THEME PROGRAMS
6 Concept 72 QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS CANNES FILM FESTIVAL: PEACE TO US IN OUR DREAMS, BY SHARUNAS BARTAS 8 Festival Board 74 BERLINALE FORUM EXPANDED: Rebranding Humanity 10 Festival Team 80 ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL: You Run Through My Veins 11 UNATC / UNARTE Presentation 86 CINEDANS AMSTERDAM: Of Love and Other Demons 12 Partner Festivals 92 OBERHAUSEN FILM FESTIVAL: 18 International Competition Jury Paradise in Ruins - Visual Art Activism
20 Opening Gala 98 GOLDEN SHORTS: Best Films in Major Festivals
22 Closing Gala 105 REBEL WITH A CAUSE: Theme Program for Teenagers
111 EXPERIMENTED IN ROMANIA INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
24 TRANSGRESSIVE BODIES SIDE EVENTS International Competition I 119 NISI MASA Experimental Film Workshop 32 DIGITAL DYSTOPIAS International Competition II 120 BIEFF opens LIKE CNDB 2016
40 JOURNEYS INTO SUBCONSCIOUS 121 Panel: The Lifespan of Cinematic Experimentation - Festival International competition III Strategies and Beyond / BIEFF on MUBI
48 DANGER IS MY BUSINESS 122 Săptămâna sunetului / Sound Week International Competition IV
56 THE ARTIST IS PRESENT International Competition V
64 URBAN RITUALS International Competition VI Special Acknowledgments to all the directors, producers and distributors whose films are screened in BIEFF 2016 and to the following persons and institutions:
Alessandro Raja - Festival Scope Giorgia Huelsse - Films Boutique Festival Alis Vasile - British Council Gilda Lazăr - JTI Mihai Orășanu - MDV Film Alina Cantacuzino - Cervantes Institute Hilke Doering - Oberhausen International Short Natalia Trebik - Le Fresnoy Studio National des Alexander Peyre Dutrey - Embassy of Sweden Film Festival Arts Contemporains Ana Glavce - TNT Ioana Diaconu - MUBI Romania Nicolae Mandea - National University of Theatre Anamaria Pravicencu - Săptămâna Sunetului Jing Haase - Filmkontakt Nord and Film Bucharest Andrei Rus - Film Menu Johannes Klein - The Festival Agency Nora Molitor - Berlinale Forum Expanded Angelika Ramlow - Berlinale Forum Expanded Jonathan Pouthier - Centre Pompidou Octav Avramescu - Săptămâna Sunetului Anna Abrahams - EYE Film Institute Netherlands Joost Daamen - IDFA International Documentary Paolo Bertolin - Venice Film Festival Anne Sophie Trintignac - Luxbox Film Festival Amsterdam Paolo Moretti - Rome International Film Festival Benoit Blanchard - UniFrance Josephine Settmacher - Films Boutique Pascale Ramonda Brigitta Burger-Utzer - Sixpack Film Juhani Alanen - Tampere International Short Film Pauline Ginot - Autour de Minuit Bogdan Drăgotoiu Festival Peter Greenaway Boglarka Nagy - French Institute Bucharest Jukka Pekka Laasko - Tampere International Peter van Hoof - International Film Festival Carmen Constantin - AFCN Short Film Festival Rotterdam Crăița Nanu - Transilvania Film Lara Zankoul Radu Boroianu - Romanian Cultural Institute Carsten Spicher - Oberhausen International Short Lars Henrik Gass - Oberhausen International Rémi Bonhomme - Semaine de la Critique, Cannes Film Festival Short Film Festival Film Festival Caroline Seebregts - Ambasada Regatului Țărilor Laurențiu Brătan - Anim’est Bucharest Roxana Trestioreanu - UNARTE National de Jos International Animation Film Festival University of Arts Bucharest Cătălin Bălescu - UNARTE National University of Laurențiu Damian - UCIN Ruxandra Andrei - Ideoplan Arts Bucharest Liliana Costa - Agência da Curta Metragem Salette Ramalho - Agência da Curta Metragem Cătălin Crețu - Centrul de Muzică Electroacustică Liliana Ciurea - Ambasada Elveției Sabina Ulubeanu și Multimedia UNMB Lorraine Creusot - French Institute Bucharest Sergi Steegmann - The Match Factory Codrin Tofan - Embassy of Israel Bucharest Lucian Pricop - UCIN Simona Pop - Embassy of Sweden Bucharest Christoph Terhechte - Berlinale Forum Expanded Ludovic Chavarot - Clermont Ferrand Shelly Hagler Livne - Embassy of Israel Bucharest Christophe Leparc - Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, International Short Film Festival Ștefan Bradea - Transilvania Film Cannes Film Festival Luiza Domnișoru - Dacia Automobile Ștefana Mărmureanu - Romanian Cultural Cornelia Popa - Cinelabs Romania Magdolna Csegedi - Balassi Institute Bucharest Institute Cristian Petcu - Romanian Cultural Institute Marina Neacşu - Goethe Institut Thania Dimitrakopoulou - The Match Factory Cristophe Pomez - French Institute Bucharest Marion Poeth - Cinedans Dance on Screen Theo Tsappos - The Swedish Film Institute Daniela Russo - LUX Artists’ Moving Image Festival Amsterdam Theus Zwakhals - LIMA Amsterdam Dietmar Schwärzler - Sixpack Film Marius Comărniceanu - WinMedia Tudor Ciortea - Noumax Elisabeth Marinkovic - Austrian Cultural Forum Martijn te Pas - IDFA International Documentary Ulrich Ziemons - Berlinale Forum Expanded Bucharest Festival Amsterdam Valeska Neu - Films Boutique Evelin Hust - Goethe Institut Martine Dekker - Cinedans Dance On Screen Vava Ştefănescu - Centrul Național al Dansului Florin Oslobanu - Control Club Festival Amsterdam CNDB François Bonenfant - Le Fresnoy Studio National Mary Scherer - Video Data Bank Vesa Puhakka - AV-arkki des Arts Contemporains Miguel Dias - Agencia Da Curta Metragem Virgil Nițulescu - Muzeul Țăranului Român Gabriela Petre - “Vito Grasso” Italian Cultural Miguel Valverde - Portugal Film & IndieLisboa Yvonne Irimescu - NexT International Short Film Institute Bucharest International Independent Film Festival Festival Gabriela Albu - Cinema Muzeul Tăranului Mihai Chirilov - Transilvania International Film and to all BIEFF 2016 volunteers. Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival BIEFF - Concept
Copel Moscu, Festival Director Adina Pintilie, Artistic Director
Created under the patronage of the artistic territory, both for the general and rarely on cinema screen. We do this because National University of Theatre and Film the specialized audience, particularly for film we believe this border area is an extremely “I.L. Caragiale” and the National University and visual art students and professionals. rich, creatively nourishing territory, from of Arts Bucharest, with the support of the where unique artistic voices have constantly Administration of the National Cultural Therefore we present films which emerged over the years, such as Peter Fund, BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL are lessons of cinema, emblematic pieces, Greenaway, David Lynch, Derek Jarman, EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL BIEFF has as eye-openers in regard to the unlimited Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage and others. its main focus the courage to experiment in possibilities offered by the cinematic cinematic language. medium, the ways to transcend any possible BIEFF presents on one side borders between fiction, documentary and an INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL BIEFF is the first showcase of avant-garde visual art, the transgression of boundaries on SHORT FILM COMPETITION, consisting of cinema and visual art in Romania, a non- every level, from concept, structure, rhythm, some of the most intriguing and innovative commercial event with educational purpose, to the construction of the shot. visual experiments from the last few years, aimed at bringing in front of the audience titles awarded and screened in prestigious highly innovative films and filmmakers with BIEFF is also the first event in Romania festivals, museums and galleries all over strong personal views on contemporary dedicated to promoting the border area the world, such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, reality, which also daringly explore the between cinema and visual art, offering Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Toronto, Centre boundaries of cinematic language. A cinema increased visibility to cutting edge visual Pompidou etc. of total creative freedom and lack of artists, whose work is mainly accessible in compromise. museums and in the art gallery circuit and
We believe BIEFF is a highly necessary event, BIEFF is also honored to collaborate with some of the major international film festivals and particularly for Romania, whose cinema institutions in the area of avant-garde cinema and visual art,recognized worldwide for their already proved its amazing strength in consistent creative support of innovative, radical filmmaking and visual art: QUINZAINE the past few years, through outstanding DES RÉALISATEURS - Cannes Film Festival, BERLINALE Forum Expanded - Berlin voices such as Cristi Puiu, Corneliu International Film Festival, International Film Festival ROTTERDAM, International Short Film Porumboiu, Cristian Mungiu, Radu Jude and Festival OBERHAUSEN, IDFA International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam - Paradocs, \\ others, yet mainly in the area of realistic Centre POMPIDOU Paris, Le FRESNOY – Studio National des Arts Contemporains, CINEDANS narrative fiction. On this flourishing creative - Dance on Screen Festival Amsterdam, TAMPERE Film Festival, SIXPACKFILM Austria and EYE background, BIEFF comes as a natural Film Institute Netherlands, each of them bringing to Bucharest a selection of highly complementary reaction, its main goal being innovative multi-awarded films from their last year’s selections. to broaden perception, to open a whole new
6 We are honored to welcome in our International Competition Jury prestigious films professionals such as: PAOLO BERTOLIN — Member of the Selection Committee, Venice International Film Festival; ULRICH ZIEMONS — Program Coordinator, Berlin International Film Starting with 2012, PETER GREENAWAY became the HONORARY PRESIDENT of Festival – Forum Expanded; LUDOVIC the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival BIEFF, generously joining us in our CHAVAROT — Member of the Selection educational initiative. PETER GREENAWAY is one of the key voices of contemporary avant- Committee, Clermont-Ferrand International garde cinema, one of the most ambitious and controversial experimental filmmakers of Short Film Festival – LABO Competition; our time. Trained as a painter and heavily influenced by theories of structural linguistics, ROEE ROSEN — Visual artist and filmmaker, ethnography, and philosophy, PETER GREENAWAY’s films often traverse unexplored winner of the BIEFF 2011 & 2014 Main territories, rejecting conventional narrative structures in favor of awe-striking imagery, Awards. constantly testing the limits of the cinematic medium. Regularly nominated in prestigious film festivals such as Cannes, Venice and Berlin, he has an impressive body of work, As well, BIEFF started in 2010 a wonderful consisting of 13 feature films and 50 short films and documentaries, plus exhibitions, visual collaboration with one of the main installations, VJ performances, paintings, books, opera librettos. experimental filmmakers of our time, PETER GREENAWAY. He opened our festival in 2010 Also, following its previous years’ success, BIEFF will dedicate again its 2014 Opening with an impressive Masterclass, addressed and Closing Ceremonies to the most recent works of some major names of the especially to our main audience, contemporary cinema. In 2010, BIEFF presented, for the first time in Romania, the latest Romanian film and visual art students film of the master of experimental cinema Jan Švankmajer, right after its premiere in and professionals, and in 2011, with Venice. In 2011, BIEFF screened the Romanian premiere of the most recent work of his groundbreaking LIVE CINEMA VJ Alexander Sokurov, his impressive FAUST, winner of the Golden Lion in Venice 2011. In PERFORMANCE LUPERCYCLOPEDIA, a 2012, BIEFF presented the Romanian premiere of Peter Greenaway’s impressive latest highly innovative audio-visual experiment, feature, GOLTZIUS AND THE PELICAN COMPANY, while in 2013 the film to open the intended to challenge the borders of filmic festival was Terry Gilliam’s most recent feature, THE ZERO THEOREM. In 2014, BIEFF language and offer the audience a totally opened with the Golden Lion winner from 2014, Roy Andersson’s A PIGEON SAT ON A new cinematic experience, performance BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE and closed with Ulrich Seidl’s fascinating hybrid which was immensely successful all over documentary, IN THE BASEMENT. the world, traveling in only 4 years to 14
countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France, BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Switzerland \\ and the UK.
