In 1988 Cynthia Beatt and the young Tilda Swinton embarked on a filmic journey along the Berlin Wall into little-known territory. The film CYCLING THE FRAME is now an unusual document. 21 years later, in June 2009, Beatt & Swinton re-traced the line of the Wall that once isolated West Berlin....
An architect is assigned to modernize a squatted house in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. But then he meets a young student who is member of a grassroots initiative trying to preserve the quarter. He falls in love with her, although this puts him into conflict with his job. Following his heart,...
The notorious pirate ruler Madame X places a print ad, calling on women to escape their boring lives and promising "gold, love and adventure" to all who come aboard her ship, the Orlando. A motley crew including a housewife, diva and artist (played by Yvonne Rainer) embark on a quest for...
"Constant" is a journey through the social and political histories of measurement. For most of recorded history, the human body was the measure of all things. “Constant” asks what led measurement to depart from the body and become a science unto itself. The film explores three shifts in the...
In 1988, Tilda Swinton toured round the Berlin Wall on a bicycle - starting and ending at the Brandenburg Gate - accompanied by filmmaker Cynthia Beatt. As Swinton travels through fields and historic neighborhoods, past lakes and massive concrete apartment buildings, the Wall is a constant presence.
The whole world in one film: Robert, a young Dane, is shanghaied in Marseille, and via Acapulco he is abducted into the South Pacific. There he kills his father and seduces his mother. Then he explores the changing world. The end finds him in a Polynesian village, where the chief bestows him with a...
Computer operator Faber works on securing computers for big companies and banks. His private life is rather dull until he meets a strange women, Juliet and falls in love. Her friend convinces Faber to exploit his knowledge to rob a bank.
Both a documentary about the city of Berlin and a personal essay about alienation and foreignness in this city. Cynthia Beatt is thought-provoking and raises questions on a range of issues relating to language, politics and culture.
He Saw Her Burning, which is based on a 1983 performance, is a provocative narrative collage, a surreal juxtaposition of two narrated texts. A man and a woman begin their respective tales: He saw a woman burst into flames on the street; she saw an American soldier go berserk and drive a tank into a...
This film with a marked ethnographic nature, which was filmed without a pre-established plan and with a script that crosses the lines of documentary and fiction, tells the story of a group of five Germans who arrive on a remote island in the South Pacific called Parapara and belonging to Vanuatu....
Clonetown 1974 to 1979: a terrorist defector named Charon sits on the edge of oblivion and commentates on the imminent putrification of an abducted car dealer.