„Waldhorn“ by Leyla Rodriguez @ the Tranås at the Fringe INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL, Tranås/ SWEDEN
https://www.atthefringe.org/product-page/leyla-rodriguez-1
https://www.atthefringe.org/film-2021
EXPERIMENTAL FILMS and VIDEOPOEMS
Selection #1
SHADOWS – Addressing memories
Sometimes memories leave shadows: something that is half there and half not.
Avec
Estonia | 18′
directed by Akio Yuguchi
synopsis
A self-reflective film about personal grief and feelings of guilt after the death of a sibling. The pensive filmmaker aims at visualizing the long process of coming to terms with his inner conflict. The film creates a sense of ephemerality, crystallizing the spatial and temporal moments into a visual expression.
Recaptcha
USA | 4′ 4″
directed by Heather Warren-Crow
synopsis
An attempt to narrate an inscrutable bodily trauma through abstraction. The text of this video is a message that the filmmaker sent to a Canadian city police department via an online contact form. She performs this text for the voice-over while listening to her own voice at a slight delay, disrupting the fluidity of her speech and preventing her from fully owning my story.
After-Image
Australia | 5′ 19″
directed by Ian Gibbins
poem by Ian Gibbins
synopsis
„I see them and look them away … see stinger-ray hide in bush … climb for a better view … afraid of spider-snake-lizard … we watched them watched us … “
An after-image is the residual image you see if you look away at a blank wall or something similar having stared at a brightly lit scene. The after-image is a negative of the original in terms of light- dark and colour. It is mostly due to the photoreceptors in the retina becoming desensitised by the original scene. It fades after a few seconds as the receptors reset.
Our land, our buildings, our travels, our past… perhaps they all leave after-images, perhaps they all contain after-images of those who precede us.
Shadows In A Landscape
UK | 7′ 6″
directed by Edwin Miles
synopsis
A filmmaker attempts to reconnect with his hometown during a walk to the Clent Hills where he is confronted by more than just picturesque views.
Disappearing Silence
Canada | 2′ 34″
directed by Sarah Seneé
synopsis
The silence subtly disappeared sometime in mid-January 2019, following a traumatic event that occurred one year before. Since then, white noise, scintillating sounds, and other dysfunctional frequencies have been with me every moment of every day, like impalpable symbols of trauma, superimposed. This self-portrait, shot in Super 8 film, illustrates the sensory chaos provoked by permanent tinnitus. I have had to tame this ‘phantom pain’, like perpetually surging sound waves, to define a new state of silence.
The Long Wail Of A Passing Train
Canada | 7′ 31″
directed by Anne-Marie Bouchard
synopsis
An experimental animated film built around a single sound recording that evokes travel, the need to communicate, solitude, fragility, the desire for freedom, the arrival of fall, and our ephemeral existence.
Selection #2
INDOOR TERRITORIES
In recent years, most of us have had the experience of staying indoors for long periods. Some may have found new universes, within the home walls.
Dear Tree, Please Don’t Spill On Our Grave
Sweden | 19′ 57″
directed by Jonne Covers
synopsis
A short story about the history of humankind. In an attempt to make sense of it all, the film origins from a somewhat dry research to ‚how did we get here?‘ and ‚what is that ‚here‘ anyway?‘. Of course this lead to nothing but more questions. So here is a clunky film about adventurous Anna, who lives in a toilet, and who accidentally throws herself a surprise party.
Windows 2020
Romania | 6′ 37″
directed by Maria Brudasca
synopsis
A short frame-by-frame animation film that explores the possibilities offered by windows as spaces of observation, interaction, measuring time, emergency escape and other much needed activities that suffered drastic changes during the spring 2020 lockdown. The situations are based on real experiences, and the entire process of creation has been an attempt at creating one’s own escape room through drawing.
Drink Some Darkness
Canada | 10′ 41″
directed by Trevor Mowchun
synopsis
A sentient patch of projected light guides the viewer through a dark cosmic room and its three doors of life. Inspired by a poem of haunting revelation from the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer.
