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Film screenings 2023

by Laura Bianco and Erica Elfstrom



Selection #1

FIRE

The four elements in films. Fire feared and sought.


The Hollow

USA | 14' 37"

directed by Jean-Jacques Martinod and Bretta C. Walker

synopsis: A reclusive glass artist lives in solitude within the dense, misty forests of Southern Appalachia and the infernal fires of a foundry. A cinematic study on mountain alchemy and its relationship to fire. 


Extended Presences

Belgium | 12' 30"

directed by Margaux Anne Ali Dauby

synopsis: 'Extended Presences' follows several women in their seasonal work as fire watchers in Portugal. The film comes close to their breathing, to the passing of time and to solitude, from within.



 


Selection #2

AIR

The four elements in films. The flight and the sound.


Turbulence

Germany | 15'

directed by Telemach Wiesinger

The film poem TURBULENCE stands in the field of tension between surreal fantasy and multi-layered reality. Telemach Wiesinger's photographic impressions of aeroplanes from the perspective of the traveller encounter kinetic wing objects by the composer Alexander Grebtschenko. In the congenial collaboration of the two artists, the electronically controllable "Chimera’s“ - elegant bird wings with megaphone - unfold expressive "acting" presence. The dialogue between the sound level (Grebtschenko) and the visual level (analogue film workshop Wiesinger) opens up space for emotions, thoughts and interpretations.

(Thomas Spiegelmann, 2022)



 


Selection #3

WATER

The four elements in films. Liquid as memories.


Water Tower Symphony

Finland | 19' 53"

directed by Panu Johansson

Water Tower Symphony is a tribute to Finnish water towers and the memories associated with them in the form of an experimental film. As the title suggests, the piece gives the spotlight to Finnish water towers, the real eye-catchers of the local constructed environment. According to recent Finnish studies these towers have become town symbols that create local identity. Water Tower Symphony not only documents, but also revives this kind of everyday environment typical to Finland. These slowly disappearing surreal buildings deserve to be depicted through art: they deserve a visual symphony of their own.


Water and More Water

Italy | 6' 12"

directed by Francesca Svampa

The director’s personal micro-memories, as a woman, filmmaker and immigrant, constructs a communal heritage in a dreamlike portrait of Barcelona. Shot in double exposure on reversible 8mm film.


CURRENTS / Perpendicolare Avanti

Canada | 13'

directed by Federica Foglia

Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti is a camera-less, hand-made, 16mm film collage, based on the artist's autobiographical experience as an immigrant. The film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of multiple countries and temporalities through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling pre-existing film materials and fragments of otherwise anonymous orphan films. Utilizing these so-called scraps, Currents is a film of extensive remediation, treated by hand through the use of the emulsion lifting technique, thereby re-imagining, re-constructing, and de-constructing the liminality of immigrant life. The re-writing of the self in Currents is produced through the archives of others, via associative montage and repeated performative acts on the celluloid surface of the film.



 


Selection # 4

EARTH

The four elements in films. Transforming matter.


To the Earthen Red

Croatia | 18' 53"

directed by Nika Pećarina

To the Earthen Red is an experimental, ontological reflection on the nature and narratives of clay extraction that traces out the relation of landscape, object, and the senses. An epic poem meets pottery meets thermography meets the transformation of matter.



 


Selection #5

FAMILY TALES

How it went, how it may have been.


I Will Take Your Shadow

Germany | 18' 56"

directed by Ayala Shoshana Guy

Two brothers flee Europe during the Nazi regime. They sail for a few months in a desperate search for a safe home and arrive at what was known as British Palestine. Generations later, in what became the state of Israel, their granddaughter weaves a dreamlike story of the past crossing into the present. The untold transforms into a search for all that is lost, yet persists and unfolds in its absence.



Imagine

Canada | 4' 28"

directed by Élise Cyr Labelle

Intrigued by the untold story of her parents, Lili finds a reel of Super 8 film that will guide her to the last trace of their love.



 


Selection #6

DEAR MOM,

Complicated relationships with mothers.


The Call

Canada | 4' 25"

directed by Camila Novais

Confronted with her own demons after watching a horror movie, a teenage girl defies logic and seeks protection in what is most fragile. A short film constructed from personal archives and the archives of the National Film Board of Canada.


The Night Is Drunk When We Suffer

Philipillnes | 6' 9"

directed by Rian Simon Cabatingan Magtaan

One night, a mother of five gets drunk.  She then spends the rest of the evening expressing her frustrations, inhibitions, and aspirations while her poet son tells all the miseries and shared trauma that bonded them together.


