that induces gasps and quite a few giggles.

Rebecca gazes into the crystal ball. It is afternoon in a Brooklyn neighborhood of industrial buildings. Rebecca has a way with words just as words have a way of seeking her out. The crystal ball intensifies this. The A train rumbles over the Manhattan Bridge. Rebecca gazes into the crystal ball. Nighttime in a suburban neighborhood of burnt out buildings. Words have a way with Rebecca just as Rebecca has a way of seeking them out. The crystal ball intensifies this.

A collage piece. Oppositions of agony and ecstasy are explored. Morticia trims yet another rose stem, while Bugs Bunny takes up Zen. Guilt-wracked, a nun tries furtively to cleans herself of imagined sin. Or attain spiritual release. Various divas flail to no avail. Lips, lipstick, frozen lips. Shakuhachi music by Chris Moran sets the mood, when there isn’t a thunderstorm raging.

"I’ve been raised with stories of the medicine men in my family. A bundle that was used successfully to heal people. Stories of bear spirits that took care of us. I don’t know about my Scottish side as much, but I did know some of the last names of my ancestors over there. The Sinclairs and the Forsyths. I fell down a Google rabbit hole one day when the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft came out. There was one case with a last name and a location close to my Great Grandmother’s hometown that made me pause. It was a white magic case, protecting cattle, and talking with fairies.

The violent overreaction to 9/11 and to the revolutions of the 1960s cannot be explained only with fear and politics. Franz Hinkelammert, a German-born liberation theologian, economist and philosopher, brings religion front and center to the discussion in a unique way. The emptiness and senselessness felt by those at the margins of a free-market utopian ideology has been filled by an extreme millenarian Christianity and other religious fundamentalisms that justify murder and torture as preemptive self-defense.

A young man of the "Modern Age" ponders sits alone to ponder "prehistoric life" and discovers that he has fine-tuned those primitive instincts in the Times he now lives. This is "food for thought", heated, stirred and serve

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure is a fourteen-minute experimental video that unfolds through a series of short episodes. "To describe Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke's new video as ironic doesn't do it justice.

This is the ritual consecration to the moon, on whose eroded surface the colorful blood of the fruits is poured, which is also our pulsating blood disseminated in the celestial body of the moon. Sparkling bleeding body that crosses the dark space of our present times. Part of the Lunar Films series.

As If the World Had No West tells of the journey of a young woman who travels through the desert and who, through her relationship with the Mirabilis, ancient plants, listens to the cosmos. She listens to her elders, the earth, fire and air. The drought calls the rain, the ashes show the way, the plants tell her the stories of colonization, of the beginning of the world when the desert was still scrubland and there were trees and flowers.

The Waiãpi videomaker Kasiripinã decides to show white people the documentation he did on his people in Amapo. He presents and comments on three celebrations that represent episodes of the myth-cycle of the creation of the universe. The theme of the Tamoko celebration is war, and it presents the death of a cannibal monster. In the second celebration, Pikyry, the dancers act out the spawning of fish. The last is the Turé, the dance of the flutes, in which the Waiãpi reenact the death of the tapir in honor of the creator, Janejar.

Directed by Kasiripinã Waiãpi.

This is a fragment of the sacred lizard in desecrated times, an intermittent tour of the flashing body of the Cipactli lizard. Part of the Cipactli series.

"In 1997 I went to Benares, India to study the Hindu practice of burning the bodies of their dead on the Ganges ghats. My purpose was:

1. To become more at ease with death, a hidden western phenomenon;

2. To de-fuse fear around seeing death;

3. To watch how Hindu elders congregate in Benares to die since dying here in this holy city guarantees "moksha", no rebirth. Visiting temples and ashrams for the elderly allowed me to observe how they use their time and prepare for their eventual passing.

Among the Xavante of Mato Grosso, the Wai’a is an important stage in a male initiation ritual that happens once every 15 years. Wai’a: The Secret of Men documents the ceremonies that prepare young men for contact with supernatural forces. The young people of the village directed the filming and assisted with the editing to make a record for the next generation.

Directed by Virginia Valadão.

In Xavante with English subtitles.

The post-Platonic cave in whose interior the nuclear catastrophe to come is disseminated.

50 doves fly out of a window, one by one. Some escape in a rush, some take their time and seem to be hesitating. The Dove symbolizes new hope and new beginnings after a disaster, as in the biblical story of the flood.

The search for one’s true identity, the need to create, to find a proper place in the universe – this is the pursuit of the individuals portrayed in this narrative meditation… It is that quest to find meaning in existence… The ability to think outside of the "self".

This title comprises Saints and Sinners (2015), Soul Searchers (2014), and His Soul to Give (2019) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

In 1971, graduate student Gloria Orenstein receives a call from surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that sparks a lifelong journey into art, ecofeminism, and shamanism. A wife and mother of two writing her dissertation for New York University, Orenstein never expects to have her life transformed through female friendship.

“Drawing on the ancient Nahuatl concept of the animating soul or life force, Tonalli engages the ritualistic powers of the cinema, summoning fire, flowers, and many moons into a frenetic and mesmerizing in-camera collage. Here, amid thickly swirling images and textured abstractions, the gods of creation and fertility manifest, dissolving into iridescent colors and dense, corporeal rhythms.” NYFF59

Medicine Bundle is about a bundle that was used in my family to heal my Great Great Grandfather from a smallpox epidemic and a life threatening wound from a gatling gun used against him during the Battle Of Cutknife Hill in 1885. The bundle was again used in 1918 when my Grandfather contracted the Spanish Flu as a baby. It was buried in an unmarked grave to protect it from grave robbers, but the spirit within the bundle has continued to protect our family from more modern psychological effects of colonization like depression.

Strip / Musrara is part of Assor's ongoing “Strip” series, set in Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood. It is an attempt to create a living map that is both collective and subjective – a plurality of combined perspectives. Not a map of the exact measurements of the neighborhood, but of the experience of moving through it, together and alone, locals and strangers, intersecting and drifting apart.

The projection and screens in this installation are access points meant to connect the present to an ancestral past. Evoking the ritualism of Aztec cosmology, this experience recalls lumbreras – circular excavation holes in archeological sites, such as the recently found Tzompantli (skulls ceremonial rack) at the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The use of obsidian crystal as a nuclear filter in the chamber is also essential.

Prophecies of doom, disaster and political catastrophe envisioned by some of the world’s most famous psychics between the 1960’s and the year 2001 are conjured up through 3D-animation, industrial films, text and historical footage -- the sum of which combine to form a visually stunning meditation on the forces that are driving us into a dark, paranoid and uncertain future. Soothsayer reconsiders yesterday’s daunting and sometimes whimsical predictions for the future after they’ve been outpaced by time. 

Tortillas are an ancestral and sacred food, our transmuted corn. The circular nourishment that represents the luminous and colorful side of the moon on which our life is nourished. This is the cosmic dance of the colorful Tortilla with the hyperkinetic fire that sustain our bodies and souls. Part of the Lunar Films series.

Gallup, New Mexico, in the American Southwest, has hosted the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial annually since 1922. Ceremonial promotes native traditions, advocates understanding and cooperation among all peoples of the Americas, and contributes to northwest New Mexico’s regional economic development.