Ira Cohen

A new film directed by Ira Cohen and produced by BASTET created from never-before-seen original 16mm outtakes, featuring a new soundtrack composed by Will Swofford with the Expanded Instrument System

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Filmmaker and poet Cohen gets close to one of India's greatest sacred celebrations, the Kumbh Mela. Taking place only once every 12 years, this gathering of holy men is surreal, passionate, and slightly mad.

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At the court of the Yellow Emperor, the Majoon Traveler & Lady Firefly appear in the Hall of Unconscious Magnetism.

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In the 1960s, beat poet and experimental filmmaker Piero Heliczer helped shape New American Cinema, and was enmeshed with iconic filmmaker Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground at the very start of their careers. Through interviews with family and friends, found photos, and archival footage, Piero’s daughter, Thérèse Casper, explores the promise and perils of leading an authentic, creative life, and the impact that it can have on the people you leave behind in the process. Wondering if she can make peace with her absent father if she can find a connection to him through his art, she explores the artistic legacy and life of a man she never knew.

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The American composer and author Paul Bowles was a man with a great deal of charisma and influence. When he moved to Tangier, Morocco, in 1949, half the world followed him to the enigmatic city. His marriage with author Jane Bowles was a loving relationship of opposites, even though both were homosexual. Based on exclusive interviews with Bowles shortly before his death interwoven with anecdotes recounted by his friends and co-workers, the film portrays a daring and visionary life as well as a relationship shaped by an interdependency that encompassed much more than sexuality.

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In 1960, Brion Gysin invented the Dream Machine, a hypnotic light device with the power to induce hallucinations, drugless highs, and revolutionize human consciousness. It looks simple enough; a 100-watt light bulb, a motor, and a rotating cylinder with cutouts. Just sit in front of it, close your eyes, and wait for the visions to come. The Dream Machine enthralled mystics and freethinkers everywhere; Kurt Cobain had a dream machine, and William S. Burroughs thought it could be used to “storm the citadels of enlightenment.” With a custom-made Dream Machine in tow, director Nik Sheehan takes us on a journey into the life of Brion Gysin; his art, his complex ideas, and his friendships with some of the most eccentric counter-cultural icons. Taking the Dream Machine as the basis of its explorations, FLicKeR asks crucial questions about the nature of art and consciousness, and imagines a humanity liberated to explore its creativity in complete freedom.

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A harrowing, gorgeous, in-your-face-and-mind 45-minute black-and-white film by Marty Topp, produced by Ira Cohen for Universal Mutant. “Marty Topp’s beautiful film of ‘Paradise Now’ reveals how the theories of revolutionary change and the experience of sexual liberation are not separate paths to the beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution. Practiced together they are a single thrust, encompassing both political action and sensual joy, leading to the dreamed-of terrestrial paradise.

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