Aryan Kaganof

Fugitive Jack is doing everything in his power to evade both the police and gangsters. Assuming he’s in the clear, he moves in with Keiko, a pornstar whose early life in an abusive family still haunts her.

Brooding pimp Sugar Man escorts his three ladies of the night (Sugars) to various clients on Christmas Eve in Johannesburg, South Africa. He takes out a hit on a supposed romantic rival, while the ladies deal with some of the pitfalls of the job. All are pursued by their own demons and regrets at this festive time of year.

In the urban intensity of Johannesburg, Jesus is a special woman. She has powers she herself doesn’t understand. After her friend Mary arrives at her doorstep having been beaten up, Jesus has to choose whether to stay and nurse Mary or take revenge on the deadly Giant.

"Love is the only thing subject to negotiation in feature film debut which betrays admiration for the formal rigidity of Straub and Zwartjes." "The film, KYODAI MAKES THE BIG TIME, caused a commotion in the Netherlands when it won the Golden Calf for Best Film (the Dutch Oscar equivalent). The film went on to win the Jozef Von Sternberg Prize For Innovative Narrative Structure at the Mannheim Film Festival." "KYODAI MAKES THE BIG TIME – What was the public’s reaction to this? Your first film – is it like your first time having sex? Which I guess is a subjective question, but I’m thinking experimental, unnerving, liberating, a learning experience, a humbling experience, leaving you wanting more ? SEX SHOULD ALWAYS BE LIKE YOU'RE HAVING SEX FOR THE FIRST TIME."

The film opens with a rubber-clad woman stepping sensuously out of a limousine. The camera lovingly closes-up on her stilletoed foot... She enters a dark desolate warehouse, and meets two men, who proceed to chain her up and worship her body. Originally projected on three screens simultaneously. Music by legendary noise musician Merzbow.

The film follows three rapists in South Africa, who live in a rape culture. Sexual, verbal, political, moral and psychological rape is common practice.

Twentysomething innocents Jacqui and Martijn move to Amsterdam and immerse themselves in the intense and drug-laden underground club scene. Life turns out to be far more complicated, difficult, and dangerous than they bargained for. Their relationship is tested - repeatedly.

This film was shot entirely in Rotterdam and shows the German couple David (Helmut Berger) and Tanya (Sheri Hagen) who are kept by Ludwig (Udo Kier), David's half-brother. Ludwig has some dubious business to do and so he is staying in the port for a while. David and Tanya have followed him and are staying in a hotel. They pass the time committing robberies. When David finds a photo of an attractive young man among the booty of a robbery, his life is turned upside down. He will have to close the door on a suffocating past.

Based on the writings of: J.G. Ballard, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Henry Rollins, Roberta Lannes, Edmund Emil Kemper, etc. The structure of this film is literally that of the title: ten monologues adapted from various fiction and documentary sources which combine to produce an unsettling work that does not pretend to analyse nor to understand the serial killers.

Howard and Selene are two English-speaking foreigners living in Amsterdam who begin a casual affair that turns serious and then starts to deteriorate. It is the second part in Aryan Kaganof's Urban Wasteland Serial.

Experimental feature based on the play "Ritual for a Poet in B Natural" by the American poet Kain. The film is the final part of the "Urban Wasteland Serial", Kaganof's trilogy about egocentric men, who are basically very lonely. This feature is about a black man who kills his white girlfriend. During profound debates with the female prosecutor and his girlfriend, it gradually becomes apparent that he really wanted to kill his mother. "The Turner Revelation" is a complex style experiment about race, education, prejudice and fierce sexual urges in which Kaganof uses a violently moving camera and extreme close-ups to visualise the desolate inner landscape of the protagonists.

But happily Kerkhof the uncompromising iconoclast is back. With his newest film RON ATHEY: IT’S SCRIPTED (the original title RON ATHEY: SO MANY WAYS TO SAY HALLELUJAH had to be changed because there is already a 2 hour documentary in production under this title) he has delivered a convincing artistic achievement. Those without strong stomachs will probably find the overwhelming amount of injection needles and razor blades a bit too much, but the film is so cleverly constructed that one cannot look away.