7 FESTIVAL BOARD
PETER GREENAWAY COPEL MOSCU
HONORIFIC PRESIDENT FESTIVAL DIRECTOR
One of the key voices of contemporary Copel Moscu (b.1953) graduated from 2010, consistent with his free innovative avant-garde cinema, PETER GREENAWAY the National Institute of Drama and Film vision and educational commitment, he took is one of the most ambitious and Bucharest in 1978, after which he worked the challenge to offer Romanian audiences, controversial experimental filmmakers of at the Sahia Documentary Film Studio. particularly to cinema and visual students, our time. Trained as a painter and heavily One of the key authors of the Romanian the first international experimental film influenced by theories of structural Documentary New Wave from the ’80 festival in Romania. linguistics, ethnography, and philosophy, (together with Ovidiu Bose Pastina, Tereza PETER GREENAWAY’s films often Barta, Laurentiu Damian, Sabina Pop), he traverse unexplored territories, rejecting was a pioneer in challenging the borders of conventional narrative structures in favor of cinema language, in controversial subversive an awe-striking imagery, constantly testing films which concealed, under daring the limits and canons of the cinematic conceptual and formal experimenting, a medium. Regularly nominated in prestigious fierce criticism of the communist regime, film festivals such as Cannes, Venice and films banned by the establishment’s Berlin, he has an impressive body of work, censorship. Copel Moscu created over 50 consisting of 13 feature films and 50 short- short and feature films, as director and films and documentaries, plus exhibitions, scriptwriter, for which he was awarded over visual installations, VJ performances, 25 international and national prizes (THE paintings, books, opera librettos. His first EVENING SCHOOL, ON THE OZANA SHORE, narrative feature film, THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S MY BELOVED SCHOOL, THE BRONZE AGE, CONTRACT, completed in 1982, received A DAY WILL COME and I CHOSE FREEDOM). great critical acclaim and established him He presently teaches film directing at
\\ internationally as an original filmmaker, a the National University of Theater and reputation consolidated by his following Film Bucharest (UNATC) and video-art films, such as THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE at National University of Arts Bucharest AND HER LOVER, THE PILLOW BOOK and THE (UNARTE) and is referred to as an artistic TULSE LUPER SUITCASES. consultant for television and cinema. In
8 ADINA PINTILIE OZANA NICOLAU
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Adina Pintilie is a Romanian filmmaker, recent which premiered in Locarno, won a Runner Up Ozana Nicolau is an alumnus of Berlinale graduate of the National University of Theater Award at the Miami IFF and a Special Mention Talent Campus and of Locarno Summer and Film Bucharest, Directing Department. in Trieste in 2009. Her latest short DIARY#2 Academy, and a recent graduate of the At the border between fiction, documentary won the ZONTA Award for Best Woman National University of Theatre and Film in and visual art, her films are very particular Filmmaker at Oberhausen International Short Bucharest, Directing Department. Intre in the new Romanian cinema landscape, Film Festival 2013. Prieteni (Surrounded by Friends), her standing out through a highly personal graduation film, was presented in over 15 film visual style, daring experimenting in cinema festivals all over the world, from Tampere language and uncompromising exploration ISFF to ISFF in Drama - Greece and Karlovy of human psychology. In 2007, her medium Vary. Ozana has worked as assistant director length DON’T GET ME WRONG - produced with acclaimed directors of the Romanian by Aristoteles Workshop, with the support New Wave, such as Călin Peter Netzer (Child’s of ARTE France and the Romanian National Pose – winner of Golden Bear at Berlinale Television, was world premiered in Locarno 2013) and Radu Jude (Aferim – awarded Silver - Filmmakers of the Present Competition, Bear in 2015). Presently, Ozana is developing included in IDFA 2007-Best of Fests selection, a documentary in the framework of East- awarded Golden Dove Best Documentary West Talent Lab at Go-East Film Festival and Award at DOK LEIPZIG 2007 and selected/ I-Doc Workshop – Visions du Réel Nyon. Her awarded in 50 international film festivals such latest film “The Island (aka Boat Trip)” had as: Thessaloniki, Montpellier, Trieste, Namur, the international premiere at Cottbus Film Munchen, Moscow, Sarajevo, Indielisboa, Festival 2015. Warszaw, Krakow etc. Her last medium length, BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
OXYGEN, was screened in Tiger Awards Short \\ Film Competition of Rotterdam Film Festival 2010, Buenos Aires BAFICI, Montpellier, Thessaloniki, Warszaw, Bilbao etc. In 2008 she co-directed Sandpit#186 with George Chiper,
9 FESTIVAL TEAM
Festival Coordinator & Assistant Curator Subtitling & Translations Coordinator Interns Dan Angelescu Mădălina Matei Alberto Niculae Alexandra Zamfirescu Chief Curator Location Managers Alexandru Păun Adina Pintilie Simona Alecu Alina Vlad Mihaela Oprea Anda Stăncescu Curatorial Department Andrei Pavel Adina Marin Volunteers Coordinators Anna Berza Andrei Tănăsescu Andrei Jakab Bianca Semen Claudia Cojocariu Adriana Susmă Bogdan Benea Andreea Udrea Bogdan Nohai Catalogue Coordinator Cristina Albert Curator for Danger Is My Business & Rebel Adina Marin Georgiana Ene With a Cause Iacob Paștină Ozana Nicolau Catalogue DTP Ionuț Gighileanu Vadim Ciocazan Mihai Marin Strategic Partnerships & Sponsoring Miruna Mihuțoiu Manager Graphic Designer Roxana Marin Ozana Nicolau Bogdan Cătălin Cazacioc Roxana Urzică Ruxandra Scripcariu PR & Press Web Developer Teodora Morar Roxana Dănăilă Tiberiu Andrișan
Print Traffic & Technical Coordinator Nisi Masa Workshop Coordinators Elena Găgeanu Sorina Diaconu Vlad Ghinea Guest Coordinator Doris Dănilă Screenings For Teenagers Coordinator Teona Galgoțiu Video Coordinator
\\ Alice Gheorghiu
Photo Coordinator Doria Drăgușin
10 THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF THEATER AND FILM “I.L. CARAGIALE” BUCHAREST
The NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF THEATER AND FILM “I.L. CARAGIALE” BUCHAREST (UNATC) counts among the most prestigious European film schools, together with the Film And TV School Of Academy Of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), and the National Film School in Lodz. The history of UNATC begins as early as 1864, the year when the first Theatre School was founded in Bucharest. In 1954, the old school merged with the Institute of Film Art, to become UNATC, The National School of Theatre and Cinema.
Great names of Romanian cinema are UNATC alumni; among them: Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Cătălin Mitulescu, Radu Muntean, Tudor Giurgiu.
THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF ARTS BUCHAREST
Founded in 1864, the NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF ARTS BUCHAREST (UNARTE) proposes, through the creative work of its students, a cultural model that links universal art forms to the contemporary cultural space. The specificity of the curriculum offered by UNARTE, and by the Photography and Video Department in particular, relies in the fostering of a flexible thinking, and in promoting themes related to contemporary issues, and a variety of approaches that avoid conservatism and dogma.
UNARTE promotes the works and ideas of its students in symposia, exhibitions, and press conferences, and offers them opportunities of exchanges and collaborations with art universities all over Europe. Among its most celebrated professors and alumni, UNARTE counts Constantin Brâncuşi, Theodor Aman, Gheorghe Tattarescu, Ştefan Luchian, Alexandru Ciucurencu, Corneliu Baba. BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL \\
11 PARTNER FESTIVALS
QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS CANNES
BERLINALE FORUM EXPANDED
INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM
CINEDANS DANCE ON SCREEN AMSTERDAM
INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM FESTIVAL OBERHAUSEN \\
12 QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS CANNES PARTNER FESTIVAL PRESENTATION
Parallel section of Cannes Film Festival, created by the French Directors Guild in the wake of the events of May ’68, QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS (the DIRECTORS’ FORTHNIGHT) seeks to aid filmmakers and contribute to their discovery by the critics and audiences alike. From its initial program in 1969, it cast its lot with the avant-garde (the glorious seventies), as well as it created a breeding ground where the Cannes Festival would regularly find its prestigious auteurs.
Since its inception, QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS has showcased the first films of Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Ken Loach, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke, Chantal Akerman, Spike Lee, Luc et Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Sofia Coppola, Robert Bresson, Manoel de Oliveira, Stephen Frears, Jerzy Skolimowski, William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppola... among others.
Among the various sections at the Cannes Film Festival, QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS is distinguished by its independent-mindedness, its non-competitive nature and its concern to cater to non-professional Cannes audiences, which can buy a subscription for the entire Fortnight program or purchase tickets for individual screenings. Striving to be eclectic and receptive to all forms of cinematic expression, QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS pays particular attention to the annual production of fiction features, short films and documentaries, to the emergence of independent fringe filmmaking, and even to contemporary popular genres, provided these films are the expression of an individual talent and an original directorial style.
CHRISTOPHE LEPARC Managing Director of QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS, Festival de CANNES.
Has been working in the film industry since 1994 as prospector, member of the selection RÉALISATEURS (DIRECTORS’ FORTHNIGHT), 1990, specialized in the organization of committee, elaborating retrospectives. the other sidebar of Cannes Film Festival. BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
film festivals; has notably worked for the Between 2000 and 2008, he has worked He’s currently working with Edouard \\ International Women Directors’ Film Festival as Program Manager for the International Waintrop, the new Artistic Director of the of Créteil during 10 years as “prospector” Critics’ Week, sidebar of Cannes Film Festival Fortnight. of films. He has begun to work for devoted to new talents. Since 2007, he Mediterranean Film Festival of Montpellier in is Managing Director of QUINZAINE DES
13 BERLINALE FORUM EXPANDED PARTNER FESTIVAL PRESENTATION
Avant garde, experimental works, essays, long-term observations, political reportage and yet-to-be-discovered cinematic landscapes: the INTERNATIONAL FORUM OF NEW CINEMA, FORUM in short, is the most daring section of the BERLINALE.
There are few formal limitations when it comes to the selection of films, resulting in even greater freedom. Documentaries and feature films are given equal consideration. The films in the Forum straddle the line between art and cinema.