Selection #3
CONNECTIONS WITH THE THE INVISIBLE
Benevolent, tricky or angry, so are the spirits and creatures of the invisible realm. Here are some stories of interactions with them.
Your Eyes (Principle Of Healing Attitudes)
Mexico | 19′ 57″
directed by Sebastian Ortiz Wilkins
synopsis
A young boy named Cristobal makes a bond with a creature in the body of a sheep who explain him the principles of healing attitudes.
Divine Melodies
Colombia | 33′ 24″
directed by Lucas Silva
synopsis
Pacho and Genaro are two farmers of African descent that live on the banks of the Guapi River, they are great musicians from the ´marimba’ ( balafon) tradition. One day, Pacho has to build a new instrument, for the burial rites of a little kid. The building of it turns into a mystical experience that is going to change his life forever.
Masters Of The Land
Belgium | 14′
directed by Jan Locus
synopsis
The rise of mining, climate change and overgrazing have led to vast desertification in post-communist Mongolia. According to Mongolian shamanistic belief violation of nature by men provokes the anger of the ruling spirits or the ‘masters of the land’.
Texts by shamaness Kyrgys Khurak and Hungarian poet Ferenc Juhasz, who experienced the painful initiation of a shaman in 1957, cut the medium long shots. Interweaving the rich spiritual Mongol tradition with a visual portrait of the country, Masters of the Land submerges the viewer in an intoxicating finale.
(Ive Stevenheydens)
Selection #4
LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING
Attempts to relate at a distance.
Hear Me Sometimes
USA | 14′ 22″
directed by Sofia Theodore-Pierce
synopsis
The monarch migration and an unearthed cassette tape correspondence form a storm speaking towards motherhood, loss, expectation, care and legacy.
An elegy. An ode to uncertainty. A cry for radical optimism and a reordering of splendor. An incomplete container for obsession and wonder. A mixtape for a trip still in progress.
Landing
Canada | 2′ 8″
directed by Chantal Partamian
synopsis
To be queer and to linger between states, between nation-states.
A poetical essay that very briefly explores fragments of a long distance relationship, when two lovers meet, when they are caught in transit.
Blue Screen
Romania | 15′ 18″
directed by Doru Vatavului
synopsis
An amateur filmmaker is working on yet another ode-to-an-ex film. When the person to whom she dedicates her „video-essay“ writes her after a long time, her intimate confession is infiltrated by the cold and banal reality. On the parallel thread of the real conversations, her lyrical film goes to a multitude of states: a fantasy, a diary, a dream, a nightmare and a dystopia.
Where I Don’t Meet You
Canada | 4′ 16″
directed by Charlotte Clermont
synopsis
Shot on Super 8, „Where I Don’t Meet You“ is based on its own physicality by the means of a DIY hand processing technique, where the film’s materiality is treated not only as a medium but also as a subject. Its narrative structure reflects a work on film deconstruction, which joins an unpredictable and experimental universe. Showing a series of figurative shots accompanied by a textual sequence, formal and psychological associations are developed between each of the images. Through a confusing poetry, a filmic atmosphere unfolds in a „non-place“, which recalls a moment lost between two time-spaces.
Selection #5
BEHIND IMAGES
Some films asking the viewer what lays behind the images they are made of.
Listen To Me Remix
Belgium | 14′ 3″
directed by Stijn Demeulenaere
synopsis
„Listen To Me Remix“ invites you to listen. To imagine listening. And in imagining others people’s listening, to imagine your own. The film questions our perceptions of listening: how we imagine other peoples listening, how they give meaning to sound. This in turn might bring us closer to understand how we ourselves give meaning to the sounds we hear, how we imagine our own listening. How sound places us in our surroundings, and our lives.
Borders II
Argentina | 18′
directed by Victoria Maréchal
synopsis
Are there places more imaginable than others?