In this documentary Kerkhof takes the viewer into a bizarre underworld, the sub-culture of blood art and body piercing performance art. Kerkhof's camera registered a performance by the American blood artist Ron Athey which took place during the FREAK ZONE festival in Lille, France in May 1997. The camerawork is so freaky one would almost suspect it is under the influence of heroin. The film includes interviews with Athey as well as shocking live fragments wherein Athey works his face over with injection needles. The crazy, maniacal clamour of the HIV positive priest/performer gives us insights into the motives and goals of this group of masochistic performance artists. Somebody who entertains his audience by cutting and stabbing himself; is this art? Who can say? What is beyond question is that Kerkhof's masterful use of the camera and editing not only obscures the images but also the boundary between art and unbearable filth.

I think at bottom, that the structure of the film is the structure of the person's mind who made it, and if that is a mind that is striving for effect because it is striving for effect, the film will be empty, however interesting it happens to be on the surface. If it is a mind that has been able to organize its own experience, and if that experience is cohesive and of one piece, it will be a poetic film. Arthur Miller

“We cannot abstain from watching the revelation of a being that would be an object neither for herself nor for any other gaze and yet which would effect, in the mystery of her own invisibility, the condensation of all objectivity.” Aryan Kaganof plays with the contradiction and relationship between the vulnerable, private realm and the voyeuristic, objectified domain in a film about a young woman's sexual initiation.

The two sides of the end of culture–in all the aspects of knowledge as well as in all the aspects of perceptible representations exist in a unified manner in what used to be art in the most general sense. In the case of knowledge, the accumulation of branches of fragmentary knowledge, which become unusable because the approval of existing conditions must finally renounce knowledge of itself, confronts the theory of praxis which alone holds the truth of them all since it alone holds the secret of their use. In the case of representations, the critical self-destruction of society’s former common language confronts its artificial recomposition in the commodity spectacle, the illusory representation of the non-lived.

What makes "Techno: Space and Flow in the Radical Frame" such an exceptional documentary is the manner in which the interviews are woven into a 50 minute long techno videoclip. The filmmaker has fully exploited all the existing digital video techniques in order to showcase the dizzying possibilities of the medium. Cut-ups and computer effects combine perfectly with the science-fiction images from Ken Ishii's Japanese manga video "Extra" - the best evidence that the techno movement has become an international culture that encompasses the entire globe.

“Click Here to Unsubscribe”, Aryan Kaganof’s latest short film, commemorates the revolutionary values of May ’68, 40 years on. This outstanding film had its world premiere in Johannesburg on March 15th 2008, a few days after its author settled in Sweden. We were very proud to see our name in the acknowledgements at the end as we’ve always emphasised the cinematographic legacy of Guy Debord, one of this resurrection’s spiritual leaders, in Kaganof’s work. The film starts with a quotation from Debord dating back to 1956 about cinematographic cut-ups, which were also essential to our latest film. Kaganof has re-invented the cut-up technique for this film, transforming the “random” aspect of the editing into an area of reflection and synthesis

Short film in which a group of children get to know the Enge Knijperman (the Grisly Pincher Man) who falls madly in love with the Onderstebovenvrouw (Upside-down Woman). However the 220-Volt-Witch and the Toilet Slave set out to spoil things. Experimental short by Aryan Kaganof, made under his birth name Ian Kerkhof.

Short documentary on Japanese noise artist Merzbow by South African filmmaker Aryan Kaganof. Filmed on location at the Kamakura Temple, Japan, 1997.

This documentary explores kwaito music developed in South Africa in the late 1990s and includes interviews with musicians, DJ's and producers as well as music clips. It was made for Dutch television and later sold to the SABC for repeated broadcasts.

Vertiginous documentary, shot in effective black-and-white, treats two painful histories. The first is a love story about a truck driver who, on his way from Johannesburg (South Africa) to Luderitz (Namibia), is haunted by thoughts of his girlfriend and their recently severed relationship. His memories are expressed in an often recurring scene, in which songs by Alec Empire, Macy Gray and Robert Schumann roughly tell the story. This small history is alternated with the tragic fate of the Namibian Heroro people, many thousands of whom died early last century in concentration camps that had been set up by the German colonisers near Luderitz. The depiction of this history is cruder and more poignant, with slanting frames, odd camera angles and a multi-layered sound sculpture. The dilapidated barracks and officers' quarters are the last remnants of the miscarried, so-called civilisation projects in Africa.

Documentary about and with the Japanese electronic composer and artist Merzbow.

A devastating assault on conformity culture, neo-liberal politics, literary pretension and the all-around follies of the Western world. Using, ironically, anti-art strategies—appropriation, violation and collage—Kaganof splinters the division between the high and the low, revelling in the contradictions and absurdities that transpire in a life lived crossing borders. Filmed on location in The Hague September 1995 at the Crossing Border Festival.