Memento Mori

memento mori is a layered exploration of the total photographs captured over the course of a lifetime – over 100,000 in total. This personal archive, the dizzying documentation of a life, represents a plurality of subjects, objects, thoughts, dreams and experiences, forming an encyclopedic index of the possibilities of sight.

Matthew's heart stopped beating on the tattoo parlour table. Now, his parents hold their dying boy. But in their hands they also hold the fates of others: the promise of new lives, and death postponed. With astonishing access and remarkable intimacy, Memento Mori carries us headlong into a world of hope lost, and hope returned. An elegy to the beauty of life in the shadow of death.

An intimate view on suicide, its taboo and its effects on two different families and a friend.

Follow in real time the peregrinations of a small pack, prisoner and resigned, recount death like a children's tale, share the twilight between tranquility and terror. Film the fence as one would a still life.

Paul comes out of the hospital where, after a series of tests, his doctor tells him that he only has a few more days to live. Devastated by this news, he decides to hit the roads of France.

By marking the grave of an NN with the word Chosen, the Animero has sealed a pact with “the devil.” Now he must do whatever it takes to keep his promise to find the head of an unnamed body. A dramatic allegory about the armed conflict in which death—and the dead—mark every action and every day of life with: Remember that you will die.

In 1983, a scientist in isolation resurrects a dead colleague.

When Michael is introduced to his friend's new girlfriend, her presence releases a ghost from his past.

Tells the story of a teenage lad developing fear of death after a series of unrelated deaths in a rural area in Metro Manila.

Winner of the Best Short Film at the Hamburg Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in 1995, Hubbard’s highly personal experimental work, Memento Mori, is a moving, queer meditation that individualizes the immeasurable collective trauma left in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. Stylistically, Hubbard powerfully departs from the small film gauge formats that dominate his documentary work, instead utilizing widescreen Cinemascope that serves to illuminate the enormous scale of loss for each individual that has perished. Through the artful juxtaposition of universal imagery of death and ritual, deliberate close-ups of a human skull to the scattering of ashes, Hubbard’s dream-like elegy transports the viewer to a deep, universal state-of-consciousness that anyone that has lost a loved one will instantly recognize. The resulting depth of emotion and empathy serves as both a mournful prayer and an indelible filmic monument to the dead.

Viewed from the world of Roger Ballen. Ballen is renowned for his confronting and bleak black and white portraits of marginalised South Africans. Melle van Essen follows in Ballen’s footsteps by creating 'Living' photographs with fixed frames and strong black and white contrasts with great emphasis on composition.

A study of light and shadows, framing and composition with no clear narrative. A visual essay on silence and the passing of time.

A stop-motion meditation on the inevitability of death, dedicated in loving memory to Gravy, the Nebelung gremlin kitty.

In 1959, a group of intellectual “Rightists” from colleges and universities in Shenyang, and criminals from prisons, arrived in the desolate area of western Liaoning Province. They wanted to build a railway here for a mine. Taking the fate of Yin Shaoyao, a lecturer at Liaoning University, as its focus, this film records this group’s experience of being labelled as rightists, of “Reform through Labour”, of being starved, and killed. Their personal files reveal the details of their transformation: their personalities encouraged them to betray each other, incriminating materials were put in their files, and their political lives were destroyed. Ideological reformation killed their spirit, while physical labour and hunger destroyed their bodies. The film also records how people who resisted were suppressed and what happened to people’s humanity in this most cruel of environments.

After a tragic event, Maxime Cavanel (Nicolas Couchet) will sink into alcoholism, drugs and solitude. He has now only one idea left in mind: "take revenge”, a terrible descent into hell awaits him. "A life of vengeance is an anticipated death… "

Laurent, a painter, observes the performance of the dancer Marguerite and immediately feels drawn to her beauty and being. He invites her to his studio and the two fall in love. Unfortunately, Marguerite is already married to Stelio, who soon finds out about the affair. Stelio seeks out the hypnotist Pizarro for revenge, and the story takes a deadly turn. (Stumfilm.dk)