In 2006 BERLINALE FORUM EXPANDED was launched. Presenting film, video, installation and performative works on varying themes and in multiple venues across Berlin, works in FORUM EXPANDED provide a critical perspective and an expanded sense of cinematography.
The director of this section is Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, who also works as a curator, alongside Anselm Franke, Nanna Heidenreich, Bettina Steinbrügge and Uli Ziemons.
ARSENAL Institute for Film and Video Art
Communicating international film culture in a lively manner is both the aim and mission of ARSENAL Institute for Film and Video Art. Working at the point where practice and theory come together, the institute comprises a space for thinking outside the box in (film) cultural terms, a cinema whose attention is focused on independent and experimental film and a communication platform for promoting dynamic exchange between film, academia and art linked to a whole network of different organizations. Its work encompasses the running of the two-screen Arsenal cinema, putting on the BERLINALE FORUM and FORUM EXPANDED, distributing films as Arsenal Distribution and collecting and
\\ communicating works of independent and experimental cinema as well as avant-garde film history. Presenting video art and experimental films at the Filmhaus, at festivals, and in art and gallery spaces all plays a part in the ongoing investigation of what the conditions that constitute cinema actually are. The board of directors is made up of the film scholars and curators Milena Gregor, Birgit Kohler and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus.
14 INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM PARTNER FESTIVAL PRESENTATION
International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) offers a high quality line-up of carefully selected fiction and documentary feature films, short films and media art. IFFR is one of the largest audience and industry-driven film festivals in the world. Famously, only seventeen people attended the opening night of the first Film International Rotterdam on 28 June 1972. Presently, during twelve festival days, hundreds of filmmakers and other artists present their work to a large audience (2014: 287.000 admissions) and over
2.000 film professionals. The festival’s Official Selection includes some 220 feature films and 320 short films out of 60 countries. The 44th edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam takes place from Wednesday 21 January till Sunday 1 February 2015.
The Shorts section of International Film designations (including the traditional Festival Rotterdam has no fixed agenda, “avant-garde”, “underground” or “video boundaries or statement, but aims art” ones). Work may also draw on to show films that are experimental, documentary, narrative, animation or innovative and contemporary, with any other tradition – or no tradition a maximum length of 60 minutes. at all. So, what is experimental, what It contains, besides the regular is contemporary in the eyes of IFFR competition and spectrum programs, Shorts? I’m hoping this program (partly) special thematic and solo programs, gives the answer. and also holds a series of MindThe BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Gap-nights with live audio-visual events. \\ The selection committee of the IFFR Shorts doesn’t thoroughly reflect in advance on what experimental or innovative means. We’re interested in work that challenges generic
15 CINEDANS DANCE ON SCREEN AMSTERDAM PARTNER FESTIVAL PRESENTATION
CINEDANS DANCE ON SCREEN Festival is unique – in the Netherlands and in the world. The central focus of the festival is on dance film. CINEDANS sees the ideal dance film as a true synthesis between the two media of dance and cinematography. At CINEDANS the emphasis lies on choreographies created specifically for the camera and on special film adaptations of existing dance performances.
In the ever-changing media landscape, creators are increasingly seeking different ways to tell their stories. New media and modern technology have entered the scene bringing new possibilities and insights. Dance film is no longer “movement on the black screen”, with new forms being developed such as installations, video clips, interactive projects and more. Contemporary dance films are often autonomous art works with a language of their own and an expressiveness that cannot be pigeonholed. CINEDANS closely follows these movements. In addition to the film programme, the festival focuses on various forms of crossover projects and media installations that involve movement.
For this film-program, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival BIEFF has selected a range of films from the CINEDANS 2014 selection. In these films surprising stories are told through movement, composition and choreography, dances that can only exist by the use of film.
CURATOR - MARION POETH Artistic Programmer, Producer, CINEDANS DANCE ON SCREEN FESTIVAL, Amsterdam.
MARION POETH is both artistic programmer and producer for CINEDANS. She gained her Masters in Theatre Studies from the University of Utrecht with a study on screen dance, having previously studied dance at Amsterdam School of the Arts, and audiovisual design and film in the
\\ Netherlands and England. Next to CINEDANS, she works as a freelance editor and media designer.
16 INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM FESTIVAL OBERHAUSEN PARTNER FESTIVAL PRESENTATION
At its 60th edition in 2014, the Internet” in 2013, a program that International Short Film Festival looks at the future of cinematographic OBERHAUSEN is one of the major production. The 2014 thematic international crossroads for the short programme (“Memories can’t wait: Film
form, unique in the range of forms and without Film”) focused on the current shift of moving image and sound from cinemas genres it presents to the public, and to galleries and museums world-wide. The festival also operates a well-stocked Video particularly well known for its spotlight Library, a non-commercial short film distribution branch and a unique archive of short on experimentation. In the course of films from more than 50 years of festival history. more than five decades, filmmakers and artists ranging from Roman Polanski to “Short film is a great first step for a budding filmmaker. That’s how I made my beginnings Cate Shortland, from George Lucas to and OBERHAUSEN was an important step on my path to become a Director.” Roman Pipilotti Rist, have presented their first Polanski works in OBERHAUSEN. “I smoked my first cigarette here. For years, I saw every single film at the Westdeutsche The Festival organizes an International Kurzfilmtage, looking forward to those days in OBERHAUSEN every year. These events Competition, a Children’s and Youth were important for me, for my decision to become a filmmaker.” Wim Wenders Films and a German Competition and the MuVi Award for the best German music “There can be no doubt that the OBERHAUSEN Short Film Festival has written film video as well as the NRW Competition history... The short film has kept itself young, and so has OBERHAUSEN. This atmosphere, for productions from North Rhine- this creative power are what still distinguishes short films today.” Gerhard Schröder, Westphalia. In addition, OBERHAUSEN German Chancellor 1998-2005 is known for its strong line of thematic BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
programmes such as “Provoking Reality” \\ in 2012, dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the OBERHAUSEN Manifesto from 1962, or “Flatness: Cinema after the
17 INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION JURY
PAOLO BERTOLIN ULRICH ZIEMONS LUDOVIC CHAVAROT
Member of the Selection Committee, Program Coordinator, Member of the Selection Committee, VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL BERLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL CLERMONT FERRAND INTERNATIONAL SHORT FORUM EXPANDED FILM FESTIVAL – COMPÉTITION LABO
PAOLO BERTOLIN is a festival programmer, ULRICH ZIEMONS is a film curator, film scholar LUDOVIC CHAVAROT has always been film critic and producer. He joined the Venice and writer based in Berlin. He is one of the passionate about the stories and the narrative International Film Festival as a member of co-curators of the Forum Expanded program systems envolved, whether in cinema, dance, the selection committee in 2008. Since 2010, at the Berlin International Film Festival. He in novels, or comics. Illustrator by training, he has worked as regional correspondent, has curated film programs and exhibitions he has continued to create posters (the covering several territories in the Asia for, among others, the National Museum of latest was for the English group Tindersticks) Pacific region. He has collaborated with the Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Arsenal and drawings for print press, under the Beijing, Hanoi and Mumbai International Film – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin, pseudonym ‘Ludchat’. Additionally, writing Festivals, the Doha Film Institute, the Udine KW – Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and producing several radio works (in Far East Film Festival, Nyon Visions du Réel, as well as for the 2010 Berlin Biennial. Since particular, the show Les Proies / The Preys, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2014 he has been a member of the short film recorded in close collaboration with Australian the Cannes Critics’ Week, the International selection committee of Dokfest Kassel. As musician Warren Ellis), has allowed him to Film Festival Bratislava and Locarno Open a guest lecturer he has taught at Stockholm follow his passion within a new environment. Doors. Bertolin has producer credits on Phan Academy of Dramatic Arts, Braunschweig Since 2003, Chavarot is a member of the Đăng Di’s Big Father, Small Father and Other University of Art, University of Potsdam, selection committee for the LAB Competition Stories (2015) and Lav Diaz’s A Lullaby for the Bard College (Berlin Campus), Ithaca College, of the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Sorrowful Mystery (2016), both entries in the NY, and Cornell University. In 2014 his book Film Festival and he is also the curator of Berlin International Film Festival Competition. Aufzeichnungen eines Storm Squatters the Anatomie du LABO exhibition. His quite was published – the first German language diverse professional experience continually monograph on the American underground urges him to work with and to reflect upon filmmaker George Kuchar and his influential new narratives devices.
\\ Weather Diary video series.
18 ROEE ROSEN
Artist and filmmaker, WINNER OF THE BIEFF 2011 & 2014 MAIN AWARDS
ROEE ROSEN (b. 1963) is an Israeli-American artist, filmmaker and writer. Rosen’s installation, Live and Die as Eva Braun (1995- 1997), stirred a scandal when exhibited at the Israel Museum. Rosen dedicated years to his fictive feminine persona, the Surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank, a project that entailed fabricating her entire oeuvre as a book and a short film, Two Women and a Man (2005). The film won a special mention at Oberhausen ISFF. Among Rosen’s other works is Out (2010), in which a BDSM session becomes political exorcism. Out premiered in Venice, where it won an Orizzonti Award. It went on to win the Best Film Award at BIEFF, which his The Buried Alive Videos also won in 2014. Several major programs were dedicated to Rosen’s cinematic productions, amongst them profiles at Tate Modern (2010), Museum of Modern Art, Vienna (2014), Oberhausen ISFF (2012). Two mid-career retrospectives BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
of Rosen opened up in 2016: Roee Rosen – A \\ Group Exhibition, at the Tel Aviv Museum, and Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories, at the Edith Russ House for Media Art, Oldenburg.
19 FRANCOFONIA 87’, 2015, France, Germany, The Netherlands DIRECTOR: ALEKSANDR SOKUROV
CAST: Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Benjamin Utzerath, Vincent Nemeth, CAMERA: Bruno Delbonnel OPENING GALA Johanna Korthals Altes, Andrey Chelpanov, Jean-Claude Caer EDITING: Alexei Jankowski, Hansjorg Weissbrich SCRIPT: Aleksandr Sokurov MUSIC: Murat Kabardokov
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
ALEKSANDR SOKUROV
Another century has passed on the Old Continent … Large armies are With this sophisticated, complex and thoroughly absorbing film, trampling on the heart of civilisation and cannon fire is once again Aleksandr Sokurov has had another night at the museum reverie, a taking its toll. Amidst the massacre and the ruins, everything majestic, cine-prose poem or animated installation tableau, weaving newsreel magnificent, and sacred, that took millions of minutes and hours of footage with eerie floating images above the streets of contemporary determined labour to build, is wiped out. Jacques Jaujard and Count Paris – presumably filmed with a drone – and dramatised fantasy Franziskus Wolff Metternich worked together to protect and preserve scenes. Thirteen years after Russian Ark, that renowned single-take the treasure of the Louvre Museum. Aleksandr Sokurov tells their movie journey through the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg, story. He explores the relationship between art and power, and asks Sokurov has now alighted on the Louvre in Paris. Francofonia has all what art tells us about ourselves, at the very heart of one of the most sorts of wayward digressions and perambulations around the idea of devastating conflicts the world has ever known. French and European culture, and the role of the museum in conserving art and promoting the idea of what it means to be human.
(Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian)
It will be impossible to neatly package “Francofonia” into a brief and FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Main Competition - Venice International Film accurate description, since Aleksandr Sokurov’s dense, enriching Festival 2015 \ Toronto Film Festival 2015 \ San Sebastian Film Festival meditation on the Louvre and specifically (but not exclusively) the 2015 \ BFI London Film Festival 2015 \ FEDEORA (Federation of Film Critics museum’s status during WWII defies categorization. View the trailer of Europe and the Mediterranean) Prize - Best Euro-Mediterranean Film and you might think the film is essentially a Sokurovian dramatization of the uncertain relationship between the Louvre’s wartime
\\ director and the Nazi officer in charge of preserving France’s artistic patrimony. Watching the film, however, a larger picture emerges, in WORLD SALES: FILMS BOUTIQUE which Sokurov [....] engages with Paris itself and the philosophical Josephine Settmacher - Festivals & Management Assistant concept of a great museum. T: +49 30 695 378 50 E:[email protected] (Jay Weissberg, Variety) W: www.filmsboutique.com
20 OPENING GALA
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Wherever you start from, you come to power. DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: Alexandr Sokurov is a Russian It’s sort of a fix, and there’s nothing that can be done about it,” says director of avant-garde and independent films that have won him Sokurov. He’s responding to a question about the relationship between art international acclaim. A son of an army officer, Sokurov was born in 1951, and power — one of the main themes of Francofonia. and spent his childhood traveling with his family around Russia as his father was transferred from one location to another. This fast change of Sokurov’s interest in interrogating the workings of power is well- places and schools kept him lonely, he never had close friends and liked established, with his 1999 Moloch (about Hitler), 2000 Taurus (about to spend his free time by himself withdrawn into the world of his own. Lenin), 2004 The Sun (on Hirohito) and 2011 Faust (a take on Goethe’s After school he studied history and completed a BA degree course. By titular tragedy) forming a tetralogy on power’s corrupting effects. “Power that time, however, he had made up his mind to become a film maker and is ubiquitous; it governs everywhere. If you believe in God’s plan then in 1975 he Moved to Moscow to study at VGIK-a state film school, one power is part of that plan — not the best part as far as I can see,” he says. of the most prestigious and major of its kind in Russia. In the years that Francofonia points to the spoils of conquest in the Louvre and other great followed he made several shorts, none of which was liked by his teachers. museums to emphasise that war as much as cultural creation underpins His works were described as “weird, formal, and mannered” but never our notions of civilisation. Whoever is in possession of these artefacts “talented” or “promising”. In the end Sokurov entered into an open conflict usurps the historical memory and fate of a people. “Only a great work with his mentors and dropped out of BGIK, nevertheless it was during of art has the capacity to link the past to the future and the present,” his years there that he met Andrey Tarkovsky whom he later befriended. says Sokurov. “Paintings may give us an understanding of who we are as Tarkovsky was the first to notice Sokurov’s gift and to tell him that he Europeans. was going to have a brilliant career provided he found his own style and (extract from an interview by Carmen Gray for stayed true to it. Particularly, after the collapse of the regime, Sokurov’s
The Calvert Journal) films started earning him numerous awards around the world. While most BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL known for his feature films, Sokurov has directed a number of interesting documentaries. His sensational “Russian Ark” (2002) is a historic \\ achievement that will be watched and talked about by many generations. Romanian Distributor: TRANSILVANIA FILM Str. Popa Soare 52, etaj 1, ap.2, Sector 2, Bucuresti, Romania T: 021 326.64.80, 021 326.02.68 E: [email protected] W: www.transilvaniafilm.ro
21 EISENSTEIN IN GUANAJUATO 104’, 2015, The Netherlands, Mexico, Finland, Belgium DIRECTOR: PETER GREENAWAY
SCRIPT: Peter Greenaway MUSIC: Sergei Prokofiev CLOSING GALA CLOSING DOP: Reinier van Brummelen CAST: Elmer Bäck, Luis Alberti, Maya Zapata, Lisa Owen, Stelio Savante, EDITING: Elmer Leupen Rasmus Slätis, Jakob Öhrman
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
PETER GREENAWAY
The venerated filmmaker Eisenstein is comparable in talent, insight and Set in Mexico during the “10 days that shook” Russia’s greatest silent wisdom, with the likes of Shakespeare or Beethoven; there are few - if filmmaker, “Eisenstein in Guanajuato” marks Peter Greenaway’s any - directors who can be elevated to such heights. On the back of his raucous attempt to capture his all-time cinema idol at his moment revolutionary film Battleship Potemkin, he was celebrated around the of greatest personal discovery and deepest professional frustration world, and invited to the US. Ultimately rejected by Hollywood and — which, the film takes great delight in suggesting, coincided with maliciously maligned by conservative Americans, Eisenstein traveled the loss of his virginity, at age 33, so far from his (still) homophobic to Mexico in 1931 to consider a film privately funded by American homeland. Determined to breathe fresh life into a medium he insists pro-Communist sympathizers, headed by the American writer Upton has scarcely evolved in the 90 years since Sergei Eisenstein made Sinclair. Eisenstein’s sensual Mexican experience appears to have been “Strike,” Greenaway has wrought an outrageously unconventional pivotal in his life and film career - a significant hinge between the early and deliriously profane biopic that could take decades to be duly successes of Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October, which made him appreciated. a world-renowned figure, and his hesitant later career with Alexander (Peter Debruge, Variety) Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible and The Boyar’s Plot.
(written by Peter Greenaway) Erotically charged and artfully crafted, Eisenstein in Guanajuato is the first of two titles devoted to portions of Soviet filmmaker Sergei FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Premiered in competition at the 2015 Berlin Film Eisenstein’s life, and proves Peter Greenaway has lost none of his Festival \ Best Director Award at the International Film Festival of India edge. At the age of 72, British auteur filmmaker maintains his ability (IFFI) \ The Hong Kong Film Festival \ The Istanbul Film Festival \ The to amaze. Ever the provocative experimentalist, he belongs to a Moscow Film Festival \ The LA Film Festival. rare class of director, one who manages to delight and confound,
\\ challenge and dismay even into his later period of film making. There’s a perverse thrill to be had watching the daringness on display in this examination of a Russian legend that bluntly examines his sexual WORLD SALES: FILMS BOUTIQUE orientation in a way that would never be produced from his native Josephine Settmacher - Festivals & Management Assistant T: +49 30 695 378 50 country. E: [email protected] W: www.filmsboutique.com (Nicholas Bell, IONCINEMA.com) 22 CLOSING GALA
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: I always felt Eisenstein’s first three films DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: Peter Greenaway has been were very different from the last three – why? I think the answer to that nominated for the most prestigious film awards at the Cannes, Venice is, when you go abroad, you become a different person,” said Greenaway, and Berlinale and received an Award at the British Academy Film in 2014 who believes the personal transformation Eisenstein underwent in Mexico for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema. His first feature film The turned him from the focus on mass action of Battleship Potemkin, Strike! Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) launched his international career and and October to a greater concern with the individual, as evidenced in identified him as one of the most original and important filmmakers of our Alexander Nevsky and the two-part Ivan the Terrible. time. He confirmed this reputation with films like The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover (1989) and The Pillow Book (1996). Peter Greenaway’s “He was away from paranoia, from Stalinist persecution and really strange impressive filmography comprises more than 65 titles. His most recent political eccentricities, and he was faced with a brand new and different works include Nightwatching (2007), Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (2008) and society. There’s a lot of evidence he freed up, and became much more Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012). empathetic to notions of the human condition.
(interview by Carmen Gray for The Calvert Journal) BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
FILMMAKER’S WEBSITE: \\ w: www.facebook.com/PeterGreenawayPage?ref=ts&sk=wall w: www.luperpediafoundation.com/peter-greenaway
FILM’S WEBSITE: w: www.luperpediafoundation.com/eisenstein-in-guanajuato/ 23 TRANSGRESSIVE BODIES PRESENTATION INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION I
Curatorial presentation by: ANDREI TĂNĂSESCU
Serving as conduit, the body parses sensory affectations to better interact, understand and exist in the world that surrounds us. Yet its dependability and robustness hide a fragility that can easily alter the socially-accepted function of said corpus. Be they cultural, sexual, economic or psychological, the limitations imposed on it push it off-course, manifesting normative transgressions that require our full attention. Regardless whether these defiances are to be celebrated or vilified, their acceptance should be recognized as part
of our human nature. As such, the second surreal experience which genre-hops Working at the threshold of program in Bucharest International through comedy, suspense and horror, documentary, diary and essayistic cinema, Experimental Film Festival’s competition OUR LADY OF HORMONES is a cautionary Antoinette Zwirchmayr’s THE PIMP AND section compiles five films that push tale of human nature’s impotence of HIS TROPHIES is an oneiric recall of the the boundaries of the body and its domesticating the very (primal) impulses director’s childhood memories of her cinematographic representation. Mixing we desire. grandfather - one of Salzburg’s most genre film, video art, documentary and infamous pimps. Beautifully shot on activist forms, the selection threads Renowned Romanian artist CĂLIN DAN 35mm and exuding the claustrophobic themes of memory, sexuality, rivalry and marks his return to the Festival with ambience of conflicting memories, childhood through actual or hypothesized STILL LIFE, POIRE GELÉE, a meditative the film employs archival photographs conditions of the body. companion-piece to his 2012 film STILL and atmospheric shots of the brothel’s LIFE, 20th C. Where the former film plush interiors as associative stopgaps BERTRAND MANDICO returns to BIEFF operated within the tradition of fiction for the voiceover narrations. At the with another tale of the psycho-sexual and documentary cinema, STILL LIFE, center of it all lies a structuring absence bizarre, the aptly titled OUR LADY OF POIRE GELÉE goes deeper within the enveloping the corporeal spectres of HORMONES. Shot in textured Super conceptual realm of video-art. Ideas of the family’s illicit business. Hearing of
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL I 16mm and bursting with the artistic architectural form, memory and maternal the grandfather’s love for hunting, the glee of a passionate genre cinephile, lineage all congeal in the symbolic titular mementos take on a new life, \\ MANDICO’s film employs rear-projection, life-cycle depicted the gradual build- materializing from the limbo-state of stunning technicolour and a lively, and up and eventual erosion of a mound of memory through the process of cinematic decadent mise-en-scene to tell the erotic white powder. Beneath it all, lies the reflection. story of rivalry between two actresses female form, tranquil and contemplative, who become obsessed by a living-and- pulsating to the rhythm of life within the Pedophilia - a taboo that elicits breathing, hairy lump of meat. A veritable granules of time. immediate and unshaken aversion, but
24 what if you were the one afflicted by it? Guido Hendrikx’ AMONG US takes us through the confessions of three highly-educated, closeted pedophiles, as they describe their history of discovery, repression and (impossible?) reconciliation with this affliction. HENDRIKX captures the poetic bliss and dizzying confusion of the three subjects’ self- confessed trigger of visualization by focusing on the black-and-white cinematography’s greyscale palette. Never exploitative or sensationalistic in dealing with the unsettling dimension of its subject, AMONG US operates as a non-judgemental platform for the avowal of repression’s life-long trauma.
