Over the course of a single match (Villareal vs. Real Madrid, April 2005), 17 film and video cameras captured every move — every step, every squint, every strike — of legendary footballer Zinedine Zidane. Directors Phillipe Parreno and Douglas Gordon have used their documentation to create a modern portrait that is equal parts performance, athletic event and intensely personal reverie.

Via a surround mix of audio, viewers in EMPAC’s Theater will be immersed in this poignant examination of the human condition of the athlete and of athlete as performer.

As guitar distortion washes from the stage, the murmur and roar of avid fans pans and circles the audience, punctuated here and there by the sharp bark of Zidane’s advice to his teammates or his amplified breath in full sprint.

Set to a soundtrack by Scottish post-rock phenoms Mogwai, the filmmakers present a spectacular meditation on the joys of both physical virtuosity and spectatorship.

Much of the actual match is relayed only in Zidane’s expression and posture — a watchful patience, a sudden explosion — though occasional subtitles offer hints at the star’s thoughts, lending poetry to motion.

Departing from Les Glaneuses, Jean-Francois Millet’s celebrated 1867 portrait of women picking through a harvested wheat field, French filmmaker Agnès Varda constructs a moving and thoughtful visual essay on the concept and lifestyle of gleaning, or scavenging, once ubiquitous in rural 19th century France. Varda’s film is both a social documentary and a frank and personal rumination on the experience of marginalization. By focusing on the overlooked, an open view emerges of our own attitudes towards usefulness, aging, decay and the discarded. The intrepid septuagenarian filmmaker embarks on a road trip to find France’s contemporary gleaners – young vandalizers, trash artists, a former truck driver – all the while commenting on what she sees with compassion and wry humor. Varda sees herself is a gleaner of images, objects, people, thoughts. As she travels through this wandering-road-documentary, gathering the film’s images, she collects heart-shaped potatoes that would otherwise be tossed or a silent broken clock that ends up on her mantle.

New media artist Sophie Kahn and choreographer Lisa Parra present a work-in-progress showing of their video installation, Body/Traces, a 2008-2009 EMPAC DANCE MOViES Commission.

Using a DIY 3D laser scanner and stop-motion 3D digital animation to track a dancer's movement through space and time, they are creating a single-channel video to be projected at life-size. The showing is the culmination of a three-week creative residency at EMPAC, and will be followed by an open discussion.

The project Body/Traces explores the female body through 3D laser scanning and structured improvised movement, where the images become alive and what is alive becomes idle, illuminating the physical presence and disappearance of the body. A dancer's body is scanned at various stages of movement, and the resulting images are re-animated in 3D. The result is an imperfect document of the traces left by the dancer’s body in space. The deeper one looks, the less familiar the body becomes, appearing awkward and fragmented. The project looks at the unstable representation of womens' bodies and of movement by addressing the questions: What happens to the body in motion when it becomes a still image? And what becomes of that image when it is returned to the moving body whence it came?

Best known for his darkly humorous stop-motion animated films that touch on themes of love, death, salvation and the underworld, filmmaker Brent Green will perform live with a series of his recent short films. Guest musicians, including the extraordinary Brendan Canty (Fugazi), Howe Gelb (Giant Sand) and Jim Becker (Califone) will accompany Green’s intense narration, which ranges from quiet, vulnerable storytelling to cathartic fumes bordering on the evangelistic. The self-taught animator is part 21st-century folk artist, part rock star, part confessional poet and part Blakean visionary. In live performance he screens a stop-motion autobiography of rich, idiosyncratic symbology to an accompaniment of raw Americana, harrowing and beautiful in its fragility. Green’s work lives in, exemplifies and tests that very trait, human fragility: We are by no means sound, he keens over Telecaster strain, not even weatherproof.