On Google Earth, Tripoli is depicted as an emptied, abandoned and destroyed city. It is also a city that has not been photographed by the program yet. Across the sea, the small Island of Lampedusa seems so real, with its photographs of swimmers, tourists and children riding bicycles.
Tripoli and Lampedusa, face-to-face, separated by the sea : synthetic images on one side and photographs on the other one. How do these representations build our imaginary ?
From one bank to the other, the sonic landscape tells us what the images have forgotten.
Under Pixel
Spain | 10′
directed by Adria Guardiola Rius
synopsis
There is nothing visible under the pixels. Under the pixels we don’t hear any narration, there is no story. There is nothing to see under the pixel?
The Blue Curtain
USA | 7′ 32″
directed by Heehyun Choi
synopsis
Utilizing the screen recording method, this desktop-essay film successively follows the color blue that has been used in paintings and videos under expressive or technical decisions. The color blue in this work connects artworks from different periods in art history and inquires about the truth and delusion in the act of seeing. After a short internet surfing session, there is a random yet organically constructed archive about the color blue.
Selection #6
DREAMS
Reflections, shadows, glares, apparitions. A group of films like pieces of dreams.
Into the Wild
Austria | 4′ 16″
directed by Markus Maicher
synopsis
Images, harvested on a farm in Mount Forest, Canada, captured with a hand-cranked Bolex, on film material that is made for sound only. Processed in buckets, in shimmering red light down by the old stables. A glimpse through the cracks, somebody is walking in the meadow, trees trembling in the wind, flowers, grass. A world that only film can see, a material flow emerging from the coupling of camera, celluloid, silver salts, chemicals, light particles and the hand of the filmmaker. The film was entirely processed by hand and chemically treated: overexposed images were brought back to life with bleach, other images were solarized and reversed.
Du Vivant
Canada | 9′ 23″
directed by Annie St-Jean, Philippe Lauzier, Éric Normad
synopsis
Pinhole music-photographic film. Stealthy illusions or ghostly fragments. A poetic investigation of the territory of a farm frozen in time.
Styx
France | 18′ 16″
directed by Sierra Nicole Kinsora
synopsis
A 18-minute odyssey through the hidden spaces of an urban world. A poem of moving images testifying to the steps we take out of sync, as we wander towards the end. A testimony of ghosts, machines, and gutters. A ballad for psychopomps.
Accompanied by the music of Giuseppe Ielasi, Styx was made without a script and instead followed a strict, aesthetic continuum based on certain movements and qualities of natural light. Most of the footage was captured within a 1 kilometre radius in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, during the 55 days of the first confinement in France.
Contrasting abstract and figurative images, sequences of natural phenomena and theatrical composition, Styx is a transformative visual narrative of ephemera and their passing from darkness to light.
We Are Without
Australia | 3′ 09″
directed by SJ. Ramir
synopsis
Our hands cannot resurrect. Set amongst the shadows of a grainy, dystopian landscape, We Are Without is a visual response to life, death and self-delusion…
Sleep Mask
Greece | 3′ 10″
directed by Phryne Konti
synopsis
An exploration of the infusion of memory and the paradoxical sensation of phosphenes, leaving a haunting aftertaste.
Strange Attractors
USA | 5′ 16″
directed by Harvey Goldman
music by Jing Wang
synopsis
Amid the ineffable uncertain void of Shiva’s gamma annihilation and one grain avalanches, the frenetic and torpid whorl of gluons and muons, shudder and judder upon the soul of Democritus. Heisenberg’s bifurcations, the restless swarming of Yin and Yang are reckoned in the pirouettes of Dirac’s space and time. Strange Attractors was inspired by the study of quantum physics and subatomic particles. The “visual music” collaborations of Jing Wang
and Harvey Goldman attempt to produce a synesthesia like experience. The audience is encouraged to “see” the music and “hear” the visuals. The imagery and audio components are constructed without hierarchy, a true melding of sound and image.