Naming

Canada | 4' 27"

directed by Aimé Majeau Beauchamp

Using personal archives and footage from the National Film Board of Canada, this autobiographical short film expresses a desire to name the unspoken in order to free oneself from it and bring about a rebirth. A blue-and-red film about emotional abandonment and the complexity of love between mother and child.



 


Selction #7

HOME LOST, HOME FOUND

Home is a place inside, the most familiar and misterious one.


The Great Kind Mystery

Canada | 16' 10"

directed by Ella Morton

Inuk and Mi’kmaw artist Amy Hull reflects on her hometown of Daniel's Harbour, Newfoundland and her connection to the natural world.


Empty House

USA | 5' 29"

directed by Ben Kujawski

A portrayal of the thoughts and memories experienced during a visit to a family home; which, having been foreclosed and abandoned for several years, still contained a stark yet decomposing layer of familiarity.


Strike

USA | 2' 25"

directed by Peter Johnston

adaptation of a poem by Cindy Hunter Morgan

A cinepoem adapted from Cindy Hunter Morgan's poem "Strike." The poet contemplates the upcoming controlled burn of her grandparent's empty house. Generations upon generations of memory and media layer upon each other.


Where I Lay My Head to Rest

Belgium | 13' 55"

directed by Alex Schuurbiers

Where I lay my head to rest is a reverie, a confession. A personal account of what it feels like to be a woman in this day and age. An exploration of the interior, both psychologically and materially. The small city life, with all its obstacles, in all its beauty. A disjointed trip through (sub)urban female alienation.



 


Selection #8

DREAMS

Images with eyes closed.


Close Your Eyes, Eyes, Eyes

South Korea | 6' 45"

directed by Chanmin Kim

What you see with closed eyes may be visible or invisible. Distinguish between possibilities and cognitions. Occasionally an object and at times, an event. May be future or a place, eyes/snow, wind, or sometimes time and aspiration, sweat and periodically desire, or the remains of those. Distinguish the difference between enabling and cognition.


I Dream No More I Remember

Italy | 11' 50"

directed by Salvatore Insana

Still was in the hour of the woods, and we can go no further. That summer day the fog rolled through the doors and filled the spirits. A gateway, a threshold and a figure pausing and maneuvering his being within that misplaced frame, before the (im)possible crossing. A liminal ritual of a mystical nature, a palindrome film, a magical and archaic place: si sedes non is. At a certain time, at a certain place not yours, before we cross this time, we can go no further. The title is an homage to the italian poetry of Lorenzo Calogero.


I Dream My Dream

Netherlands | 4' 14"

directed by Monique van Kerkhof and Bo Oudendijk

I dream My dream

Exploring, loving and dreaming

Unearthing freedoms, instinctively

with consciousness and unconsciousness intertwined

Circles define as if nothing be something

Some moves for true nearness, I give ground

but my dream after the real you, is real



 


Selection #9

ANIMALS AND US

Animals, so close and so far.


Dragonflies

Australia | 1' 43"

directed by Ian Gibbins

For several days in December, 2022, Adelaide and surrounding areas swarmed with large dragonflies, that had bred in the very wet spring of 2022. In this video, I've used a frame echo process to track and digitally illuminate the flight paths of the dragonflies as they fly around our garden in Belair, South Australia. The soundtrack includes some of our native birds that were calling at the time: rainbow lorikeets, a grey shrike-thrush, Australian magpies, red wattlebirds, New Holland honeyeaters, and kookaburras, as well as passing human traffic. The flower in the final sequence is a kangaroo paw, native to Western Australia. Dragonflies have some of the most accomplished aerial abilities of any animal: they are both fast and manoeuvrable. Associated with this, they have an advanced visual system, capable of seeing a wide range of colours as well as polarised light with very high resolution. All this allows them to be aggressive predators of other flying insects. Their larvae are fully aquatic and are also fierce predators, living mostly on aquatic invertebrates, such as mosquito larvae, but they are also capable of catching and eating tadpoles. It's a very successful strategy: dragonflies evolved this basic body plan about 250 million years ago!


L'ombra di Rasputin

Italy | 26' 45"

directed by Pietro Francesco Pingitore

Whereas nature is a dimension created by western philosophy, wilderness is the shadow of human architectures. This film is a sensorial exploration that looks at conservation behaviours as infrastructures bordering the wildlife of a natural reserve in the plains surrounding Piacenza, one territory amongst the many heavily transformed by industrial agriculture in Italy. Soundscapes of these troubled lands are framed in sensorial conversations with humans, non-humans and technologies of control.


Balaena

USA | 8' 8"

directed by Alessia Cecchet

A stranded whale meets its simulacrum as human interlopers observe, collect, dissect, and take selfies. A woman seeks closure. Blurring documentary and fiction, the film explores the changes wrought by human progress and advancement through an experimental lens: the time has come to mourn the whale.


