Oblivion: The Original Texts

Man of Marble

February 1977 •Polish

A young Polish filmmaker sets out to find out what happened to Mateusz Birkut, a bricklayer who became a propaganda hero in the 1950s but later fell out of favor and disappeared.

The Scars

March 2019 •Basque

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

Phantasia

March 2024 •

X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Arkhé

May 2023 •Spanish

“Archeology” and “Archive” share the same roots. Both words come from “Arkhé”, the Greek word for “origin”. In the ruins of buildings, lost forever by earthquakes, as in the depth of the archives, we dig. What happened the morning of the big earthquake? The morning of September 19th 1985 is fading away in our memories. These recordings have never been seen. Unedited images of the catastrophe dug out by the archaeological adventure of an archivist that suffered with them. He dug and suffered until he could no longer see.

Titanic's Fatal Fire

April 2017 •English

The sinking of the Titanic sent shockwaves around the world and started debates that continue to this day. But new, explosive evidence from the most unlikely of sources may finally lay all arguments to rest and reveal, for the first time, the full story of what possibly doomed the "unsinkable" liner. Join us as we unveil recently discovered and never-before-seen photographs of the super ship that exposes shocking clues that investigators and historians once dismissed but can no longer ignore.

11 septembre : En direct du cockpit

January 2011 •French

Apollo 11: The Untold Story

July 2006 •English

Nearly forty years after the moon landing the men on the mission reveal what really happened. On how close the mission came to disaster.

Hélène Berr, une jeune fille dans Paris occupé

December 2013 •French

14-18, les tunnels de guerre

January 2017 •French

Un día por Málaga

June 2024 •Spanish

Emilio Pascual, a historical figure of Andalusian cinema from the early 1900s, appears in today's Malaga with the mission of bringing the first documentary filmed in Andalusia to its first screening.

Guiding Star

December 1987 •Japanese

In April 1985, I started to make a film with my friend Kamioka as the main character. But even after three months, the whole film was still unknown. I started to work alone with the camera. One day, the rabbit he keeps at home gives birth to a stillborn baby. As he buries her under a tree in the garden, it made me think of his father, who died the year before. He is no longer with us, but only the gaze he left behind. And so I set off on a journey. In a town in the Hokuriku region, he met a woman who once appeared in one of his films. When I dozed off on the train to Tokyo, she appeared to me in a dream and tells me that I will soon find the exit. Back in Tokyo, I told Kamioka that I'm going to start filming again. I came back into the room, turned on the microphone and pressed the flame against the lens.

Enjoy the Silence

June 2023 •Spanish

Haunted by the weight of an unfinished project, an architect battles insomnia by silencing distractions within his home. In the depths of silence, he confronts inner demons, leading to a haunting journey with a destructive outcome.

The Exact Shape of The Islands

November 2012 •Spanish

For many, the name Malvinas/Falklands evokes an absurd war between England and Argentina in 1982. For Julieta Vitullo, the protagonist of this film, this tragic history becomes deeply personal 25 years later when she suffers a loss associated with her search to uncover that past, unfolding into a life-affirming struggle for renewal and rebirth. This film tells the story of two trips, one made in 2006 and the other in 2010. In the space between one trip and the next, between past and present, between the public and the private, between what can and cannot be told, the movie reflects on the possibilities of conveying extreme life experiences, presenting landscapes and sounds that suggest subtle contours of that shape, 'The Exact Shape of the Islands.'

Les Suppliques

July 2022 •French

Since the defeat, the Nazis, who were the masters of the occupied zone, and the French State, which had been ruling the so-called free zone since Vichy, ordered the Jews to take a census. From the spring of 1941, whether they had been French for several generations or naturalized for a few years, foreigners who had taken refuge in France or stateless people who had been driven out of their country, they were put on file, arrested or threatened at any time. Some wrote to the administration, or directly to Marshal Pétain, who seemed to them to be the last resort. These requests are called Suppliques. Men, women, sometimes children, tried as best they could, by all means, to loosen the trap. They address themselves to their executioners, but they do not know it.

The We Should Game

September 2023 •English

Fame driven Ken Dean becomes the subject of a documentary when he attempts to start a pornography company. Following the failure of the company, Ken uses his father's religious music to start a Christian rock band but finds himself trapped in a gay conversion cult.

Dear Jinri

October 2023 •Korean

"Dear Jinri" explores the daily concerns and thoughts of actress and singer Sulli, whose real name is Choi Jinri, where she talks about her childhood, career and more in this interview she gave in 2019.

Einstein and the Bomb

February 2024 •English

What happened after Einstein fled Nazi Germany? Using archival footage and his own words, this docudrama dives into the mind of a tortured genius.

Dear Esther

April 2020 •English

In 1989, a woman writes a letter to her mentor. She reminisces about a life-changing campaign they spearheaded to save a historic home, Irving Gill's Walter Luther Dodge House in Los Angeles, twenty years prior.

Manufractur

January 1985 •German

A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.

Lo fugaz de la mirada

December 2024 •Spanish

Fifty years have passed and Julio still hasn't managed to get over the disappearance of Miguel, the actor starring in a film they made together when they were young. In an attempt to reconstruct what happened, Julio sees some tapes he filmed while they were shooting and decides to write a farewell letter to Miguel's ghost.