White Point
UK | 4′
directed by Annette Philo
poem by Dorothy Alexander
synopsis
A deer makes his appearance through a white point.
This film explores the crossover between the technical process of recording image and sound, and the expressive gestures which emerge when both are combined with the spoken word. While filming in Hermitage Castle in the Scottish Borders, the white point was set on my iPhone camera and the exposure dialled in and out, using the touch screen. The Scottish writer Dorothy Alexander gave her response to this material, in her native Scots tongue. The subsequent recording of her performance inhabits the film produced.
„Hart cut solid in licht
sliced mortared moss
and ticht-built stanes
till een stepped oot wi blades“
ENG TRANSLATION:
„Hart cut solid in light.
sliced mortared moss
and tight-built stones
till eyes stepped out with blades“
To See What I Want To See I Need More Than The Eyes
Spain | 6′ 30″
directed by Arnau Padilla
synopsis
A movie freely inspired by the myth of Demeter and Persephone. A rumination on time and the material nature of film. An Orphic journey through the earth on which it was shot and buried later on. Death and resurrection of a film. Celebration of the circular mystery.
Void Weaves
USA | 9′ 23″
directed by Brandon Wilson
synopsis
A film inspired by natural and domestic forms. It alternates between darkness and light, disappearing and reappearing as it wanders through layered space. The sounds also arrive in fractured layers: wind, footsteps, indecipherable whispering, creaking hinges, bubbling and crackling. These build together in intricate swells, retreat and build again.
Selection #7
SHAPES OF TIME
Stretched or compressed, frozen or rediscovered, fluid and multifaceted, this is the nature of time.
The Bearers Of Memory
Lithuania | 13′ 17″
directed by Miglė Križinauskaitė-Bernotienė
synopsis
With every moment – one more memory. But memory sometimes goes blind and what is left becomes hazy.
Flying Waters
Hungary | 2′ 25″
directed by Peter Klausz
synopsis
A song to the fading of memories. Cameraless techniques on 8mm film, 35mm negative film and slides.
10 Megabytes Of Memory
Austria | 2′ 4″
directed by Markus Maicher
synopsis
What is the meaning of „memory“ in the digital age? For humans memory consists of subjective images of past events, for computers memory refers to an objective capacity to store information. The film compresses 10 human years in 10 megabytes of binary information and employs an aesthetics of the small file format, a counter strategy against the ever increasing resolution, bitrate and cost of digital images. The file was compressed and assembled with open-source software „ffmpeg“, the original Video8 tapes were left unedited.
Rootless
Sweden | 5′ 32″
directed by Karolina Bergman Engman
synopsis
An animated short based on photographs, reflecting upon memory processing of a lost home. The house goes through a transition from present to absent, to eventually become an object of memory. Where soundscapes are repeated to a point where technological errors make an imprint, as the house becomes more distant in the movement of time.
Birthday
Japan | 8′ 10″
directed by Yuka Sato
synopsis
What is birth? It is said that being born into this world is the beginning of suffering: dukkha.
Madame Jarrar
Canada | 4′ 11″
directed by Mathieu Samaille
poem by Mathieu Samaille
synopsis
A videopoem about Madame Jarrar’s inner world.
Through the power of suggestion, this video-poem unites senses and sensations, inner and external rhythms and variations in time. A dull landscape unfolds before Mrs Jarrar while the representation of masculinity poetically invades her inner world. Madame Jarrar is absent to her own self, totally imbued with her memories. Her daily routine and sensual images jostle against each other as she remembers the young body of her deceased husband, still the object of love and desire, but marked by the stigma of cancer.
Aged images, as worn out as the protagonist, explore this body, loved and cared for, gnawed by the disease : it is a place of loss, grief but also comfort. In the autumn of her life, Mrs Jarrar can still hear her mother’s voice singing to her „Abneti Alsaghira“, meaning „My little girl“. Deeply inside, she still is this little girl in exile.
