Natural History

Brooke Dammkoehler’s meditation on the rise to stardom of a glamorous movie idol (modelled after Greta Garbo), draped in gorgeous black & white photography and a tone of delirious grandeur.

The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.

A state employee tasked with photographing road conditions tracks a mysterious man (played by Steve Buscemi) who leaves suspiciously large garbage bags along a snowy country road.

A trio of interweaved transgressive tales, telling a bizarre stories of suburban patricide and a miraculous flight from justice, a mad sex experiment which unleashes a disfiguring plague, and the obsessive sexual relationship between two prison inmates.

In 1977, when she was four years old, Albertina Carri's parents vanished without a trace, victims of Argentina's brutal military junta. In this fresh and politically daring film, the young Argentinian filmmaker attempts to unravel the mystery, piecing together her memories and fantasies in a quest to understand her parents' untimely fate.

An odyssey about two women trying to stop a young girl from biting the Host at her First Communion.

A dramatic story of childhood trauma and mystical bonds telling of Matthew, a young boy haunted by a traumatizing memory of witnessing a suffocation death of another child (possibly a friend or playmate). He withdraws and has nightmares about what he saw. He struggles to relive his experience through play and fantasy in the face of an increasingly hostile world while his uncomprehending parents struggle to understand him. During one of his frequent trips to a building site near his house, Matthew meets Anna, a strange mysterious girl with whom he forms a mystical bond that forces him to confront the memory that has obsessed him.

The only black American family in Maine has a son, a blind bodybuilder, who falls in love with a white "mer-boy."

Ordinary people of both sexes, and of varying ages, races and ethnicities, tell stories that sound familiar. But each is a construct to plumb reality in a considered, theoretical, and, ultimately, playful fashion, as Delson continues the filmic experimentation begun during her collaboration with Jill Godmilow an the genre-bending Far from Poland.

A priest wakes repeatedly from a dream in which he sees attractive, partially-disrobed man in his room. The hypnotic repetition and anxiety of his vision gains tension from the minimalist score.

Traumatized by a spate of college student suicides, a young woman grapples with her loss by diving deep into her own disturbing subconscious.

Christine Vachon’s story of a man haunted by the grotesque memory of having stepped on a dead animal's carcass is an artistic tour de force starring Michael Sean Edwards (the voice of Richard Carpenter in Todd Haynes’ Superstar) and a young Steve Buscemi.

A cunning storyteller presents a curious tale of blackmail to two friends invited to lunch. As the story unwinds we realise that the blackmail plot is merely a cover-up for a far more sinister plot involving revenge and murder. This fast-paced, ironic black comedy provides the spectator with a challenging puzzle of events whose meaning always lies just beyond the frameline.