by Laura Bianco and Erica Elfstrom
Selection #1
YOU AND I
Two films like private letters.
Tell you about: the birds and the bees, sagittarius rising
Sweden | 14' 58"
directed by Pollyanna Popermajer
To the images of awakening spring, a woman talks to a man. She reflects on his actions towards her, her old self and the new. By saying goodbye to what once was, she accepts her altered new self. But with anger of what was taken from her, she's determined to seek justice.
To my love
Finland | 5' 3"
directed by Aino Kontinen
Facade renovation locks young woman inside her apartment. During a reconstruction of her home and herself she writes a letter to her loved one. "To my love" is a documentary audiovisual mosaic created amid a painful period of depression and exhaustion. The images and the text were built around each other, based on journal-like entries, as a consolation. The film is a breath of air from inside of a repair process, a promise of a return.
Selection #2
FEMALE LANDSCAPES
Women loved and feared.
YOU ARE NOT THE BOSS OF ME (and look who is fucking sorry now)
Canada | 3' 19"
directed by Allison Beda
A contemporary fairytale about an anorexic princess which was recently honored at the Sadho Poetry Festival in India and was part of the Everywoman Biennial in NYC.
Demi-Godesses
Germany | 7' 25"
directed by Martin Gerigk
‘Demi-Goddesses’ is the second essay about still dominant dark aspects of our modern society. It is conceived as a surreal anti-patriarchal thought experiment and raises important questions about gender, power, and social change, prompting us to reflect on how historical patterns of discrimination and oppression might be either repeated or overcome in a reversed gendered world. It challenges the viewer to confront their own assumptions and biases, and to consider the possibilities of a more equitable society.
Negative / Positive Film
Italy | 14'
directed by Federica Foglia
Negative / Positive Film is a hand-made, camera-less collage film composed of layers of erotic 16mm films from the 1920s, 1940s, and 1970s, intermingled with nature documentaries and layers of organic materials. This visual abstraction merges positive black-and-white film stock and its negative black-and-white counterpart - on the same film base. This allows the film to exist in two versions, one positive and the other negative. Women's bodies are dislodged from their original erotic context and ripped away from their male co-protagonists. The man is removed from the picture, while the female body slowly merges with insects and flowers.
Selection #3
WORDS THAT BRING ME HOME
Words can build paths towards familiar places, lost or rediscovered.
The poem we sang
Palestine | 20'
directed by Annie Sakkab
The Poem We Sang is a 20-minute, colour and black and white, experimental documentary that meditates on love and longing - the love of one's family and the longing for one's home, contemplated through overcoming the trauma of loss of family home and of forced migration, transforming lifelong regrets into a healing journey of creative catharsis and bearing witness.
Ko pyhare, para siempre
Canada | 5'
directed by Fiorellla Boucher, Laura Criollo-Carillo
Child of two worlds that do not speak to each other, the girl speaks to her mother and her grandmother. She travels through the dilated space of origins, impostures and wounds.
Selection #4
A BREATHING PRESENCE
The wind and its touch on everything.
Who Has Seen the Wind?
Finland | 5'
directed by Johansson Panu
How does it feel to live next to 170 year old creatures? This short impressionistic film documents an old forest area called “Mortin männikkö” in Rovaniemi, Northern Finland. As an array of glimpses and moments the film tries to summarise a decade of life next to this vivid & forested tableau vivant.
The Stream XIII
Japan | 5' 21"
directed by Hiroya Sakurai
In my "The Stream series", I have expressed the transformation of landscapes as a result of the interactions between humans and nature. In "The Stream XIII", the 13th in the series, I focused on how the landscape is transformed when the wind as a weather phenomenon streams through the fields and reed fields cultivated by humans. For sound effects, I used the sound of a wind chime. A wind chime consists of a bell made of iron with a weight suspended by a string inside. When the wind blows, the weight rings inside by wind pressure. I used the wind chime to perceive the invisible presence of wind as sound. And also we can perceive the invisible presence of wind as visualized wind ripples in the fields.
I expressed the invisible scenery through sound and images.
Selection #5
INNER LANDSCAPES
Films can be windows on the inner world.
The Dissolution of the Landscape
Canada | 23' 52"
directed by Anne-Marie Bouchard
Through visual metaphors, the film offers an incursion into an inner landscape, a dive into subconscious, a mix of childhood memories and recurrent dreams, between surrealism and automatism.
Echoes of grief
Austria | 19' 13"
directed by Verena Repar
Portraying the personal experience of a fatal loss, "echoes of grief" seeks to verbalize the unspeakable. A journey through phantasmagoric realms, oscillating between shadow and light, past and present, sorrow and solace. Guided by a faint shimmer illuminating an ever-changing path out of the dark, lined with memories of the irretrievable.