The Prophetess
Canada | 2′ 20″
directed by Marco Joubert
poem by Marco Joubert, freely inspired by a poem by Francis Ponge
synopsis
Drawing from the observations, experiences and thoughts gathered throughout her life, the prophetess, in a surge of hope and altruism, shares her conception of a world which should have been, could or will be: a manifesto, for a fictitious or latent generation The text is freely inspired by a Francis Ponge poem, The Law and the Prophets (1930), reinterpreted and rewritten to better anchor it to the contemporary context as well as to my own ideals.
Return
Mexico | 12′ 35″
directed by Vicente Rincón-Gallardo Ogarrio
synopsis
The story follows a man searching for a lost book, by a mysterious author, that reminds him of a past love. The search takes him to start a road-trip through México (starting at the capital and ending in la sierra de Guanajuato), the same trip that the book described. In the narrative two voices interact: one describing the journey, and a second one speaking fragments of „Retorno“, the enigmatic book.
Lithic
Peru | 8′ 5″
directed by Romina Ortega
synopsis
Three distinctly different pairs of lives collide into each other during the Indy 500 race. Renowned Swedish rappers Joy M’batha & Frej Larsson star in this pulse thumper alongside American rapper, Debra Danielsen, better known as the mother of original MTV teen mom, Farrah Abraham.
Selection #8
TECHNO-ANIMISM
Directly quoting the title of the first film of this section, a „techno-animist“ duo.
Without Conscious Effort: A retrospective Of Techno-Animist Machines
New Zealand | 12′ 16″
directed by Emit Snake-Beings
synopsis
A CCTV camera’s observations into a noisy factory where coin operated divinity machines, mutant synthesisers and coin-operated shrines are being reproduced by a techno-animist cult. Randomly accessed memories narrated by an artist obsessed with morse-code, cut-up radio voices and bingo numbers drive the story of this haphazard creative ethnography.
Flying Low
Colombia | 24′ 37″
directed by Elkin Calderón Guevara, Diego Piñeros García
synopsis
Aa spatio-temporal journey inside of a DC3 airplane, in which different historical and dream episodes are narrated from a singular voice. These old surviving aircraft from the Second World War are still used daily throughout the Colombian flatlands and jungles, being essential to reach remote and inhospitable areas abandoned by the State.
A trip with unusual stories and aerial reflections that passes through different places, landscapes, visions and perspectives, until reaching the boarding and meeting of an unexpected passenger. The obsolete machine is witness to a physical and temporary suspension in the always imminent shadow of the accident. Nature and dilapidated aircraft confront their destiny, hybridize and combine. Suspension in time and resistance to the processes of modernization and progress are the ellipse of this story.
Selection #9
ARCTIC STORIES
Explorations and legends of Northern lands.
Exercises In Being Close To You: A Story For The Arctic Refuge
Canada | 15′
directed by Krista Davis
synopsis
An experimental documentary that follows a group of hikers through Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The team is in search of the Porcupine Caribou herd in hopes of collecting stories that could help push back on oil exploration and drilling on the caribou’s birthing grounds. The narrator, admitting to a perverse desire to be close to everything, wants nothing more than to spoon a caribou.
As the film culminates in anticipation of the “money shot”, the audience is pushed to evaluate its expectations of nature films. Meanwhile, the expedition team is left to weigh intention with strategy when environmental filmmaking mirrors tactics of the extraction economy they are fighting against.
The film uses documentary footage of the two-week expedition intercut with experimental vignettes — exercises, to rethink our relationship to the land and animals we hope to protect.
These Sight-Altering Spells Sometimes Speak
USA | 18′
directed by Georg Koszulinski
synopsis
Chapter 1: The Deluding of Gylphi
Written by Icelandic scholar and poet, Snorri Sturluson, in the 13th century, Gylfaginning tells the story of King Gylfi setting out to Asgard to encounter the All-father, Odin. Gylfi comes to learn of the events that lead to Ragnarok—when the gods will be slain and the world comes to its fiery end. This film adaptation engages both deep/geologic time and mythic time, meditating on issues of the Anthropocene, and the 6th mass extinction as it plays out against Odin’s fateful prophecies.
