Movies: Vivian Ostrovsky

The film is a travelogue of sorts. Ostrovsky’s personal family footage meets the archives of Soviet propaganda footage. The result is a kind of Khruschev-era mix with a collage of Soviet music and a voice-over of my reminiscences of the Cold War era....

Funny collage of sea, sun and ice. A show from the beach with skiers, tigers, mermaids and much more....

With a super 8 camera from Paris to Berlin, from Amsterdam to Rio, from Jerusalem to New York shooting only at night. Hungarian crooners, Indian tribal chants, opera arias, and an occasional samba make up the sound track of this “hand-held” diary....

This video was made for an exhibition in Rio on Paulo Werneck, one of Oscar Niemeyer's collaborators. Werneck was the first to introduce mosaics in Brazilian Modernist architecture. P.W. shows the context of the artist's work in Rio and Belo Horizont...

Originally a text in fragments, more or less biographical, of different characters. Crossed stories, mixed times, memories and inventions. Coming from the voices encountered. They look like text like sisters. They are the voices of memory, the shado...

In 10th. Century Japan, Sei Shonagon, lady-in-waiting to the Empress, wrote of the goings-on at the Japanese court. Fearing vengeance, she hid these secret notes in her pillow. UTA MAKURA is also a collection of humorous observations on modern-day Ja...

A trip to Russia by two filmmakers in 1990, forms the bulk of this twin-screen projection, finished some 9 years later; Their super-8 footage mixed in with archival material (and a sprinkling of the classics such as Vertov and Eisenstein)....

"A sketch on skis - in memory of my father, an urban snowman [...] December 2012"...

Going through my mini DVs shot over the past decade, I rediscovered a forgotten night sequence of Chantal Akerman and Sonia Wieder-Atherton leaving a brasserie where we had dined together in Montparnasse. The excerpt stayed with me for a while. This...

Statues of dictators fall in the wind of history, a very pissed off Silvana Mangano is surrounded by scenes involving Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, who are themselves in conversation with Truffaut's 400 Blows and Medvedkine's Happiness....

A new short film by Vivian Ostrovsky remembering Chantal Akerman, beginning with their first meeting in the early 1970s. Using her own footage of Chantal Akerman, the filmmaker remembers a few moments that illustrate Chantal's personality. Forty year...

Brooklyn boxers and boucing balls.Catalan dancers and Provençals dogs. The Douro, the Danube, Biarritz, Brazil. In super 8 colours and black and white sounds....

Starting out with super 8 reels of Paris catwalks I shot in 1979/1980, what was supposed to be an experimental short on couture culture turned into a study of style. Deleuze’s definition of style: “creating a foreign language in one’s own language”, ...

Readings. Heinrich von Kleist / Robert Walser. Contiguous. They talk about imagination. Walser imagines Kleist, Kleist nobody, but Penthesilea. In the new desert islands that are the enclaves of flowers of the city. Roses of sidewalks. Wild spaces w...

A month in the country. In summer, a group of friends rent a house in southern France. People come and go, making their way through chickens, dogs and cats. Playful sounds and a wacky collage of music make up the soundtrack....

Portrait. She dances in the center of her area. Obscure to the look. She abandons us to her limit. Turn. Count the chips. Conjugate. Turn on yourself, in a blind echo. Cross the already deserted space....

An observation of humans' and animals' table manners as they gulp down breakfasts, lunches, cocktails and dinners in a variety of situations....

A single-screen version of the Portraits / Mirrors multi-projection. Featuring portraits of: Aloual, Gaël Badaud, Raphaël Bassan, Yann Beauvais, Jean-Michel Bouhours, Gérard Courant, Berndt Deprez, Bertrand Gadenne, Mythia Kolésar, Christian Lebrat,...

A felinosophy of life....

Based on a correspondence between Brazilian artist Ione Saldanha and the filmmaker, this portrait was made for an exhibition at the MAM (Museum of Modern Art) in Rio de Janeiro. Ione Saldanha (1919-2001) was a contemporary of Lygia Clark, Sonia Delau...