Your Dream Is My Dream
USA | 17' 15"
directed by Marina Sagona
Your Dream is my Dream is a video about ancestral memory, shared identity and the collective unconscious. According to C. G. Jung we are all born with common patterns and ancestral memories, that he calls archetypes, that are the exact same ones throughout lands and cultures. These memories and the collective unconscious manifest itself mainly through art and dreams, particularly reoccurring dreams, that with minimal variations are indeed the same for all of us. We are all connected and somehow we all dream the same dreams. The chorus of reoccurring dreams in Your Dream is My Dream can be traced back to four main categories - impossibility, unpreparedness, self-consciousness and loss. Following a specific and different logic for each category, subtitles give additional body to the voices, both in Italian and in English.
to gait + to retreat = to ascend (testament)
Italy | 20'
directed by Ilaria Pezone
It is a musical film, beyond the words that represent the soundtrack, which in their icy documentary tone contrast with the intimate and daily images of the private archive. The sky shadowed and threatening, a gray bloated with lake melancholy, which crushes Lecco between the mountains and its lake; the ties between the cold psychoanalytical words and the gestures described by the images are subtle and counterpoint: from the car, to the stars, to the eclipse, to photographic erased images. The lunar eclipse is also the subject's eclipse portrayed in them, through the cancellation and colouristic crushing that favors cold tones; if hot: disappeared. The survey is held, suggested, conducted for idea associations through a narrative voice that cools the pathos of the other voices. Everything is dramatic and at the same time hides the comedy - it contains its subtle contradictions. The yearning for the unknown, the metaphysical of earthly places is recalled in the infinite landscape of the stars. He collects the Testament who dialectically is framed first, asking for a smile. The childish request is heartbreaking, because pure: the smile is for him, the slight purr, the breath, the fan that turns and ends it all.
Opaline
Canada | 7'
directed by Alix Galdin
The word opaline evokes a delicate, milky-white glass object, reflecting the theme of this experimental short film: the precious but fragile period of childhood. In this visual poem, the child trapped in the maelstrom of family becomes the living archive of unspeakable violence. The images were first captured with a camera, then filmed in Super 8 and hand painted. The colour streaming through the film restores movement to days frozen and steeped in anxiety.
Glimpses
Poland | 6'
directed by Dominika Strobel
A woman quietly recounts a dream composed of images that seem to mirror the reality we live in. Flashes of light appear and disappear, revealing glimpses of memories like washed out postcards. Does her voice speak from today's perspective or from that of the future? The world is fragile, as is our memory of it.
Dark
UK | 1' 55"
directed by Jane Glennie
poem "Dark" by James E. Kenward
A world of people are plunged into darkness and forced to negotiate themselves mirrored back in black – only to find occasional moments of strange relief amidst the beauty of nothing.
Selection #6
STILL THERE?
Presences that don't leave.
Blue
Sweden | 9' 54"
directed by Kelly Stormare Wedin
Experimental short about grief. Set in the subway. Girl lost her cell phone and is trying to go to a party where her friends are at.
Swifts
Estonia | 5'
directed by Ada Napiorkowski
Like every year, the swifts are returning to their homes in the “sleeping districts.” But this year the humans are gone, leaving nothing but spirits.
Verzamelaar
Canada | 14' 47"
directed by Jeff Sermon
Verzamelaar is an essay film about my ongoing research into the ghosts left behind in the landscapes of my past. My own ghosts and those of my family, my partner. The voices of these ghosts travel through the air, whispering stories. If we listen closely, we can hear them, if we look closely we can see them in the flower that comes back each spring, in the branch of the tree that keeps on growing.
Form
USA| 2' 45"
directed by Adam E. Stone
"form" is a poem film about physical and spiritual transmutation, crafted with archival footage, family photos, and found photos.
Why Are You Image Plus?
Portugal | 9'
directed by Diogo Baldaia
In a small and poor village, a local Saint controls the realm of the abyss, making it impossible for dead people to talk to their loved ones who are still living. Ima, a curious dead child, tries to meet the Saint, so he can let her talk to her beloved grandmother.
Selection #7
HUMANS AND LANDSCAPES
Man's relationships with the landscape and the elements of nature.
The View From the Plane
Portugal | 5' 46"
directed by Daniele Grosso
On the 24th of June, 1958 the philosopher and anti-nuclear activist Günther Anders was flying to Japan to take part in the Fourth World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs and for Disarmament. He recollected this experience in his book "The Man on the Bridge: Diary from Hiroshima and Nagasaki”.
What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada del Muerto
USA | 13' 45"
directed by Hope Tucker
Visitors and residents of the Tularosa Basin, site of the first detonation of an atomic bomb, contribute to the production of public memory as they offer philosophical reckonings, logistical advice, and plaintive cries about making "the journey of the dead." Between 1945 and 1992, the US federal government exposed the world to radioactive fallout from 200+ detonations of above-ground nuclear weapons. 2025 will be the 80th anniversary of the detonation of nuclear weapons in Japan and the US and the 345th anniversary of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. The 1680 Pueblo Revolt forced Spanish colonizers out of New Mexico and returned sovereignty to Native people.