Because You Speak of Fur

Belgium | 3' 12"

directed by Patricia Delso Lucas and Johanna Wagner

poem by Georg Leß (adapted)

In this adaptation of Georg Leß’s poem Anderkatt (The Haircut), two women converse through an uncanny amalgam of images and soundscapes. One is on an expedition; the other follows the expedition’s progress from afar.



 


Selection #10

ORGANIC DANCES

In/organic worlds.


The Subterranean Blackness of Roots

Canada | 10' 10"

directed by Charles-André Coderre

Shot in Quebec (Canada), the film seeks to show the sensory experience of the invisible life of stones, plants, and the nature that surrounds us.


La fontaine et la chute IV (Origins)

Canada | 4' 50"

directed by Julie Tremble and Philippe Hamelin

In constant oscillation between abstraction and figuration, La Fontaine et la chute IV (Origins) proposes to explore an animated painting populated by organic and geometric entities.



 


Selection #11

COLLECTIVE DANCES

Many bodies, one body.


Commun

France | 8' 14"

directed by Jonathan Rochier

The crowd can be seen as a sum of individualities but also as an autonomous acting power with its own logic and structure. Commun is an organic, social, and sensitive experience of a mass of pins, its behavior crosses the three modalities: community, communitarianism, communion.


Memories of Touch

Canada | 8' 53"

directed by Bettina Hoffmann

The video addresses the pleasure and pain of touching and being touched. It makes use of the versatile movement capacities of hands to take all kinds of shapes, their transformative potential and narrative expression. It creates shifting feelings immersing a viewer into fantastic imagery (metamorphosis of hands), sensual and violent interactions and at times, the uncomfortable realisation that hands seem to be cut off a human body. Though, it is also a celebration of the great abilities of hands that are so specific for the human animal.


Tokyo Reflect(x)ions

France | 3' 45"

directed by Maxime Contour

A poetic visit of an uninhabited Tokyo, where people and their spirit are only present in any type of reflection.



 


Selection #12

ENCOUNTERS ELSEWHERE

Have I met you or not?


Good Morning I Love You

USA | 23' 9"

directed by Scott Magid

A queer fantasy poised between sleeping and waking life. Split between an online chatroom and a terrain of dream-desire, the film is an experiment in the aesthetics of intimacy.


As the Night

USA | 1'

directed by Adam E. Stone

In this silent one-minute poem film about selective mutism, an apparition, regret, and hope, a man imagines living a much different life.



 


Selection #13

HOW MY BODY SPEAKS

In a complicated relationship with the body.


Life In the XXI Century

Norway | 39' 56"

directed by Iosu Vakerizzo

While Joe's wife is away having a questionable plastic surgery procedure, he discovers that he has a strange tentacle growing on his chest. The finding of an exotic parasitic plant with healing properties offsets a series of strange events.


The Body Is a House of Familiar Rooms

USA | 10'

directed by Eloise Sherrid and Lauryn Welch

A magical-realist documentary combining paintings with live action footage to show a man's experience living with a painful chronic illness.


Les corps aqueux

Canada | 5' 8"

directed by Filémon Brault-Archambeault

An experimental film that explores gender identity outside the binary. By constructing a theatrical space comprised of designed sets, staged radio interviews, found footage vignettes, and overlays, it explores the relationship between the body and the self. Inside that space, uncertainty is finally allowed to exist.


Model Fifty-One Fifty-Six

USA | 11' 2"

directed by Josh Weissbach

Model Fifty-One Fifty-Six displays the physical changes of the maker’s heart since being born with the congenital disorder, transposition of the great vessels. This chronicle envisions a convergence of the human and the cyborg, connecting personal vulnerability to 1980s science fiction.


This Is How I Felt

USA | 1' 35"

directed by Josh Weissbach

This Is How I Felt was filmed in a twenty-four period while the filmmaker was wearing a heart monitor to investigate possible arrhythmias.



 


Selection #14

INSTRUCTION BOOKLET OF THE BODY

Trying to learn how the body works.


Faces In the Wild

USA | 15'

directed by Magdalena Bermudez

An excavation of histories of facial recognition in which scientists direct faces to emote, close ups direct audiences to feel, and a feedback loop between a monkey and an AI reckon with the data-sourced faces of their unconscious.


Beautiful Figures

Belgium | 4'

directed by Soetkin Verstegen

Thoughts ripple over the pages of a personal notebook, kept during a stay at different science labs in Zürich. They float from one to another, like a mind map of unfinished ideas on memory, medical imaging, cells, and aging.