With YOU ARE BORING, Vika look at our inner (prudish) limits, while Kirchenbauer delivers a steady but pondering the outer ramifications of our assured wake-up slap in the face to cultural hegemony’s “consumption of our repressed, closeted spirit. Through difference.” Rather than a jolt, the film soothing and beckoning direct-address, leaves us with a warm, embraceful slap a choir of people take turns addressing to our normative society’s politics of the camera, looking for (you!) the representation.
patient, passive, pent-up viewer. Their BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL aim? To sell you, through stiff-and-stuffy yet campily nonchalant rhetoric, their \\ performative bodies of difference and vicarious experience for your personal fantasy wish-fulfillment. Wonderfully subversive and confrontational, YOU ARE BORING forces us to take a long, hard
25 OUR LADY OF HORMONES 30’, 2014, France DIRECTOR: BERTRAND MANDICO
CAST: Agnès Berthon, Nathalie Richard, Michel Lebayon, Elina Löwensohn SCRIPTWRITER: Bertrand Mandico CINEMATOGRAPHY: Pascale Granel ART DIRECTION: Astrid Tonnelier TRANSGRESSIVE BODIES EDITING: Laure Saint-Marc SOUND: Laure Saint-Marc, Bertrand Mandico PRODUCER: Emmanuel Chaumet
BERTRAND MANDICO
FILM PRESENTATION: Réalisateur-terrible BERTRAND MANDICO DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: With Notre Dame des Hormones, I wanted returns to BIEFF with another tale of the psycho-sexual bizarre, to explore a view of eroticism that goes against the grain, moving the aptly titled OUR LADY OF HORMONES. Shot in textured Super 16mm object of desire onto a cutting of evocative, autonomous organs. This and bursting with the artistic glee of a passionate genre cinephile, piece of flesh that resembles nothing may very well be the incarnation of Mandico’s film employs rear-projection, stunning technicolour indecency for some people. and a lively, and decadent mise-en-scene to tell the erotic story of My first intention was to write a film specifically for Elina Löwensohn rivalry between two actresses who become obsessed by a living- and Nathalie Richard. They form a truly intense and funny duo in the and-breathing hairy lump of meat. Fitted with a protruding phallic theater (and in real life). They’re sufficiently self-deprecating and crazy to antennae, the pet-cum-lover becomes an object of desire and envy, dive right into an organic project like Notre Dame des Hormones. It was kicking off a murderous tale fit for a Giallo or Hammer film. A veritable exhilarating to work with this incredible tandem… They do not hesitate to surreal experience which genre-hops through comedy, suspense play with their own image to the point of twisting it out of shape. and horror, OUR LADY OF HORMONES is a cautionary tale of human nature’s impotence of domesticating the very (primal) impulses we When I came up with the two main characters, I was thinking of several desire. memorable films that deal with the twilight of an actress (or artistic menopause): Whatever Happened to Baby Jane by Robert Aldrich, Paul (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) Vecchiali’s Femmes Femmes, and obviously Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard… During the filming, I INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL I FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival conjured up the combined memory of those films.
\\ 2015 / IndieLisboa 2015 / Young Jury Mention & Grand Jury Mention - (BERTRAND MANDICO) Festival de Brive 2015 / Special Mention of the Press - Short Corner Pantin 2015 / Minimalen Kortfilmfest - Trondheim 2015 / Festival du film de Fesses - Paris 2015
WORLD SALES: ECCE FILMS 26 T: +33 1.47.70.27.23 | E: [email protected] | W : www.eccefilms.fr
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] W: www.bertrandmandico.com/ AMONG US 24’, 2014, The Netherlands DIRECTOR: GUIDO HENDRIKX
SCRIPTWRITER: Guido Hendrikx CINEMATOGRAPHY: Emo Weemhoff EDITING: Lot Rossmark SOUND: Tijn Hazen MUSIC: Ella van der Woude PRODUCER: Erik Glijnis, Zinzy Nimako, Jonne Roos
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
GUIDO HENDRIX
FILM PRESENTATION: Paedophilia - a taboo that elicits immediate DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: The conflict between deeper inner feelings and unshaken aversion, but what if you were the one afflicted by it? and rational thinking fascinates me. By focussing on three high-educated, Guido Hendrikx’s AMONG US takes us through the confessionals of self-conscious pedophiles I was able to explore this conflict in his most three highly-educated, closeted pedophiles, as they describe their dramatic form. The main characters of Among Us rationally reject and history of discovery, repression and (impossible?) reconciliation therefore don’t act on their sexual feelings. with this affliction. Hendrikx captures the poetic bliss and I wanted to give a merciless insight in the minds and thoughts of these - dizzying confusion of the three subjects’ self-confessed trigger of for most others - indefinable persons. To achieve this I felt I was forced to visualization by focusing on the black-and-white cinematography’s put a lot of effort in sound-design and music-composing, combined with greyscale palette. Never exploitative or sensationalistic in dealing an unconventional use of imagery. An interesting challenge for me as a with the unsettling dimension of its subject, AMONG US operates as filmmaker. an non-judgemental platform for the avowal of repression’s life-long trauma. I hope the audience will be able to set their prejudices aside so the understanding of having to cope with a sexual orientation which most (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) consider as morbid will not be disturbed by narrow-minded judgement.
In the end, every human being has to learn to cope with forces he can’t control. Learning to cope with such forces seems an important universal
challenge in life. BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Best International Short Film - Montreal International
Documentary Festival, Canada 2015 / Vevam Award for Best Dutch Film - Go (GUIDO HENDRIKX) \\ Short – International Short Film Festival Nijmegen 2015 / Uppsala Award in Memory of Ingmar Bergman - Uppsala International Short Film Festival 2015 / Rotterdam International Film Festival 2015 / Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival 2015 / True/False Film Fest 2015 / Busan International Short Film Festival 2015 / IndieLisboa 2015 / Sarajevo Film Festival 2015 / Vilnius International Short Film Festival 2015 / Festival dei Popoli – International Documentary Film Festival 2015. WORLD SALES: SOME SHORTS - Wouter Jansen T: 0031 6 22076717 | E: [email protected] 27 W: www.someshorts.com
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: T: +31(0)641356961 | E: [email protected] W: someshorts.com/films/onderons STILL LIFE, POIRE GELÉE 12’, 2013, Romania, The Netherlands DIRECTOR: CĂLIN DAN
SCRIPTWRITER: Călin Dan CINEMATOGRAPHY: Marius Iacob EDITING: Larisa Sitar SOUND: Maţe PRODUCER: George Niculescu TRANSGRESSIVE BODIES
Photo credit: Natură moartă. Pere înghețate, 2013
CĂLIN DAN
FILM PRESENTATION: Renowned Romanian artist CĂLIN DAN marks DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Still Life. Poires Gelée is a one-shot poetic his return to the Festival with STILL LIFE, POIRE GELÉE, a meditative meditation on the points where history, geology, meteorology and companion-piece to his 2012 film Still Life, 20th C. Where the former feminity converge. This film is the second panel in a diptych dedicated to film operated within the tradition of fiction and documentary cinema, the women in my life and it is to be viewed in connection with Still Life. Still Life, Poire Gelée goes deeper within the conceptual realm of 20th Century (2012), premiered at BIEFF the same year. video-art. Ideas of architectural form, memory and maternal lineage The film is a reflection on feminity confronting history. The aim is to create all congeal in the symbolic life-cycle depicted the gradual build-up and the visual and audio background that operates as a centre of absorbtion - eventual erosion of a mound of white powder. Beneath it all, lies the of both energy and meditation - either within a multi-media installation or female form, tranquil and contemplative, pulsating to the rhythm of as an autonomous piece for cinema screenings. life within the granules of time. (CĂLIN DAN) (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016)
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL I FESTIVALS/AWARDS: R.E.M.X., Muzeul Județean, Arad 2014 / Urmele
\\ unei nopți anunțate, Galeria Poterașu, București; Muzeul Județean, Arad 2015.
28
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: Popa Tatu 62 A, ap. 46, Sector 1, București YOU ARE BORING! 14’, 2015, Germany DIRECTOR: VIKA KIRCHENBAUER
CAST: La JohnJoseph, Max Göran, Mysti, Nadia Buyse, Vika Kirchenbauer SCRIPTWRITER: Vika Kirchenbauer CINEMATOGRAPHY: Martin Sulzer EDITING: Vika Kirchenbauer SOUND: Rita Macedo
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
VIKA KIRCHENBAUER
FILM PRESENTATION: With YOU ARE BORING!, VIKA KIRCHENBAUER DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: YOU ARE BORING! discusses the delivers a steady but assured wake-up slap in the face to our repressed, troublesome nature of “looking” and “being looked at” in larger closeted spirit. Through soothing and beckoning direct-address, a choir contexts including labour within the new economy, performer/spectator of people take turns addressing the camera, looking for (you!) the relations, participatory culture, contemporary art display and queer patient, passive, pent-up viewer. Their aim? To sell you, through stiff- representational politics. and-stuffy yet campily nonchalant rhetoric, their performative bodies What economic value or value of interest do these images create for a of difference and vicarious experience for your personal fantasy wish- general public’s eye and why are they now fashionable? YOU ARE BORING! fulfillment. Wonderfully subversive and confrontational, YOU ARE suggests that the value is created by an immersive presentation of a BORING! forces us to take a long, hard look at our inner (prudish) limits, subculture outside its original context: providing safe positions and access while pondering the outer ramifications of our cultural hegemony’s ports for exoticising gazes, while at the same time offering the experience ‘consumption of difference.’ Rather than a jolt, the film leaves us and closeness to something that is understood and presented almost as a with a warm, embraceful slap to our normative society’s politics of secret society. representation. YOU ARE BORING! formulates from this web of thoughts a 3D video (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) installation focusing on five performers’ bodies as sites-of-speech free from any physical context. Through strategies that overload the capacities of affective multitasking and the self-consuming illusion of total FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film subjectivity, the spectator is personally addressed and promised exactly BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Festival 2015 / Hamburg International Short Film Festival 2015 / what he or she needs. \\ Struts Gallery/Faucet Media Arts Centre, Canada 2015 / Uppsala (VIKA KIRCHENBAUER) International Short Film Festival 2015 / IndieCork Film Festival, Ireland 2015 / MixBrasil FIlm Festival 2015 / MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival 2015 / SPEKTRUM art_technology_community, Berlin 2015
WORLD SALES: VIKA KIRCHENBAUER T: +491749992915 | E: [email protected] | W : www.vk0ms.com 29 THE PIMP AND HIS TROPHIES 21’, 2014, Austria DIRECTOR: ANTOINETTE ZWIRCHMAYR
SCRIPTWRITER: Antoinette Zwirchmayr CINEMATOGRAPHY: Rosa John EDITING: Antoinette Zwirchmayr, Rosa John SOUND: Rob Peters MUSIC: A thousand fuegos & Squalloscope TRANSGRESSIVE BODIES PRODUCTION: Antoinette Zwirchmayr & Carmen Weingartshofer
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
ANTOINETTE ZWIRCHMAYR
FILM PRESENTATION: Working at the threshold of documentary, diary DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: The first time I visited my grandfather’s and essayistic cinema, ANTOINETTE ZWIRCHMAYR’s THE PIMP AND brothel I was seven years old. We were sitting on a couch in the entrance HIS TROPHIES is an oneiric recall of the director’s childhood memories hall and he was telling me a story. Just as the story was reaching its of her grandfather - one of Salzburg’s most infamous pimps. Beautifully climax, he suddenly stopped speaking and left the room with two shot on 35mm and exuding the claustrophobic ambience of conflicting prostitutes. I looked over at my grandmother, whose gaze was empty, as if memories, the film employs archival photographs and atmospheric she were somewhere else. shots of the brothel’s plush interiors as associative stopgaps for the Prostitution, pimping and human trafficking are universal phenomena voiceover narrations. At the center of it all lies a structuring absence of society and at the same time a taboo in public discourse. Beyond enveloping the corporeal spectres of the family’s illicit business. the indisputable moral rejection of evil per se, the various attempts to Hearing of the grandfather’s love for hunting, the titular mementos interpret this behavior have generally focused almost exclusively on the take on a new life, materializing from the limbo-state of memory victims, in this case, the prostitutes. The offenders or pimps are usually through the process of cinematic reflection. not keen on discussing their profession or introducing themselves publicly, (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) mainly because of judicial circumstances. Being the granddaughter of one of Salzburg’s most infamous pimps, I have encountered such a perpetrator on a truly intimate level, seen through a child’s eyes. Secret audio recordings by my grandmother, footage of my grandfather, architectural
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL I blueprints and photographs of the brothel, my father’s thoughts as well as FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Best Documentary Film - Diagonale Graz 2014 / my own memories: all this forms the groundwork of my undertaking.
