Religion/Spirituality

The Passion According to Sevilla focuses on the celebration of Holy Week in Seville, Spain. Statues of the Virgin and other religious images and figures are carried through the streets on parade floats.

A psychedelic portrait of the founding theorist of Christianity.

The story of Paul the Apostle’s life, ideology, and influence is told by piecing together 20th century 16mm and cassette propaganda, board games, animation, reenactments, Roman Empire doom metal and covers of Catholic liturgical music. The gentle Paul themes of flute, acoustic guitar, and mellotron contrast with the Demonic Roman Empire themes of electric guitar, drums and synth. Performance artist Linda Mary Montano and Usama Alshaibi portray Paul on his journey.

Animal Attraction is a documentary about the relationship between people and animals that questions the way we project our hopes and desires onto our pets, and ascribe human qualities and attributes to their gestures. The video was inspired by the plight of the filmmaker who was frustrated by the obnoxious behavior of her cat, Ernie. As a last resort, she gave in to a friend's suggestion to contact an animal communicator. This is her journey with interspecies telepathic communicator, Dawn Hayman, from Spring Farm CARES, an animal sanctuary in upstate New York.

A thirty-three minute video odyssey documenting one woman's search for the miracle of the Virgin Mary. A must-see for recovering Catholics and their families and friends worldwide. From Italy to Portugal, from France to Georgia, from Iowa City to Peru, Miracle recovers a newly-minted set of the Seven Deadly Sins on the way to immortalizing the latest modern religious trend: "Spiritual Tourism." Rated S for satirical.

This is the contained power of the sacred seeds, the vibration of the ancient seeds of corn and their passage through an ocean of pulsating luminosity. A germinal liturgy of holy seeds.

A four-part documentary, Yãkwá shows the most important ritual of the Enauênê-Nauê Indians (Brazil). For seven months every year, the spirits are venerated with offerings of food, song, and dance so that they will protect the community. In The World Outside the Rock, the Yaõkwá festivities open with the Enauênê-Nauê preparing for the big fish-catch by making salt, canoes, and fish traps. In Dataware’s Revenge, groups of men leave the villages for two months and build dams on forest waterways to catch fish as they return from spawning.

This is the invocation to the gods, the incense to the gods. A kinetic dance to the gods. Behold the hieratic nature of Tonatiuh (The Sun) and the ferocity of Tlaltecuhtli (Goddess of the Earth) raising her agitation from the white smoke of the burned Copalli, Mesoamerican aromatic resin, sacred resin that tears celluloid with smoke, white hair, on the dark background of the world.

For the Least is a short documentary about American Catholics who marched to Guantanomo to bring spiritual comfort to the prisoners and an end to the torture they endure. In December 2005, Catholic Workers--people of faith following the tradition of Dorothy Day--marched over 70 km in the hopes of entering the prison. Ultimately, although they could not actually visit the prisoners, they camped outside the Cuban military limit, fasting and praying for the detainees. The video is in the format of a letter written to the U.S.

At this time even the flowery wars are ready to begin and the flowery atavism begins to flash. The flowers, the skulls, the moon and the sun are ready for the sacrificial trance. Part of Tonalli.

This is the liturgy of the sacred fangs, a forgotten syntax of ancient scripture. In the secret of the ritual fangs the holy syntax used to be a dance. A germinal dance of the language.

After the screening of his film Wai'á rini, the power of dream in other Xavante villages, the people of Aldeia Nova from the São Marcos reservation asked Divino to make a film on the same ritual, the Wai'á ceremony. In this ceremony the young men are initiated into the spiritual world to develop their curative power. This is a new experience for Divino, as he has to shoot in a different village, but also find a way to try new tricks and to develop his editing skills.

Various languages.

Direction and photography: Divino Tserewahú

Out of the mouths of rural boys, finding the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin in Afghanistan.

The Grandmother recites the Mourners' Kaddish over her granddaughter.

An experimental documentary comprised of regional vignettes about faith, force, technology and exodus. Eleven parables relay histories of settlement, removal, technological breakthrough, violence, messianism and resistance, all occurring somewhere in the state of Illinois. The state is a convenient structural ruse, allowing its histories to become allegories that explore how we’re shaped by conviction and ideology.

The Bible Belt is exactly what its name implies: a belt attached to a bible that comes with a sturdy brass buckle, in the name of "Jesus", dipped in gold. We've created a special television spot of a televangelist selling the belt. Edited as a typical day of channel grazing and zapping, the televangelist plays between "real" television preachers and scrambled porn.

The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity is a documentary about the search for four lost treasures buried on a single farm in Missouri. These treasures include a Spanish explorer's gold, silver from the Civil War, mysterious stone carvings, lost texts, and a wife's attempt to heal her husband and protect herself and her children. Part personal documentary and part historical essay, The Disappointment traces the patterns of cultural forgetting etched in the landscape of the Austin Farm.

As the AIDS epidemic took hold in the early 1980s, self-help guru Louise Hay created a space for healing called the Hayride. Drawing hundreds of gay men confronting a deadly and stigmatized disease, Louise promised that they could overcome AIDS through self-love. Some said this early new age wellness movement was unscientific and harmful. Others who were suffering said that Louise healed them. In the face of a deadly pandemic and government neglect, resilience takes unusual forms, and for Louise Hay’s circle, intimate forms of reckoning were transformative.

This is the invocation to the ancestral god of the underworld, the ancient annihilator, which preserves the ritual inertia of the bones and stones.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.

This is a rhythmic invocation of the ancestral fire, in which dazzling flames reanimate bones and natural elements. This is the shining of color.

By asking a group of space physicists the unanswerable, Semiconductor reveal the hidden motivations driving scientists to the outer limits of human knowledge. In an attempt to find meaning within the question, they open a Pandora's Box of limitations within science itself, revealing their own philosophical confines. Issues of faith, medicine and the laws of matter are raised to illustrate the infinitely complex universe we live in.

“Trypps #7 (Badlands) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman's LSD trip in the Badlands National Park, before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell's unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence.”

-- Michael Green, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

ḤARAM is an essay film portraying the urgent contemporary situation at the Haram Al Sharif/ Noble Sanctuary in the Old City of Jerusalem reflecting on the growing Temple Mount Faithful movement whose goal is to build the Jewish Third Temple on this holy landscape and in turn to assert Jewish sovereignty over this holy Muslim site.

Director and Editor: Cynthia Madansky
Cinematographer: Michele Paradisi
With Nazmi Al Jubeh and Avital Itzhak
Sound Design: Binya Reches
Graphic Design: RRNR Studio

Set between Swaziland and South Africa, in a region still struggling with the divisions produced by an apartheid government, Greetings to the Ancestors documents the dream lives of the territory’s inhabitants as the borders of consciousness dissolve and expand. Equal parts documentary, ethnography and dream cinema, herein is a world whose borders are constantly dematerializing.

Part of paraconsistent sequence series and the hauntology series.