Utopia/Dystopia
see all genres ›The eternal struggle to create ideal (or at least halfway decent) socio-political systems has inspired no lack of literary and cinematic art depicting models for better, more equitable societies. At the opposite end of these utopian dreams are dystopian visions in which society's worst extant tendencies warp into nightmares of fascistic control and unisex fashion. Why conjoin these apparent opposites? The division between "utopia" and "dystopia" is rather narrow, it seems. One person's notion of utopia often leads to a dystopia for others.
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Genres / Science Fiction / Utopia/Dystopia
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Teknolust
Academy Award® winner Tilda Swinton plays four roles in this award-winning science fiction film about Rosetta Stone and her three Self-Replicating Automatons which she clones from her own DNA. Though they look human, the SRA cyborgs were bred as intelligent machines and are immortal. In order to...Watch Movie
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Fata Morgana
Possibly Werner Herzog's most experimental work, FATA MORGANA defies categorization. Is it a narrative feature? A documentary? A metaphysical essay on film? As the director himself has noted, it regards Earth and its creatures as if from the curious, alienated viewpoint of interplanetary...Watch Movie
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Mock Up on Mu
Notorious Bay Area kino-renegade Craig Baldwin tops his earlier found-footage operas SPECTRES OF THE SPECTRUM and SONIC OUTLAWS with the rapid-fire pulp serial-cum-political-tract piss-take on California's major industrial complexes: military, entertainment and religious. Hitting upon everything...Watch Movie
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Riki-Oh
Ricky is sentenced to prison for the pulpy murder of a lowlife responsible for his girlfriend's suicide. In the dystopian future of 2001, the prison system has been privatized and run by monsters far worse than the criminals they keep locked up. Ricky finds himself up against the Gang of Four,...Watch Movie
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Tokyo Gore Police
Blood and guts are the ultimate weapon! In the near future, the Tokyo Police Corporation is locked in a bloody war with the "engineers." These genetically modified super-criminals can bio-fuse their open wounds with weapons, turning self-mutilation into a combat form. Ruka,...Watch Movie
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It Happened Here
In IT HAPPENED HERE, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's brilliant re-write of history, Germany is winning World War II and Nazi troops occupy England. Pauline Murray, an apolitical Irish nurse, is transferred to London, where she slowly realizes the horrifying reality behind...Watch Movie
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The Remnants of Civilization and the Dawn of Anxiety
Two parallel films, unfolding simultaneously: a deadpan comedy about the problem of happiness. In THE REMNANTS OF CIVILIZATION, archeologist Karl unearths a lost civilization and meets his doppleganger. In THE DAWN OF ANXIETY, researcher Madeleine presents her utopian...Watch Movie
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Metropolis
Incorporating more than twenty-five minutes of newly discovered footage, this 2010 restoration of METROPOLIS is the definitive edition of Fritz Lang’s science fiction masterpiece. Backed by a new recording of Gottfried Huppertz’s 1927 score, the film’s dazzling visual design and special effects...Watch Movie
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Glen and Randa
Independent filmmaker Jim McBride follows a hedonistic, innocent young couple as they roam the post-apocalyptic world in search of a fabled, unspoiled city of dreams. The record of the journey is GLEN AND RANDA, a primitive, desperate odyssey by the last bewildered survivors of an atomic...Watch Movie
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SpaceDisco One
In this sequel of sorts to both LOGAN’S RUN and 1984, George Orwell's Winston Smith runs into the daughters of Logan 5 and Francis 7 as they're busy running amok in a park, shooting laser beams at one another. A roller-skating rink in space, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA references and a Ministry of Truth...Watch Movie
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Altitude Falling
In the year 2029, everyone has been injected with an identification chip originally for medical emergencies which the corporate run government uses to track travel patterns, purchases, political affiliations, relationships and diseases. Greg Forrester perfected this technology...Watch Movie
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Virtual Love
A love story for the 90s: Valery falls in love with an identical twin, a virtual reality scientist, and finds she can have a more intimate relationship with him through the computer screen than in person. Or is it really him? Commissioned by ZDF German Television, VIRTUAL LOVE features a number...Watch Movie
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Evergreen
An exploration of the crisis of grand narratives in the face of the photographic image. It is a self-deconstructing story of an immortal traveler's undefinably temporal/spacial journey through inhabited theme parks and museums, islands of time, abandoned cities. A civilization's perpetual...Watch Movie
