Playlist
<p>A photo album bound in red leather. It contains black-and-white aerial photographs, taken at a time when colonial powers ruled and dictated the way things should be interpreted. How can the signs of that time be read today? An exploration of imperial image production and destruction.</p>
<p>Seven centuries of stone are overthrown in a single moon. Thus passes the glory of the world, in the twinkling of an eye.</p>
<p>As the VHS news footage that opens the film reveals, when the Palace of Justice in Bogota went up in flames in 1985 as part of a violent siege, the fire also engulfed the judicial archive, countless documents that defined law and order in the country gone forever. BICENTENARIO seeks to fill this void by returning to the man who called the Colombian state into existence, retracing the path taken by Simón Bolívar and his army in the final stages of the liberation campaign in 1818.<br /> <br /> The striking 16mm images of towns and landscapes two hundred years later pick out any number of traces of the political leader along the way, alighting on ancient bridleways, statues, advertisements, celebrations, and official events as different people talk of their relationship to Bolívar in voiceover. And these indirect attempts to summon forth his spirit are given a wonderfully ghostly undertone by the séance narrated by the unseen woman across the film, an orange backdrop to house any number of projections.<br /> <br /> History is so many things at once: books turned to ash, markings in stone and earth, each flag that is a copy of an older one, the man feeding pigeons in the square, a flame that flickers as the spirit approaches. (James Lattimer / Viennale)</p>
<p>Closed and sacred, filled with a fire without matter, a fragment of the world offered to the light. Valéry, The Marine Cemetery (1920)</p>
<p>Strange lights appear at night in the Mexican desert – it seems to be full of life. The residents tell us what they’ve seen: a fireball, lights flying, lightning falling from the sky, a flash. The singularity of each experience builds a complete story narrated by a choir of people. This suspenseful film invites us to open our eyes wide in the twilight, and listen to the sounds hidden in the darkness.</p>
<p>Stemming from a personal account of a search for liberation set in the US during the early 70s, Liberty: an ephemeral statute reflects upon post-68 desires for emancipation, emigration, and education through an impressionistic memoir and portrait of the filmmaker’s mother back home in Scotland today.</p>
<p>A 16 mm cinematic poem shot just after the 2020 COVID‑19 lockdown: a group of friends perform domestic gestures—touching, cooking, spinning a toy top—captured through an eerie red filter. The film explores the fragile balance between tenderness and latent violence in everyday life.</p>
<p>A voice-over by American psychologist Timothy Leary professes that psychedelic drugs trigger the expansion of consciousness. Meanwhile, the subtitles we read tell us about a teenager from 1990s South London who spends acid-infused weekends with a friend. Following both perspectives simultaneously is a mind-twisting exercise, but Morgan Quaintance’s seamless editing evokes that firm feeling when a connection is established between two people. But just like hallucinations, teenage friendships feel like they’ll last forever but rarely do.</p> <p> </p>
<p>SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today.</p>
<p>Documentary on a Canadian feminist activist who helped to get abortion legalized in that country, and who continued to be involved in issues such as Israel/Palestine and her own mental health.</p>
<p>In this film shot on 16mm, Sanzgiri traces lines and lineages of ancestral memory, poetry and his history. A search for solidarity in the sounds and colours of a spontaneous movement in Delhi led by Muslim women, an Iqbal Bano song, images of B.R. Ambedkar – a radical anti-caste Dalit intellectual – all revolving around a letter addressed to a distant relative. Seeking to reclaim the past from erasure, and provide a journey towards a potential future.</p>
<p>A day that could also be a life. A young man who could also be an older woman. A nightmare that could also be a dream. In Tunisia, while it could also be somewhere else: on the border between the necessity and the fear to make a film, the necessity and the fear for the revolution, This day won't last is a cooperation with a distance. That is how this self-portrait turns into a group portrait. Clandestine, but straight from the heart: an end that could also lead to a new beginning.</p>
