Fast Dreams

Vincent P. Falk is Fashion Man. Clad in brightly colored suits; Vincent twirls on Chicago's many bridges, performing fashion shows for passing tour boats. As he spins his way through the city, tourists and locals alike are left to wonder just who is this strange man. Over the course of one boat season, we follow Vincent and begin to unravel the mystery that surrounds him. We discover that the man behind the fashion, having come through the travails of life, has decided to do what makes him happy. And so, he spins on.

In this film by Aleksandr Balagura, Alain Fleischer, with the help of Danielle Shirman, his partner and collaborator, speaks about his art, reads a chapter of his new novel, and reluctantly comments on the Zen "Story of the Ten Oxen", which in the film becomes a Story of Ten Horses and is illustrated by way of Eadweard Muybridge's sequential stills. "WE ARE ALL IMAGES OF THIS FILM" is a paraphrase of Alain Fleischer's answer to my question, "What is an image?". Photographer, filmmaker, writer, and more - "a total artist" -, Alain Fleischer has the rare quality of seeing the world with the freshness, curiosity, and imagination of a child that explores reality by play, who sees, finds, establishes (or perhaps re-finds and re-establishes) the secret links between objects and phenomena, often invisible to the adult eye. It is precisely his constant readiness to get involved in an artistic adventure, combined with the awareness of the method, with a mature and concrete analysis of the material and the means, that allows him to create pure, unpolluted images. Images perceived at their origin, as it were "for the first Jme". The ability and talent to transform reality into art, and, vice versa, to restore to art the quality of reality, is a central feature of his work. WE ARE ALL IMAGES OF THIS FILM is the result of three meetings with Alain Fleischer, which took place in his Italian home on Lake Bracciano, where he introduced me to the various aspects of his art. I tried to find the internal links between the motifs, themes, images of his works, and to combine them in a single flow, a single current, driven by the spiritual need for creation hidden behind Fleischer's ostensible "French rationalism". For this purpose, I used motifs that are very dear to me: the Zen Story of the Ten Oxen (which in the film becomes the Story of the Ten Horses, read and commented on by Alain Fleischer at my request), and sequences based on the stills of Eadweard Muybridge. Aleksandr Balagura

Young W. A. Mozart is hosted in a villa near Bologna, where he has to graduate. There he gets in touch with "normal" boys, falls in love for the first time and tries to escape his destiny of young genius.

Hamama is nearly a 90 year old female healer and living legend in the Emirates. Blessed with an incredible gift of healing she has to face her fragility and age that threaten to impact her work and her livelihood. Her skills are incredibly valuable to hundreds who continue to visit her each day where she lives in Al Dhaid in Sharjah, seeking her essential cures. Yet, Hamama struggles with the responsibility of providing the care that is so greatly needed, while she confronts her own personal hardships. How does Hamama bear all of these burdens yet still remain one of the most successful and in demand Shaman of her time. A question tested and answered in this captivating visual testimony.