Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life

Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life 1995

7.70

Jakob arrives at the Institute Benjamenta (run by brother and sister Johannes and Lisa Benjamenta) to learn to become a servant. With seven other men, he studies under Lisa: absurd lessons of movement, drawing circles, and servility. He asks for a better room. No other students arrive and none leave for employment. Johannes is unhappy, imperious, and detached from the school's operation. Lisa is beautiful, at first tightly controlled, then on the verge of breakdown. There's a whiff of incest. Jakob is drawn to Lisa, and perhaps she to him. As winter sets in, she becomes catatonic. Things get worse; Johannes notes that all this has happened since Jakob came. Is there any cause and effect?

1995

Identicals

Identicals 2015

4.10

Identicals is a highly unconventional romantic thriller: an obsessive love story stripped down and re-arranged into the looping logic of a nightmare.

2015

Kelly + Victor

Kelly + Victor 2012

5.20

When Kelly meets Victor on the dance floor of a Liverpool nightclub, the attraction is instant. After wandering through the night they find themselves at her flat, making love with a passion and urgency that neither had experienced before. Both Kelly and Victor are struggling to get by as best they can, while the people around them are choosing illegal lifestyles; she is escaping a brutish former lover, while he is being dragged into a world of drugs. It's when they make love that their darker instincts take over.

2012

Bodysong

Bodysong 2003

5.10

Documentary footage from various sources, set to music. Showing the whole of human life, from birth to death and beyond.

2003

Innocence of Memories

Innocence of Memories 2016

5.40

Orhan Pamuk – Turkey’s Nobel laureate for Literature – opens a museum in Istanbul. A museum that’s a fiction: its objects trace a tale of doomed love in '70s Istanbul. The film takes a tour of the objects as the starting point for a trip through images, landscapes and the chemistry of the city. A film about Istanbul, love, memory and loss.

2016

I Could Read the Sky

I Could Read the Sky 1999

4.20

The film concerns an old Irish immigrant living in London who is looking back over his life. He recalls his early life in the west of Ireland, his first love, emigrating to England, searching for his brother Joe, who disappeared after he emigrated several years previously. His marriage and wife's later depth is also remembered.

1999

Is There Anybody Out There?

Is There Anybody Out There? 2023

6.00

While navigating daily discrimination, a filmmaker who inhabits and loves her unusual body searches the world for another person like her, and explores what it takes to love oneself fiercely despite the pervasiveness of ableism.

2023

The Gold Machine

The Gold Machine 2022

5.00

Inspired by the writings of Iain Sinclair, a father and daughter trace the footsteps of their colonialist ancestor to the Peruvian jungle. Their journeys flip between continents and centuries to produce an original mediation – part documentary, part fiction – on fate, family and the search for Eldorado.

2022

The Cardinal and the Corpse

The Cardinal and the Corpse 1992

1

‘The Cardinal and the Corpse' marks the beginning of Petit’s loose partnership with writer Iain Sinclair. There’s a nod towards narrative here involving a book-search launched by graphic novelist Alan Moore and a dealer (the dapper but barking Driffield), but it’s little more than an excuse to showcase a number of authors and other miscreants.

1992

Looking for Light: Jane Bown

Looking for Light: Jane Bown 2014

5.80

In the almost six decades that Bown worked for The Observer, she became renowned for insightful, highly individualistic portraits of the famous. Some of these portraits are now regarded as classics of the genre - Samuel Beckett, Queen Elizabeth II, The Beatles, Bertrand Russell, Mick Jagger and Margaret Thatcher. For the first time, she spoke candidly about her career and revealed how her very personal approach to the taking of portraits is informed by a deep sense of loss and abandonment. This private portrait is enhanced by a series of insightful interviews with Jane’s peers, family, colleagues, friends, and of course some of her subjects.

2014

Shock Head Soul

Shock Head Soul 2012

5.00

This cross-media documentary (film, installation and website) explores the life and writings of Daniel Paul Schreber. Now famous as an Outsider Artist, Schreber was a successful lawyer, who in 1893, started to receive messages from God via a ‘Writing Down Machine’ that spanned the cosmos. He spent the next nine years confined to an asylum. This is his story.

2012

Wavelengths

Wavelengths 1999

1.00

A woman searches for emotionally safer sex via gay bars and the internet.

1999

No Greater Love

No Greater Love 2009

1

View the pace of life at the Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity in Notting Hill, home to a cloistered order of Carmelite nuns.

2009

Everybody Digs Bill Evans

Everybody Digs Bill Evans 1970

1

June 1961, NYC: legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans has found his musical voice and created the perfect trio, including bass player Scott LaFaro, said to be his soulmate through music. A residency at New York’s Village Vanguard culminates in the live taping of two of the greatest jazz records of all time in one night. Ten days later, LaFaro dies in a car crash. Numb with grief, Evans stops playing.

1970

Ray-Gun Fun

Ray-Gun Fun 1998

1

A young boy's games lead him into an uncanny dreamworld. This film uses intricate digital effects to create Chinese boxes; worlds within worlds.

1998