\\ IndieLisboa 2015 / Festival dei Popoli 2015 / Toronto International Film Festival 2014 / Vienna Independent Short Film Festival 2014. My goal is not to shock, but to show the reality behind the façade, with all of its cracks, to expose the many facets of truth that lie beneath.”
(ANTOINETTE ZWIRCHMAYR)
WORLD SALES: T: +43 676 4703524 | E: [email protected] 30 W: www.antoinettezwirchmayr.com DIGITAL DYSTOPIAS
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION II BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL \\
31 DIGITAL DYSTOPIAS PRESENTATION INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION II
Curatorial presentation by: ANDREI TĂNĂSESCU
We live in a time where, now, (more?) than ever, the future and all its socio-economic, political and cultural affectations bear a heavy burden on our lives. It used to be that we could sit back and comfortably envision a future through the prism of modernity’s promising outlook. Yet while we were sleeping, “the slow cancellation of the future,” was happening before our eyes. Our Ludovico wide-eyed evolutionary optimism has freeze-framed as the future of the past was crumbling in a fascinating
uncertainty. In our present future, change is immediate, technology advances at exponential rates and global systems of economy and power are riven with instability.
And so, equipped with an unprecedented awareness afforded by our digital age, the following films look at the frailty of our human existence and its inevitably dystopic trajectory. Significantly, in this wide cinematographic pallette each film brings out distinctive hues of digital filmmaking (from simple compositing to creating full-scale virtual worlds), blurring the line between reality and fiction.
The dystopic film par-excellence, Edouard Salier’s HABANA serves as landing point for experiencing first-hand a world in ruins. Documentary footage offers a cursory investigation of a Cuba under siege, where technologically-superior (in)human forces have
imposed martial law over its capital’s structural blueprints of human civilization’s urbanization, envisioning a world where inhabitants. More so than its faithfulness concrete meets both the organic and the abstract. Mutating (in the slightest) the DNA to genre storytelling (the inevitable strand of architecture, Braun creates a literal, post-apocalyptic, post-capitalist digital rise of the oppressed), HABANA stands dystopia where soap-bubble buildings stand alongside ruined churches turned car out through its sleek chiaroscuro dealerships. A parable for our future generations, it questions whether architecture’s cinematography that seamlessly (and, alchemical wonder of urbanization - and its aesthetic, environmental effects - is an
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL II digitally) envisions a present infiltrated inheritance worth endowing. by an imagined future. This realism is \\ weighed even heavier by the plausibility The (seemingly) evolutionary acceleration of our time narrows to the essential in of the film’s David and Goliath narrative. Thibault le Texier’s pleasantly foreboding THE INVENTION OF THE DESERT. The landscape has shifted completely to the digital, where virtual demo videos of (home, An uproarious but tender example of office, recreational) real-estate are stand-ins for our disappeared world. These idealized ‘digital-organic’ cinema, Ulu Braun’s utopias of urban habitats summarily become ‘user-friendly concentration camps’ in the ARCHITEKTURA re-organizes the narrative spoken by an unseen female robotic voice. It seems humanity’s complacency
32 in allowing technology to optimize its and-response rhetoric is juxtaposed against the song-and-dance of life’s most reliable Truth existence became the catalyst in the and constant: death. If “hell is other people” FREEDOM & INDEPENDENCE points out that eventual arrival of technological singularity. Capitalism’s ruinous ideology is the clothing that wraps up the dystopian despotic emperor. The inevitability of Artificial Intelligence surpassing mankind leaves us to ponder Oftentimes, greener pastures veil arid realities, diverting awareness and placating concern. ultimate dystopian fear: our existence no In the case of Casablanca’s Arab League Park, Randa Maroufi sweeps us past its green idyll longer computes. and lets us loose ‘on the wrong side of its fence.’ Instead of touristic leisure, our floating POV captures derelict carousels among wild vegetation and rubbish-strewn walking paths. The capacity of parody to subvert takes on This is the stomping ground of Morocco’s urban youth, heard through fractured voice-overs literal form in FREEDOM & INDEPENDENCE, as they perform in front of digital cameras for the approval of social media. Materializing as Bjørn Melhus embodies the titular this presence-asposture through still-lifes of bodies in mid-action, The Park offers a concepts in order to deconstruct the (privileged) virtual flânerie in a space where youthful abandon and societal fears converge. dystopic potentiality of our current neoliberalist political and economic climate. How can one imagine the future in an insular, totalitarian country such as North Korea, A high-art vaudevillian one-man show, Bjørn where the past attests to a present where (r)evolution and progress are suppressed? For Melhus’ work caricaturizes Capitalism’s renowned Romanian artist Mihai Grecu, the answer is from within, as his THE REFLECTION
notorious Ayn Rand as the mother-superior OF POWER holds a reflective mirror to the absolute and megalomaniac power of the state. BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL to Mr. Freedom and Ms. Independence, All alone and empty of human presence, the dictatorial monuments exude an unshakeable who are sent off into the first-developing- folie-de-grandeur that starts to be slowly swallowed up by an incoming Biblical flood. Poetic \\ world. Parroting rational and theological and striking in its realism, THE REFLECTION OF POWER subverts the utopian dimension of platitudes, the two protagonists unwittingly landscape art. Sealed-off from the outside world, the resilience of totalitarianism becomes single out the indoctrinating egomania of an Achilles heel, as it symbolically swallows itself, remaining but a faded glory. Capitalism, at the same time foreshadowing its inescapable futility. Their reductive call-
33 THE INVENTION OF THE DESERT 7’, 2014, France DIRECTOR: THIBAULT LE TEXIER
CAST: Liz Tolan SCRIPTWRITER: Thibault Le Texier EDITING: Thibault Le Texier DIGITAL DYSTOPIAS DIGITAL SOUND: Thibault Le Texier MUSIC: Thibault Le Texier PRODUCER: Thibault Le Texier
THIBAULT LE TEXIER
FILM PRESENTATION:THE INVENTION OF THE DESERT is, on the DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: THE INVENTION OF THE DESERT takes its surface, an essay abstract for the study of singularity theory; at its inspiration from the theory of singularity, embodied by someone like Ray core, however, lies a prophetic dictum, vocalized by a digital entity Kurzweil and which postulates that the machine is the future of humanity. hailing from a future where mankind has disappeared. Fly-bys of According to this theory, we will very soon insert microchips in the brain, architectural videos populated by digital simulacra of ourselves are nanoparticles will replace our cells and thus we will be stronger, smarter appropriated as the narrator describes a world - not far from ours - and we will be potentially immortal. This Posthuman ideology has long where human civilization grew over-reliant on technology. Gradually, remained confined in Silicon Valley, but is invading common sense. HER, our virtual presence in the videos disappears, as we learn of Artificial Spike Jones’ film, is an example of such blind acceptance of a benevolent Intelligence surpassing the human species. Frighteningly passive in machine that becomes both a spouse, a benevolent parent and a coach. its apocalyptic conclusion, The Invention of the Desert functions as a And the blockbuster of the moment, CHAPPIE, has the tag line: ‘The powerful alarm call, resonating within the droning pulsations of the last hope of mankind is not human.’ This kind of film gets us used to, synthesized soundtrack well after its credits abruptly cut off its lifeline. nonchalantly, put our fate in the hands of machines.
(Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) My impression is that we are headed for a fall. All eyes on our smartphones, we send short videos of kittens and selfies without us realizing that we’re wrecking the world that we have received. Not only the natural world, but also a whole culture, a whole breadth of human
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL II relationships that we are losing. FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Rotterdam International Film Festival 2015 / Festival des
\\ cinémas différents et expérimentaux, Paris / Clermont-Ferrand International (THIBAULT LE TEXIER) Short Film Festival / Jeonju International Film Festival, Seoul, South Korea / Imagine Science festival, New York
WORLD SALES: THIBAULT LE TEXIER 34 T: + 33 9 81 68 61 41 | E: [email protected] | W: www.singularity.fr FREEDOM & INDEPENDENCE 15’, 2014, Germany DIRECTOR: BJØRN MELHUS
CAST: Bjørn Melhus SCRIPTWRITER: Bjørn Melhus CINEMATOGRAPHY: Eike Zuleeg EDITING: Bjørn Melhus SOUND: Max Schneider MUSIC: Max Schneider PRODUCER: Yuki Jungesblut, Bjørn Melhus
BJØRN MELHUS
FILM PRESENTATION: Part performance, part political critique, part CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Bjørn Melhus combines material from genre film, yet 100% entertaining, BJØRN MELHUS’ FREEDOM & American movies such as Armageddon and Deep Impact with the INDEPENDENCE is a wonderfully witty and thought-provoking allegory controversial neoliberal ideas of the Russian-American writer and of neoliberalism’s ideological folly. Guided by the voiceover proselytism philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982). As the author of Atlas Shrugged, Rand of Ayn Rand, Freedom and Independence take on physical shape as they was at the forefront of influential, conservative think-tanks in the US. are sent to view the urban development of the future. Split between With her concept of ‘objectivism’, in which individual happiness trumps reality’s rational thought (Rand’s Objectivism) and theological faith that of the community and the path to salvation lies in the privatisation (Hollywood melodrama), the titular protagonists reach an identity and complete deregulation of the economy, she provided a philosophical crisis. Although reigned back in by their ‘mother superior,’ their quest foundation for neoliberal capitalism. towards neoliberalism’s exigent individual empowerment ends with a Melhus portrays her as a tyrannical mistress, indoctrinating the two main song-and-dance of life’s most reliable Truth and constant: death. Wry, protagonists of the film, Mister Freedom and Miss Independence, and a witty and wonderfully jubilant, Bjørn Melhus’ straight-faced film is a group of sick half-dead men in a mortuary with her philosophy on the free one-man show of cerebral activism. market. As in many of his films, Melhus addresses topics such as identity, (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) religion, capitalism and globalisation. He exposes and caricatures in a very specific mix of fiction and non-fiction, in which he plays all the lead characters himself. He allows the audience to look at reality in a new light,
from a distance; it’s uncanny, funny, but above all sharp. BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Sphinx Award for Best Video/Film - Videomedeja
International Video Festival, Serbia 2015 / Oberhausen International Film (STUK) \\ Festival / Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival / Hamburg International Short Film Festival / Cyprus International Film Festival / Winterthur International Short Film Festival / Berlin International Short Film Festival / Exground Film Fest
WORLD SALES: AUG & OHR MEDIEN T: +49 (0) 176 - 62965299 | E: [email protected] | W: www.augohr.de 35
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] | W: www.melhus.de HABANA 22’, 2014, France DIRECTOR: EDOUARD SALIER
EDITING: Alexandro Rodriguez SCRIPTWRITER: Sébastien Ors, Edouard Salier CINEMATOGRAPHY: Mathieu Plainfossé DIGITAL DYSTOPIAS DIGITAL PRODUCER: Nicolas Schmerkin, Emilie Schmerkin SOUND DESIGN: Rubén Valdés
EDOUARD SALIER
FILM PRESENTATION: Digital artist and manipulator EDOUARD CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Cuba, it is chaos in Havana, there are over SALIER delivers an award-winning vision of a near-future, dystopian 7 years old Havana and is the great revolution in the streets! Chickens Cuba, where its titular capital is occupied by a foreign force. Through brigades replace the frenzied salsa dancers and the smoke of Cuban cigars the lens of a documentary crew guided by local slum-youth Lazaro, is replaced by smoking towers... But what happened in Havana? A new we’re immersed in a city under lockdown, a derelict ruin dwarfed Cuban revolution for its freedom? Lazaro (Leoandy Chacon) accompanied by towering new structures and an oppressive force that controls by a cameraman will unveil the conditions of the Cubans left behind, who the city. Gritty and harrowing, Salier’s cinema-verité footage have nowhere to go and are stuck on this beautiful island turned into reveals the city’s seedy pleasures and paralyzing pains with poetic hell. Is this the price to pay for freedom? Is it a nuclear attack? According visuals of unflinching realism. Through seamless digital effects and Lazaro, there would be toxic waste everywhere. But when Lazaro brings unforgettable vistas, HABANA goes beyond its narrative’s shock-and- the journalists in a heavily guarded hangar… awe conventions, emerging victoriously as a portrait of urban decay (Olivier H - Blog du Cinema) and humanity under siege.
(Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016)
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL II FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Best Short Film - Fantasporto, 2015 / Best Short Film -
\\ Odense International Film Festival 2014 / Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2014 / Festival du Cinéma Européen de Lille 2014 / Vila do Conde International Short Film Festival 2014 / Palm Springs International Film Festival 2014 / Festival Séquence - Toulouse 2014.
WORLD SALES: AUTOUR DE MINUIT - Annabel Sebag 36 T: +33 1 42 81 17 28 | E: [email protected] W: www.autourdeminuit.com
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] | W: www.edouardsalier.fr | www.habana-movie.com ARCHITEKTURA 15’, 2015, Germany DIRECTOR: ULU BRAUN
CAST: John-Patrick Morarescu, Gina-Lisa Maiwald, Niina Lehtonen Braun, Valentin Lorenz, Milan Braun SCRIPTWRITER: Ulu Braun CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ulu Braun EDITING: Ulu Braun SOUND: Moritz Hoffmeister MUSIC: Patric Catani PRODUCER: Ulu Braun
ULU BRAUN
FILM PRESENTATION: Rather than reinventing the wheel, BIEFF- CURATOR’S STATEMENT: In the beginning there was a brick, which flew favourite ULU BRAUN re-envisions the structural potentiality of the through space. It flew past skyscrapers in a city and keeps reappearing in brick, in this revisionist fable of mankind’s urbanization of our planet. this film about construction and destruction. Brick by brick – where will Employing playful and visually dense digital collages (recalling his that ultimately lead? A father shows the world to his child – that will be all 2013 BIEFF short FORST), Braun’s associative tableaux collate an yours one day, he says. Soap bubbles float upward. It is all a cyclical affair. ‘alternate’ vision of our world, where nature invades the urban (and The tableaux Ulu Braun assembles are playful, associative and powerful. vice-versa). We’re transported by a comforting narrator through post- In his realm of imagery, sizes, relations and contexts become malleable. apocalyptic, post-capitalist habitats, where the material co-exists with Owing to the deconstruction of proportions and coherencies, Ulu Braun’s the metaphysical, the literal alongside the figurative (soap-bubble narrative becomes a fable. Architecture is the game of positioning bodies buildings stand alongside ruined churches turned car dealerships). in light. Darkness needs its space. The future is already misaligned. ARCHITEKTURA echoes our civilization’s childlike ingenuity in creation (BERLINALE) and destruction, as we question the inheritance we pass on to our future generations.
(Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Berlin International Film Festival 2015 / Hong Kong BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
International Film Festival / Videoart at Midnight Berlin / Athens Digital \\ Arts Festival / Shortfilmfestival Hamburg / Videoart at Midnight / Sarajevo Film Festival / Berlinische Galerie.
WORLD SALES: ULU BRAUN T: + 49 176 22253040 | E: [email protected] | W: www.ulubraun.com 37 THE PARK 14’, 2015, France DIRECTOR: RANDA MAROUFI
CAST: Young folk of Yasmina Park (Rayan, Walid Achouikh, Abdellah Adnan, Reda Afandi, Nora Aitlkadi, Nisrine Barakat, Achraf Beckoury, Abdellah Belkaid) DIGITAL DYSTOPIAS DIGITAL SCRIPTWRITER: Randa Maroufi CINEMATOGRAPHY: Luca Coassin EDITING: Randa Maroufi PRODUCER: Alain Fleischer
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
RANDA MAROUFI
FILM PRESENTATION: Oftentimes, greener pastures veil arid DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Desire to question different points of view realities, diverting awareness and placating concern. In the case of and to multiply the possibilities: politically charged moments, danger Casablanca’s Arab League Park, Randa Maroufi sweeps us past its frozen in time, instants before acting out... between immediacy and green idyll and lets us loose ‘on the wrong side of its fence.’ Instead illusion, audience observes “something about to happen” and is invited to of touristic leisure, our floating POV captures derelict carousels accept an experience of duration. among wild vegetation and rubbish-strewn walking paths. This (RANDA MAROUFI) is the stomping ground of Morocco’s urban youth, heard through fractured voice-overs as they perform in front of digital cameras for the approval of social media. Materializing this presence-as- posture through still-lifes of bodies in mid-action, The Park offers a Actions frozen in gestures of exchange, expectation and aggression are (privileged) virtual flânerie in a space where youthful abandon and played out following a score conducted by the artist who, in the manner societal fears converge. of Eric Baudelaire, uses composition to explore reality. But this reality is also virtual, for these scenes come in part from a repertoire of violent self- (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) representations found on the Internet. The artist reprises their vocabulary. Violence, she tells us, is a language, and its interpretation is a matter of context. (...) A strange vitality emanates from the gentle immobility of the silent travelling shot that drifts through the scenes acted out by the local INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL II FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Special Mention - International Film Festival Rotterdam inhabitants. Like the roughness of the vegetal and urban architecture of
\\ 2016 / Prix de l’ADAGP – Exhibition Panorama17, France 2015 / New Directors/ the abandoned park, these existences are not festive, yet they celebrate New Films, New York 2016 / Clermont-Ferrand International Film Festival 2016 / life’s endurance, a vital energy that is hidden yet tenacious. IndieLisboa 2016 / Festival International du Film sur l’Art, Montreal 2016 / 25fps (INÈS BOUAILLON) Film Festival, Croatia 2015 / Winterthur International Short Film Festival 2015 / Med Film Festival, Rome 2015 / Cairo International Film Festival, Egypt 2015 / Poitiers Film Festival, France 2015.
WORLD SALES: LE FRESNOY - Natalia Trebik: Head of Distribution 38 and Festivals T: +03 20 28 38 64 | E: [email protected] | W: www.lefresnoy.net
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] THE REFLECTION OF POWER 9’, 2015, France DIRECTOR: MIHAI GRECU
EDITING: Mihai Grecu, Clemence Diard SCRIPTWRITER: Mihai Grecu CINEMATOGRAPHY: Mu-Jin SOUND DESIGN: Simon Apostolou PRODUCER: Nicolas Anthomé
MIHAI GRECU
FILM PRESENTATION: Romanian artist MIHAI GRECU takes us CURATOR’S STATEMENT: This film is a rare glimpse into one of the deep into the heart of North Korea’s reclusive capital Pyonyang, as most reclusive places of the world, Pyongyang, the capital of North grandiose ceremonies are underway. Nestled indoors, its citizens Korea. Slowly, an unknown anomaly devours this strange city. But the remain unshaken in their celebration while an impending catastrophe city’s atmosphere of eternal celebration never changes no matter how takes over the city. As the camera slowly glides across the city’s obvious the approaching end. The people keep absurdly demonstrating urban landscape, the repressive state’s megalomanic monuments are the same preset patriotic behavior. The visual poetry of the film quickly being swallowed up by a Biblical flood. Poetic and striking in its rests upon metaphoric relations being created between architectural realism, THE REFLECTION OF POWER subverts the utopic dimension objects, including symbols of the North-Korean regime, and the natural of landscape art. Sealed-off from the outside world, the resilience of phenomena sent to dissolve them. The film supposes history to be a chain totalitarianism becomes an Achille’s heel, as it symbolically swallows of situations that seem to be unshakable until they are gone forever. itself, remaining but a faded glory. (Ars Electronica) (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Grand Prix - Festival Silhouette, France 2015 / BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Special Jury Mention - Timishort Film Festival, Romania 2015 / Special \\ Jury Mention - FIVA Film Festival, Argentina 2015 / Award of Distinction - Ars Electronica, Austria 2015 / Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2015 / Message To Man St Petersburg Film Festival 2015 / DokuFestKosovo 2015 / Festival Nouveau Cinéma, Montreal 2015 Festival de Cinéma Européen des Arcs 2015
WORLD SALES: BATHYSPERE - Clement Le Penven T: + 33 1 40 21 37 02 | E: [email protected] | 39 W: www.bathysphere.fr
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: T: + 33 06 16 60 57 46 | E: [email protected] W: www.mihaigrecu.org/ JOURNEYS INTO SUBCONSCIOUS PRESENTATION INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION III
Curatorial presentation by: ANDREI TĂNĂSESCU
The films gathered under the theme program Journey into Subconscious take us beneath the surface of our mind, looking at what lurks in that intriguing locus of conflicting and extreme thoughts, wishful desires and latent traumas. Together, they present formal variations on the thought-processes that form us and by extension, use the screen to mirror our (mis)matched projected selves.