Deepest Darkness, Flaming Sun
Canada | 9′ 52″
directed by Ella Morton
synopsis
A short experimental film about the Svalbard Archipelago in the Norwegian Arctic. Narrated by wilderness guide Marte Agneberg Dahl, the film features altered Super 8mm film footage of the region. Dahl speaks about her travels in the Arctic, climate change, walruses and the region’s history.
We Are Islands
Canada | 5′ 21″
directed by Mike Hoolbloom
synopsis
Based on texts gleaned from Catherine Bush’s novel Blaze Island, this multi-layered collage offers a fleeting love story on a distant shore. The novel reimagines Shakespeare’s last testament, The Tempest, now set on a fictionalised version of Fogo Island, a windswept island off Canada’s east coast. Local photographers/artists Paddy Barry and M’Liz Keefe issue a lifetime of photographs and deep weather sightings, which create a kind of ground and schooling for the couple (Miranda and Frank), who find themselves by embracing the climate.
Selection #10
SUCH STUFF WE ARE MADE ON
Some films exploring the structure of matter life and identity.
Untitled (Performance)
Romania | 10′
directed by Ruxandra Mitache, Andrei Mitache
synopsis
Video Art / Poetry film project, composed from a digital poem written in May 2018, juxtaposed with a 3D scan.
The black chamber
is the first one,
after the
white noise.
The chamber, silent, just fine.
I see the bridge,
the mirrored sphere, the transparent canvas,
the interactive draw.
Not opaque,
projected,
reflected,
the prism
form.
The Life We Live Is Not Life Itself
Greece | 8′ 45″
directed by Ian Gibbins
poem by Tasos Sagris
synopsis
Tasos Sagris’s poem, with its haunting soundtrack by Whodoes, offers us an extended exploration of lives lived in parallel, at cross-purposes, in and out of love, around the world, from the innocence of children to the wisdom of elders. There are the good times when summer seems to last forever, and the bad, when persecution and misadventure could land us in prison, with nothing but rain to hear our voice. But what is the reality? What is mere illusion? Can there be more to life than simply living?
Nothing in the video is quite as it seems. In malls and side-streets, we see our fellow walkers, and then, again, again… In windows of city buildings, on derelict walls, we see the faces of the young and old, the boys and girls, the men and women of our imagination, our desires, our reconstructed memories. Perhaps we will meet again … on another rainy afternoon… “like now, like now.”
Tattva
USA | 5′
directed by Kalpana Subramanian
synopsis
Tattva in Sanskrit (meaning ‚thatness‘) refers to basic elements of nature that determine the material manifestation of all matter and organic life. This film experiments with cinematic projections, microbiology architecture and performance, to inquire into the material ’nature’ of our ‚being’. A scanning electron microscope was used to capture the interior landscapes of everyday matter. Surveying quotidian textures this film explores the unseen and the imperceptible seek a dissolution of boundaries between human-nonhuman, subject-object, art-science, matter and spirit.
Emerald Ice
USA | 15′ 59″
directed by Jesseca Inez Simmons
synopsis
A cinematic journey exploring the mind of the American poet Diane Wakoski. This short experimental film brings to the screen her work–the sprawling beauty that is Diane’s emotional spectrum.
Metamorphosis
Australia | 4′ 21″
directed by Marie Craven, Eduardo Yagüe
synopsis
Inspired by a woodcut print by M.C. Escher, Metamorphosis, imagines a man fascinated by life’s multiple and varying repetitions, of shapes and spaces, movement and time.
Pleroma
Russia | 4′ 10″
directed by Vladislav Andreev
synopsis
There is someone’s first and last breath,
there is the young man with a black veil,
there the horn sounds
and pearls adorn necks.