Crushed Between Ocean and Sky
Canada | 24' 39"
directed by Ella Morton
An unexpected event on a tall ship headed for Antarctica incites passengers to reflect on life, death, adventure and irony against the vast ocean backdrop. Crushed Between Ocean and Sky speaks to the transcendence of exploring new places, the power of nature and life's brutal twists of fate.
Hunger
UK | 8' 47"
directed by Natalie Spencer
La signora Aetna, (Etna), is bored and boredom can be a dangerous thing for those around you when you are a volcanic goddess. An elderly woman shares her life lessons as she reflects on the passage of time. It soon becomes clear, however, that things are not quite as they seem when our enigmatic protagonist invites us to watch in on one of her favourite games, involving an innocent local girl and a new tourist to town. A dreamlike montage of events from that fateful day ensues as we are transported to the mystical realm of Etna, where the law of nature is sovereign, and the humans merely pawns in the ancient goddess’ game to satisfy her boredom, and hunger.
Kusikozu
Spain | 6' 46"
directed by Aitor Irulegi
An intense journey between lines, nature, animals, life and death.
Monolith
USA | 13' 45"
directed by Teri Carson
An encounter with a volcano culminates with the theQ of a stone and a reckoning with disgruntled gods. Part experimental essay film, part videopoem, Monolith braids found footage, documentary, experimental, 3D anima1on and narra1ve filmmaking devices to explore no1ons of collec1vity, dissent, indigenous knowledge and non-linear 1me. This shape-shiQing film ques1ons the ongoing legacies of na1onalist archives, archeology, and coloniality.
Selection #8
SOUND LANDSCAPES
Worlds made of sounds.
Come out of your shell
Switzerland | 6' 45"
directed by Yannick Mosimann
The lovingly compiled collection of shells, the life‘s work of Maria Cândida Consolado Macedo, comes to life in a rhythmic ritual of hand-processed 16mm footage and trancelike sounds of capiz shells.
Magpie
Australia | 3' 34"
directed by Ian Gibbins
The Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen) has extraordinary vocal ability, trilling and carolling a wide range of calls, often together, and often at night. It not related to the European or North American Magpies. The audio for this piece was developed around a recording I made of a magpie singing at night behind our house. I transcribed two of the melodies and then arranged them, including the actual voice of the magpie in the chorus. The video is animated from footage of magpies from various locations in our garden and in the wild, as well as the word "magpie". The abstract nature of the video reflects our incomplete understanding of magpie society. As the world heats up around them, as we push the environment closer to total devastation, perhaps we should be listening to what the magpies have to say.
Sonido: Ivans & Tobis
Portugal | 21' 31"
directed by Diogo Baldaia
Many children are subjected to an exhausting sound experience. Tested through a long and insensitive questionnaire, they are victims and witnesses of different manifestations of violence. Ivan, one of the children, overcomes everything by mysteriously transcending himself. Tobi challenges him and projects themselves into an idyllic world where it is possible to live in harmony.
Selection #9
FADING LANDSCAPES
Everything gets transformed over time.
Entropic Memory
Canada | 6' 28"
directed by Nicolas Brault
This photographic exploration of family photo albums ravaged by water evokes hazy and indistinct memories, poignant witnesses of a fragile past.
A Biography
France | 6'
directed by Alexander Schellow
How can a person suffering from Alzheimer still tell herself her own life? When words are no longer there, only remain the sensations and the sounds the body remembers. In the community room of an Alzheimer clinic, a music coming from a radio triggers the dancing of an old lady in a wheelchair. Remembering the moves she used to perform, her body brings along a series of sound memories. Entirely drawn and animated from memory, A_biography reconstructs dot by dot this emergence of memory where it is no longer expected, in an effort to keep this body and this life from oblivion. When words are no longer there, only remain the sensations and the sounds the body remembers. In the community room of an Alzheimer clinic, a music coming from a radio triggers the dancing of an old lady in a wheelchair. Remembering the moves she used to perform, her body brings along a series of sound memories. Entirely drawn and animated from memory, A_biography reconstructs dot by dot this emergence of memory where it is no longer expected, in an effort to keep this body and this life from oblivion.
Farewell Glacier
Norway | 4'
directed by Simone Maria Hooymans
Short animation about the melting heart of the worlds glaciers. Made for the music of composer Terje Isungset who made the recordings during the most northern ice concert ever. Played on instruments made of natural ice. The music video serves as a reminder of the increasing threat of global warming to glaciers while also paying tribute to the visual beauty and enchanting sound of ice.
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