One of four winners of the DANCE MOViES Commission 2008, new media artist Sophie Kahn and choreographer Lisa Parra collaborated on a single-channel video installation during their three-week residency. Body/Traces consists of video imagery created by 3D laser scans of a body in motion, which are animated in post-production to create a life-size ghostly body moving through space. Body/Traces is an imperfect document of the traces left by the dancer’s body in space. The deeper one looks, the less familiar the body becomes, appearing awkward and fragmented. The project looks at the unstable representation of women’s bodies and of movement by addressing the questions: What happens to the body in motion when it becomes a still image? And what becomes of that image when it is returned to the moving body whence it came?

During the residency, the artists experimented with this technique; refined the storyboard for the project; completed several scanning sessions of dancers in motion and the rendering of the images via animation; tested the projection to scale; and worked with Sawako Kato, a digital sound artist, on the sound score. A work-in-progress presentation of a video installation that was commissioned as part of DANCE MOViES.

Provocative shorts exploring personal narratives and re-evaluations of living in the modern metropolis. ideas of the individual and collective, from multi-culturalism to personal paranoia through to street art interventions.

• jean-julien pous:seeking you [a love letter to hong kong]/ france / china / 03:10
• hélène canac, gilles brinkhuizen + clément bourdeleau: derrière la port / france / 05:00
• martin orton + greg villalobos: faith in the city / uk / 04:22
• james houston: a cultural guide to the united kingdom / uk / 01:04
• alex robinson: london / uk / 03:19
• tim bollinger:between / germany / 04:52
• gareth crook: the sky’s gone out / uk / 06:00
• lorcan finnegan: defaced / ireland / 03:00
• matt lambert + jellyfish pictures: carbon footprint / usa / 01:30
• crush: man-sized wreath [r.e.m] / canada / 02:40
• shroom: a living wage / uk / 02:50
• chris allen + rob rainbow: home / uk / 03:00
• lindsay knight: not for good / uk / 04:40
• jonathan harris: hikikomori / uk / 03:27
• marieke verbiesen: brain games / norway / 04:52
• the light surgeons: eight questions / uk / 05:51
• graham clayton-chance: raw / uk / 03:10
• russell etheridge: odd from every angle / uk / 03:00
• petpunk: the magnificent town of vilnius / lithuania / 01:00
• jeff wood, tom roope, wade shotter + lawrence blankenbyl: integral [pet shop boys] / uk / 03:23

A series of documentary films that turn truth into something other than fact, using poetry and imagination, rather than transparency and objectivity. These filmmakers question the very notion of authenticity, and disobey the typical documentary filmmaking practices; instead they stage their own realities on location, employing techniques such as reenactment, personal voice-overs and special effects.

Welcome to the world of industrial food production and high-tech farming! To the rhythm of conveyor belts and immense machines, the film looks and listens into the places where food is produced in Europe: monumental spaces, surreal land and soundscapes— a cool, industrial environment which leaves little space for individualism. People, animals, crops and machines play a supporting role in the logistics of this system, which provides our society’s standard of living.

Our Daily Bread is a wide-screen tableau of a feast which isn’t always easy to digest—and in which we all take part. A meticulous study that enables the audience to form their own ideas through long shots calculating what happens before food journeys to tables around the globe.

IMPORTANT! This film contains graphic scenes of meat processing, animal husbandry, and other aspects of food production that can be disturbing. While this film is not rated, please use your best judgment, especially when bringing children.

Spectropia is a highly imaginative live-mix cinema event, a “scratchable” movie performed by video DJs playing a movie “instrument”. Toni Dove’s sci-fi hybrid, features time travel, telepathy, and elements of film noir in a drama set in England, 2099 and in New York City, 1931, following the Great Crash. Live performers orchestrate onscreen characters through an original mix of film, performance and a unique system of motion sensing that serves as a cinematic instrument, creating a narrative form that is part video game, part feature film, and part VJ mashing. The audience sees through characters’ eyes, hears their interior thoughts, and even talks with characters via Dove and her co-performer, R. Luke DuBois, in a post show Q&A.

Join hundreds of citizens to watch election night coverage on EMPAC’s big screens. Door Prizes! Scorecards! Free apple pie!