Shorts: A Different View

These Silences Are All the Words explores the public libraries of Karachi, Pakistan, as an evolving three-part piece, against the backdrop of the city’s changing linguistic landscape. Focusing on librarians who have been working for years in traditional institutions such as Bedil Library and others, Aijaz tells the stories of an aging intelligentsia. The conversations with both librarians and the library’s users reflect on the shift of language from Urdu and its literary history to the ambition and individualism associated with English. Many of Aijaz’s works similarly offer a perspective on a country sharply divided along linguistic lines. Her work…

In the late 1950s, a woman named Agnes approached the UCLA Medical Center seeking sex reassignment surgery. Her story was long considered to be exceptional and singular until never-before-seen case files of other patients were found in 2017. Watch as preeminent trans culture-makers of our time breathe new life into those who redefined gender in the midcentury.

Luke Fowler’s mother is a sociologist who worked in the politics department at the University of Glasgow. Over the years she wrote down everything she read, learned and heard on index cards. Having given up her office after retiring, her house is now filled with boxes and file cabinets full of cards. A romantic look at the work of a woman who saved all of her knowledge.

The geography of the otherwise flat city of Charleroi is defined by slag heaps – hills formed from the waste material from coal mines. Filmed entirely from these terrils themselves, the film weaves large-scale industrial tragedy with the poeticism of ecological rebirth through a data-driven narration in which the terrils are the protagonists.

An auspice, since ancient times, is the observation of the flight of birds to read the present and discover the future. Every year Francesca, a scientist and ornithologist, studies the migrating birds flying through the Brocon Pass ringing station in the Italian Dolomites, showing us that today, more than ever, our survival depends on our ability to understand the birds’ message.