<p>Simulated images of crowds are compared with accounts from Liverpool FC supporters, who recount their experience marked by a tragic event: the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, when 96 people lost their lives, which changed the nature of football.</p> <p>A crowd simulation software serves as a tool for exploring football supporters’ collective memory. + Images of crowd simulation are faced with testimonies from Liverpool Football Club’s supporters who recall their experience marked by a tragic event : the Hillsborough stadium disaster, in 1989, which changed the nature of the game of football.</p>
<p>Five seasons, four parts, eight hours: the dimensions of C.W. Winter and Anders Edström’s film are as incommensurable as its central figure. Tayoko Shiojiri, a vegetable farmer who works and cares for her ailing husband in a small village north of Kyoto, Japan (and who is also Edström’s mother-in-law), is the nominal core of this monumental work, a matriarch whose labor the film observes through precise tableaux, dense sonic collage, and sequences that bend all conventional distinctions between fiction and documentary. Through the film’s workday duration, time itself becomes the subject: in its incremental movement at natural, epochal, and human scales, and through the slow passage of a rural way of life that is fading into the past. A Grasshopper Film release.</p>
<p>The body re-exists and persists. It is never a sealed envelope, but rather a channel of passage and trance between the most diverse spiritual dimensions (Obatala Film). A devotional film, a cinematic offering, a gift film. Filmed in the mythical Ile-Ife, the sacred city of the Yoruba people and founded by the Orisas, this film seeks to sensorially affirm the vertigo of coming into contact with Obatala, the Orisa who creates the world and light. A trance of sparks of light, of bodies in spiritual connection.</p>
<p>Pseudosphinx is the scientific name for fire caterpillars that soon become butterflies, or as they are commonly (and ominously) called, hags. These butterfly hags are associated with various myths. The Pseudosphinx is both a sphinx, an inhuman, conical monstrosity that poses riddles, and pseudo, which refers to the artificial, false, deceptive, unreal, illusory, and mimetic. Pseudophynx keeps its meaning hidden, like a secret kept by those who preserve the haptic impression of its struggle on their retinas.</p>
<p>Over the course of 2019, the popular rock band Berri Txarrak completed a world tour entitled the Ikusi Arte Tour to bid farewell to a career which had lasted twenty-five years. As it lived its last days, the Navarrese filmmaker Marina Lameiro accompanied the group which had managed to transcend a style –rock–, a language –Basque– and a generation –its members’– to become a universal phenomenon. Dardara is a documentary-river which flows through the lyrics and reflections of Gorka Urbizu, songwriter, guitarist and lead singer of the band; and concocts a choral portrait from stories filmed in different parts of the world, all marked by a common interest: the music of Berri Txarrak.</p>
<p>Ekphrasis is a fragmentary and non-chronological history of South Tyrol, a territory contested between Italy and Austria. The film takes its cues from the events between 1939 and 1943, when the native German-speaking people of South Tyrol were given the option of either emigrating to neighbouring Nazi Austria (and other Third Reich territories) or remaining in Fascist Italy and being forcibly integrated into the mainstream Italian culture, thereby losing their language and cultural heritage. This system, enforced after an agreement between Mussolini and Hitler, was called the "Option Agreement". The film also evokes the aftermath of the Option Agreement, including episodes of tension, conflict and terrorism between ethnic communities.</p>
<p>Cardón cardinal arose from the investigation of an event that occurred twenty-six years ago; the displacement of a giant cactus, a Pachycereus pringlei, seventeen metres high and weighing eighteen tons, from the desert of Baja California to the garden of the Mexican Pavilion for the Universal Exhibition of 1992 in Seville. The cactus was later ceded to Seville City Council and now survives next to the ruins of what was once the pavilion.</p>
