Movies: Existentialism

What happens to a person's self when she retires and no longer has the job to lean on? Documentary filmmaker Lars Lennart Forsberg asked that question to about ten retirees but never had the chance to complete his project. Olle Häger and Kjell Tunegå...

Zoetrope is a haunting and surreal film set in an apocalyptic, decaying world. Based on Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”, a man is imprisoned for an unnamed crime and tortured by a nameless sadistic bureaucrat. As the chilling nightmare unfolds, t...

Short animation by Mati Kütt...

Two computer engineers are given a strange request by a monk: Compile all 9 billion names of god. One engineer discovers a strangeness regarding the entire situation....

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A short, abstract look at the effects of repetition on the human mind....

As an unwavering natural force, Maj Wechselmann produces at least one film a year, which is guaranteed to show troublesome connections between established power structures and maladjustments for people further down the hierarchy of society; this time...

In a godforsaken landscape, filmed in transcendental black and white, as if fallen out of time, young Ada lives alone with her ill mother. Her rather lonely existence is characterized by hard work and poverty and as her mother's condition worsens the...

Makulatura [which means both scrap paper and pulp fiction in Russian] is a duo of poets Evgeniy Alyokhin and Konstantin Speransky, who have been performing together since 2003. Blending classic literature references, mind-bending introspection, musin...

A story of life and death, featuring Lozinski's six-year-old son Tomaszek and elderly people spending time on the benches of a Warsaw park. Riding his scooter, Tomaszek asks the elderly very adult, though basic, questions, which they are happy to ans...

Set in the mountains of northeast Italy, this film may be considered an observational documentary about rural life. Although this is undeniably the case, at the same time Under the cold stars can hardly be considered a documentary: the microcosm on w...

The young man, originally a Jew, is deeply burdened by the consequences of war, in which he had lost his loved ones. He is considering himself mandatory to take revenge to former commander of the concentration camp where his family was killed, and wh...

A man and his conscience are shown on their way to paradise as the only illusion that saves him the present civilization's hell. However, it is the same people and same events that await him there....

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The theatre company of a forgotten town puts on one last performance to escape the reality of their home fading away into nothingness....

A young adult has an existential crisis among his friends....

A burning flame, black-and-white, opens Nasos Karabelas’ “Osmosis”, a philosophical piece on life, death, loneliness and nothingness. Nothingness, this absence, this lack of something, is a major force in Karabelas’ film. It’s disorienting, just like...

A dream character tries to sell telepathic devices on a dream TV network, only to be confronted with a poetic existential crisis!...

Two kids entangled in the pursuit of young love find themselves colliding with the life of a woman experiencing a crisis....

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