Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Combining high definition and Super 8 footage, Lampedusa is composed of interwoven narratives based on a series of real events. In 1831, a volcanic island suddenly erupted from the sea a few kilometers off the southern coast of Sicily. An international dispute ensued, as a number of European powers laid claim to this newfound “land”. The island receded below sea level six months later, leaving only a rocky ledge under the sea…

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An extraordinary adventure through the interior of the human body; or the discovery of an alien landscape of unprecedented beauty.

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Constructed from the audio archive of the 1961 Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea: In the encounter with the Hubula people, this work reflects a parallaxing image of the histories of field recording, ethnographic film, and colonialism.

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Caniba is a fresco about flesh and desire. It reflects on the discomfiting significance of cannibalism in human existence through the prism of one Japanese man, Issei Sagawa, and his mysterious relationship with his brother, Jun Sagawa.

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Works with sound recordings of Dion McGregor, who became famous for talking in his sleep.

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Maya is a photographer. She takes photos related to the eyeball. Kunio is a neurosurgeon and an independent documentary film director. He is interested on making a documentary about Maya. A mysterious eyeball collector watches for Maya's own eyeballs.

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For her medium-length project Into the Hinterlands filmmaker Julia Yezbick collaborated with the Detroit-based performance group The Hinterlands, with her camera engaging in their kinetic actions. Produced during Yezbick’s time with the Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, her immersive and unadorned footage pushes bodies and the documentary form to abstraction, aided by sound artist Ernst Karel’s dynamic sound mix.

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A throng of believers all crowd together in front of a stage. The speeches have ended. They are enraptured. The 'new' Indonesia.

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A documentary about a group of pilgrims who travel to Nepal to worship at the legendary Manakamana temple.

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An archaeology of both the ocean and the image, this piece reworks the sequences of Leviathan that were shot in and from the sea. Projected at 1/50 of the speed at which they were recorded, it simultaneously slows movement and animates the still, revealing a liminal universe at the threshold of human vision. In this flux, one beholds a netherworld of aqueous forms that appear in one frame and disappear or transmogrify into something else in the next.

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An experimental portrait of the North American commercial fishing industry through the lens of GoPro cameras placed on a fishing vessel off the coast of New England.

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A static camera records the coming of day as a flock of sheep cross the titular stream in a painterly pastoral to restore the senses through a tradition of old.

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An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, revealing a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.

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Interweaving stories of Western collectors, Muslim traders, African artists and intellectuals, and the filmmakers themselves, the film focuses on a remarkable art dealer from Niger named Gabai Barre. It follows him all the way from the rural Ivory Coast to East Hampton, Long Island, where he bargains for a sale. The film shows how (through occasionally hilarious and frequently fantastic tales about the art objects) he adds economic value and changes the "meaning" of what he sells by interpreting and mediating between the cultural values of African producers and Western consumers.

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