The Mirror Neuron (poetry mix)

USA | 10'

directed by Tommy Becker

The Mirror Neuron (poetry mix) is an art rock film divided into three vignettes that investigate complexities of interconnection beneath an awakening of the sun. Mirror neurons activate when we observe the actions of others. They allow us to empathize through feeling, not thinking. Their discovery confirms our evolutionary path to see others as similar to ourselves. The Mirror Neuron celebrates our biology through a series of musically driven gestures intended to activate our neural networks.



 


Selection #15

COLLECTING DATA

Who does our data belong to?


Everything We Know About You

UK | 6' 50"

directed by Roland Denning

EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT YOU examines 21st century issues of data control and social media using mid-20th century found footage and AI synthesised voices and characters. Digital corporations assure us the information they harvest is used to deliver what we want, but is giving us what we want a form of control? Does telling us what we want to hear polarise society? Is freedom of choice anything to do with freedom? And what is the secret of making your partner smile in the morning? The dominant model of propaganda and advertising was once that of insidious forces brain-washing us to do something we otherwise wouldn't want to do. That model is now redundant; in the current era, the anonymous algorithms of transglobal business exploit us by giving us more of what we desire.


Zuckerberg, You Owe/Own Me

France | 14' 29"

directed by Pauline Blanchet

A deep exploration into a personal Facebook archive of videos leads to discovering the internet’s darker historical roots. In an attempt to build a connection between one’s own data and the digital infrastructure, this film questions how one can perceive the internet as separate from their material world and hence, themselves. As a pre-adolescent, I was obsessed with my laptop, the internet, and Facebook. Through the use of old Facebook videos, I realised my love for filmmaking stemmed from this period of my life. The film medium itself was appropriate to use, as it interlinks this moment in time with filmmaking itself. My original idea stemmed from the concept of making the ‘invisible’ visible by producing a film on data centres. The challenge was to find a way of using the film medium as a lens to approach the digital infrastructure.


About Memory and Loss

Canada | 7' 55"

directed by Amélie Hardy

Capture, document, record, share, restart. We are making ourselves more memorable than ever by archiving every bit of our daily lives. What if we lost something along the way?


The Machine to Undo Life

France | 8'

directed by Arsène Billaud

Today, film is no longer used to take photos, but to capture memories. On the day of the Blackout, the pictorial traces left by the digital disappear. Between the digital and the organic, travel in a world of remembrance.



 


Selection #16

AMERICAN DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

America: a dream turned nightmare.


How to Build a House Out of Wreckage and Rags

Germany | 4' 14"

directed by Bernd Lützeler

Found footage: California in the 1950's and 60's. A young Indian couple enjoys their personal American dream come true in their home somewhere in the suburbs of San Francisco. In great detail they pose with their newly achieved wealth in front of their Super-8 camera. Just like postcards, they would send these film rolls to their joint families back in India. Around the same time, an American missionary couple visits the city of Calcutta to shoot a Christian propaganda film. The drastic reality of poverty and famine in the streets of the Indian metropolis fits perfectly into their wicked plan: To promote the believe in Christ by showing the misery that pagan believers are doomed to suffer from.


Chile 1973

Costa Rica | 8' 14"

directed by Mike Hoolboom and Jorge Lozano

Based on a trove of photographs made by Koen Wessing, who bore the risk of documenting the streets of Santiago, even the dreaded stadium, newly filled with police backing the coup. When freshly elected president Allende began sharing resources with the poor, the reaction shot from Washington was predictably swift. One of Nixon’s oldest financiers worked for Pepsi, and coalmining interests were not far behind. In order to protect shareholders, the CIA put their favourite general in charge, a dictator who pipelined money into the American dream. But resistances old and new grew continued to grow, a legacy of upholding the commons that persists to this day.


One Survives by Hiding

USA | 6'

directed by Esy Casey

Reverberations of US military occupation through three generations of women in the Philippines and US, contemplated through wartime archives and the silent atrocities behind family pictures.


To Cut a Tree On a Green Moon

Peru | 8' 45"

directed by Felipe Esparza

From the diary of Christopher Columbus, October 15, 1492: "And deviated from the land by two lombard shots, there is in all these islands so much depth that one cannot reach it. These islands are very green and fertile and have very sweet airs, and there may be many things that I do not know, because I do not want to stop to go through many islands to find gold". They had only been on land for four days. The gold never existed. It is only possible to suppose the sweetness of the air. The islands are still green.



 


Selection #17

SECRET NARRATIVES

​Glimpses of hidden subtext narratives.


simple simple simple

UK | 1' 22"

directed by Stuart Pound

The last paragraph of Alice in Wonderland disappears word by word as the voice-over re-arranges them, offering an alternative future for Alice.


This Person

Canada | 4' 23"

directed by Nora Rosenthal

A filmic essay about a very private person and their lover, who keeps getting distracted by big world issues.





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