<p>A sonic portrait of a Chiapan village in southern Mexico, focused on architecture and public space. Filmed over six years, ( ( ( ( ( /* ) ) ) ) ) presents a sensory ethnography of communication in a Zoque community that was displaced by the eruption of the Chichonal volcano. Charles Fairbanks and Saul Kak address the cultural richness of indigenous communities, and denounce the pressure they are under to maintain their land and rights.</p>
<p>A woman living in a transparent box, oranges floating on the seashore, and the movement of an oscillating stone are stories that are interwoven by the Tramuntana wind; a wind explored in this film through the people of Alt Empordà, through their experiences and imagination surrounding this mythical power.</p>
<p>Paralelo 28 portrays the workers’ conditions at the world’s biggest salt mine, in the north of México, and tells the story of a one-eyed dog/welder who steals the workers’ lunch. It’s a film interested in the paradox of representation of raw material, vision, landscape, machines, workspaces. This paradox, that we can synthesize as the impossibility of showing a body’s three dimensions through two-dimensional images, maybe points out at raw material and work —at this moment of history where there’s no more distinction between the objects’ presence and images’ representation— as the only proof of the world’s volume and weight.</p>
<p>A cruise ship during the Brexit referendum. A colony of birds unwittingly killing the forest they call home. A world in a pandemic. Nothing is a closed system. In moving through these three ecologies the film questions what old images can mean after a rupture and offers a space of mourning.</p>
<p>In a kaleidoscopic sequence, images search freely for stories that shape lives — faith, patriotism, anarchism, tourism, returns and arrivals, sketches of daily life and nature. Like a photo book, the film creates new images and relationships between shots, reassembling a journey of impressions where the outlines of the world oscillate. Filmed in Poland, Germany, Portugal, Greece and Brasil. Shot in 16 mm, in seven chapters.</p>
<p>Supported by “Margaret Tait 100” Ten filmmakers and artists were asked in 2019 to make a film dedicated to the Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait. “In summer 1995, I visited Margaret Tait in Orkney. She had her studio in an old Kirk (Church), but we watched many of her 16mm films in her living room at home in Cruan. One day we went out filming some titles from her film script "Video Poems of the 90’s" like Lapping Water, Turning the Page and Rust Everywhere. In Glimpses From a Visit to Orkney in Summer 1995 you see these images next to images I just filmed during my visit, like Margaret drinking tea. Now twenty-five years later, I looked at all my Orkney-footage for the "Margaret Tait 100" project and remembered the abstract colors I had filmed for another film, but never used.” — Ute Aurand</p>
<p>A short film about the Argentine electroacoustic composer Beatriz Ferreyra, an original pioneer of early musique concrète alongside Pierre Schaeffer during the 1950s and 1960s. Here she discusses her “sound hunting” recording techniques, and other thoughts on sound montage and spatialization. Featuring creaking doors, barking dogs and rainbow hands.</p>
<p>In 1988 co-director Da Hee Kim was adopted from South Korea as a baby, and was raised by a white family in the suburbs of Minnesota. The film centers around two dinner conversations, one with her adoptive parents in Minnesota, and the other with another Korean adoptee in Seoul. Big Happiness is a personal exploration of adoption, identity and colorblindness growing up in a transracial family.</p>
<p>The American Sector takes viewers on a fractured road trip, encountering panels of The Berlin Wall that have been installed as public monuments throughout the United States. Visiting over forty sites, the film weaves together the stories people tell about these imported monoliths, capturing how artifacts bond the past and the present.</p>
<p>Excerpts from excerpts. A compilation irrepressibly expanding in time and space. Excerpts I [Though I now depart…], the first chapter of this film project, is made up of shiftings, (re)encounters and departures. Records organically driven by the energy of gesture and light. Somewhere, fiction was possible.</p>
<p>A short study of the interior of amaryllis flowers, shot on 16mm film. The central pistol, the stamens and the anthers, which produce the yellow pollen, are set against the colour field of the petals.</p>
<p>An expanding feeling, unfolding new inflections — forever different, forever changing.</p>