Selection #10
HERITAGE – Remains from the past
Personal and historical heritage. What have previous generations left us?
Gold And Snowflakes
Sweden | 11′ 40″
directed by Ronak Naderi
synopsis
A subjects tale of migration. A development from childhood to adulthood. To receive something that is given and be part of something greater, or to go your own way.
What shapes us? What is our essence/DNA and what are the influences from our surroundings? What is most valuable to us? Do we need to experience loss to be able to value things and people? What is a Gift?
When The Sea Sends Forth A Forest
France | 21′ 10″
directed by Guangli Liu
synopsis
Through a 3D virtual universe simulated by a game engine intertwined with historical pictures, a lost moment of history can be experienced. The story revolves around the memory of a Chinese survivor of Khmer Rouge. This tragedy, which took the lives of 2 million people, continues to reshape our present in virtue of today’s narration.
Lilith
Norway | 3′ 40″
directed by Michel Pavlou
synopsis
Lilith, the fairy, the black moon, banished wife from men and their gods whom she claimed to be equal, a wandering madonna of Aleppo and Gaza, light trickles through the folds of her veil, makes her pellucid, crystalline.
A Dog Named Sheep
Belgium | 5′ 30″
directed by Giedre Narusyte Boots
synopsis
An animation film with encyclopedically precise fantasies and fabeld historical facts. For 200 years, the legend of Napoleon’s lost gold has been haunting Lithuania. The Grande Armée, packed with silver and gold, was unable to pass the frozen Paneriu mountain and the treasure was lost in a snowstorm. Sergeant Bourgogne describes everything in his memoirs… Or is this just a fable? Maybe the magpies can tell us more. Or an army dog.
Not me, that’s for sure…
Selection #11
NATURE AND US
Nature speaks to those who know how to listen to it.
Narciso
Argentina | 29′ 30″
directed by Julio Fermepin
synopsis
Narciso lives amongst mountains, he is in charge of water distribution in the aboriginal community of Hornaditas. His days go by between personal stories, working the land and his vision of contemporary world and nature.
WWW {The Whale Who Wasn’t}
USA | 10′
directed by Alessia Cecchet
synopsis
A tale of conquest and destruction. Utilizing fragments of early educational films and animation, the piece develops a sci-fi counter-narrative of subjugation and annihilation told from a non-human perspective.
Borametz
Switzerland | 5′ 57″
directed by Yannick Mosimann
synopsis
Borametz – half plant, half animal – hybrid of the incurably vegetable lamb, which as a four-legged plant is firmly attached to the ground and complains about nature – what does it want to tell us, outside in the drizzle, inconsolable and outraged, when it speaks one last time?
Earthfall
Norway | 6′ 32″
directed by Simone Hooymans
synopsis
In this experimental animation made of hand-made ink drawings, artist Simone Hooymans explores the transforming powers of crisis. Landscapes, cityscapes and abstract shapes are moving slowly, while growing into an avalanche threatening to destroy everything in its way. Then the destruction is a fact, but from the rubble and chaos emerges a glimpse of a new beginning: Unknown and undefined, but maybe hopeful? The film is a symbolic exploration of current global challenges, yet also an inner journey exploring how a crisis can transform you.
Tornado Lake
USA | 10′ 53″
directed by Tiffany Deater
synopsis
A video essay that attempts to merge the philosophical and scientific aspects of our relationship to insects and “undesirable” animals.
Waldhorn
Germany | 8′
directed by Leyla Rodriguez
synopsis
A reality check to the ancient call of the wild. The two protagonists of this epic journey feature an immediate verbal dimension – a premiere in the work of Leyla Rodriguez. Speaking softly yet clearly, they let go of chaos and lethargy and set out to attend a mystical meeting.
Wading
Colombia | 1‘ 57″
directed by George Mario Angel Quintero
synopsis
A young man wades into the water and remembers his grandfather’s voice exhorting the fish to come to him. In the end, the young man is nothing more than the play of sunlight and shadow.
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