In an empty, non-descript room, films from Marie Losier, Dominga Sotomayor and Denis Côté) GABRIEL ABRANTES’ two middle-aged women play out a FREUD AND FRIENDS is a raucous cavalcade of parodies. Bearing the eponymous heart-wrenching scene of child abuse. title, Abrantes’ film is set up as a TV show narrated by famous documentarian Herner Testimony turns to reenactment, and as Werzog as he goes on location to a laboratory, observing guinea-pig Abrantes who the moments go by, the stop-and-repeat is volunteering for his scientist-girlfriend’s mind-reading experiments. Always the psychological exercise grows in intensity. mischievous, self-deprecating filmmaker, Abrantes uses this opportunity to unleash a In front of the passively observant barrage of subconscious fears and desires (ranging from the cerebral to the gaseous), camera, the excruciating details of complete with commercial breaks (look out for the truly Freudian Woody Allen psychological trauma are performed, impersonation!). Beneath it all lie incisive stabs at media’s culture of beauty and sex, as giving way to a flood of emotions. well as the eternal fear of commitment. Nine-year old Signe is resurrected before our eyes as we take part in her Winner of the Cinema & Gioventù prize from a dual pregnancy. Lindeen explores adult self’s psychological purification. for Best International Short at the 2015 this with utmost gentility through a form Brilliant in its cinematic economy, MY Locarno International Film Festival, of cinematic stream-of-sub-consciousness, MOMMY by FALCK pulls us deep within MARCUS LINDEEN’s movie DEAR observing Jaxen episodically as she the experiential state of the victim’s DIRECTOR is an absorbing mood-piece on engages in the process of internalizing
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL III powerlessness. By the end, our communal the search for identity within the mirrored this discovery. Accessible but hiding catharsis is revealed to have a more reflection of cinema. In 1980 jazz musician intricate layers of narrative and formal \\ significant scope as a simple pan of the Kazzrie Jaxen had a life-changing complexity, Dear Director is a wonderful camera delivers a powerful statement on experience watching Ingmar Bergman’s objet d’art of cinematic musicality that trauma’s transference across generations. From the Life of Marionettes. Immersed unwinds more with each viewing. within his cinematic world of duality and Commissioned by IndieLisboa for the fissured identities, she realized she was a omnibus Here in Lisbon (shared with ‘womb-twin survivor,’ the only child born
40 A cerebral wonder of cinematic narration, Awarded Special Mention upon its debut DAVID RODES’ film CÉOS | PHOÉBÉ at last year’s Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in plays out within the liminal realm where Cannes, THE EXQUISITE CORPUS is PETER thoughts and ideas germinate - the mind. TSCHERKASSKY’s long-awaited follow-up Emanating from its deeply symbolic to his 2009 Coming Attractions. Using core, the film envisions its male and as material and thematic basis erotic female protagonists meeting upon a footage culled from various sources, vast, arid plateau. As their ghostly traces Tscherkassky employs his trademark run circles around each other, their real techniques of analog manipulation, manifestation brings them face to face, creating a veritable garden of delights: under the threat of a colossal electrical arriving amongst a nudist colony, a couple sandstorm that is approaching. Words in approaches a woman sleeping on the an unknown language are spoken, glances beach. Her fortuitous state of reverie exchanged and the symbolic offering takes over and we’re thrown into every of an amulet leads to the possibility celluloid fan’s erotic dream. Montage of communication and contact. Within and manipulation guide Tscherkassky’s
this simple structure, Ancient Greek formal narrative of the seduction and BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL mythology is re-envisioned, placing the coital triumph of the body, as it is viewer in the middle of the conceptual reinforced by frequent collaborator Dirk \\ plane of the mind. By dramatizing the Schaefer’s hypnotic sound collages. With cosmic meeting between the titans of its beautiful craftsmanship, The Exquisite intellect (CEOS) and prophecy (PHOEBE), Corpus disassembles cinema and the body RODES imparts to the viewer the noblest in a delicious celebration of arousal. of offerings: emotion.
41 FREUD AND FRIENDS 23’, 2015, Portugal, Switzerland DIRECTOR: GABRIEL ABRANTES
CAST: Gabriel Abrantes, Carloto Cotta, Sónia Balacó, Filipa Anika, David Phelps, Cláudia Jardim, Joana Barrios, Natxo Checa, Norberto Lobo SCRIPTWRITER: Gabriel Abrantes, David Phelps CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jorge Quintela EDITING: Margarida Lucas SOUND: Rafael Cardoso MUSIC: Norberto Lobo JOURNEYS INTO SUBCONSCIOUS INTO JOURNEYS PRODUCER: IndieLisboa - Associação Cultural, Gabriel Abrantes WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
GABRIEL ABRANTES
FILM PRESENTATION: Commissioned by IndieLisboa for the omnibus DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Since my early boyhood days I wanted to Here in Lisbon (shared with films from Marie Losier, Dominga cross the chaotic frontier of the mind to be able to walk around in other Sotomayor and Denis Côté) GABRIEL ABRANTES’ FREUD AND people’s dreams. I had a childish fantasy where I would shrink smaller than FRIENDS is a raucous cavalcade of parodies. Bearing the eponymous a peanut and I could walk through my mother’s ear and be a peeping Tom title, Abrantes’ film is set up as a TV show narrated by famous in her dreams.” In the dream laboratory of the Champalimaud Centre for documentarian Herner Werzog as he goes on location to a laboratory, the Unknown, Abrantes’ dreams become reality. A machine is created that observing guinea-pig Abrantes who is volunteering for his scientist- makes the shrinking process possible. At its core stands a living creature, girlfriend’s mind-reading experiments. Always the mischievous, self- named after the hero of European Cinema: Bernardo. A baroque journey deprecating filmmaker, Abrantes uses this opportunity to unleash a to the world of id begins. Gabriel Abrantes has the courage and Georg barrage of subconscious fears and desires (ranging from the cerebral Groddeck would have been thrilled. Film history and all of its world- to the gaseous), complete with commercial breaks (look out for the renowned male heroes undergo a new ascription. truly Freudian Woody Allen impersonation!). Beneath it all lie incisive (GABRIEL ABRANTES) stabs at media’s culture of beauty and sex, as well as the eternal fear of commitment.
(Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL III
\\ FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Berlin International Film Festival 2016 / Museum of Old and New Art, MONA Biennale of Moving Images, Australia 2015 / Friends with Benefits: An Anthology of Four New American Filmmakers, Lincoln Center 2015.
WORLD SALES: Portugal FIlm 42 T: +351 213 466 172 | E: [email protected] W: www.portugalfilm.org
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] | www.marcuslindeen.com MY MOMMY 15’, 2014, Norway DIRECTOR: FALCK
CAST: Signe Martha Tosterud, Aud Steinsbekk SCRIPTWRITER: FALCK CINEMATOGRAPHY: Audun G. Magnæs EDITING: Anette Ruud Andersen, Brede Rørstad PRODUCER: Elisabeth Kvithyll, Revolt Film
FALK
FILM PRESENTATION: In an empty, non-descript room, two DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: middle-aged women play out a heart-wrenching scene of child I feel ashamed. abuse. Testimony turns to reenactment, and as the moments go by, the stop-and-repeat psychological exercise grows in intensity. In I hate myself. front of the passively observant camera, the excruciating details I don’t deserve to be liked. of psychological trauma are performed, giving way to a flood of emotions. Nine-year old Signe is resurrected before our eyes as I have made a film about my mommy. we take part in her adult self’s psychological purification. Brilliant The film is part of the project SHAME. in its cinematic economy, MY MOMMY pulls us deep within the experiential state of the victim’s powerlessness. By the end, our (FALK) communal catharsis is revealed to have a more significant scope as a simple pan of the camera delivers a powerful statement on trauma’s transference across generations.
(Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Oberhausen International Short Film Festival \\ 2015 / Norwegian Short Film Festival 2014
WORLD SALES: NORWEGIAN FILM INSTITUTE T: + 47 22 47 45 74 | E: [email protected] | W: www.norwegianfilms.no 43
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: T: +47 469 32 489 | E: [email protected] CEOS | PHOEBE 13’, 2015, France DIRECTOR: DAVID RODES
CAST: Anaïs Chartreau , William Prunck SCRIPTWRITER: David Rodes CINEMATOGRAPHY: Sylvain Briend, Vladimir Peeters ART DIRECTION: Sidney H. Greenwood EDITING: David Rodes SOUND: Maxence Ciekawy PRODUCER: Le Fresnoy JOURNEYS INTO SUBCONSCIOUS INTO JOURNEYS
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
DAVID RODES
FILM PRESENTATION: A cerebral wonder of cinematic narration, DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: What is left of us at the dawn of our DAVID RODES’ film plays out within the liminal realm where thoughts forgetting? This could be the story of a future memory or that of a and ideas germinate - the mind. Emanating from its deeply symbolic forgotten future. A fragment of a mythical dream in our frozen memories. core, the film envisions its male and female protagonists meeting upon What is left of us at the dawn of our forgetting? When presence is no a vast, arid plateau. As their ghostly traces run circles around each longer flesh and our words are murmurs? In the spectrum of our desires other, their real manifestation brings them face to face, under the emerges the shore of an intimacy become unsayable. In the lassitude of threat of a colossal electrical sandstorm that is approaching. Words our talismans we count the beads of murmuring and imperious desire. are spoken, glances exchanged and the symbolic offering of an amulet It may be the story of a fable to be invented or that of a legend that has leads to the possibility of contact and communication. Within this crossed our eyelids. The vertigo of a form whose interpretation is the simple structure, Ancient Greek mythology is re-envisioned, placing prelude to survival. The perturbation of an urgency or that of a repetition the viewer in the middle of the conceptual plane of the mind. By hoped for. The trace of a movement defying knowledge, in the embrace of dramatizing the cosmic meeting between the titans of intellect (Céos) an impossible infinity. and prophecy (Phoébé), Rodes imparts to the viewer the noblest of offerings: emotion. It may be the story of a time outside time. An address in the distance. An unknown, buried. The searing flash of a hidden nomadism, in the beyond (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) of our expectations, in the sweetness of our forgetting.
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL III (DAVID RODES) FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Uner 35 Award - Invidéo Film Festival, Italy 2015 \\
WORLD SALES: LE FRESNOY - Natalia Trebik: Head of Distribution 44 and Festivals T: +03 20 28 38 64 | E: [email protected] W: www.lefresnoy.net
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: [email protected] | www.david-rodes.com www.facebook.com/ceosphoebe THE EXQUISITE CORPUS 19’, 2015, Austria DIRECTOR: PETER TSCHERKASSKY
SCRIPTWRITER: Peter Tscherkassky CINEMATOGRAPHY: Peter Tscherkassky EDITING: Peter Tscherkassky SOUND: Dirk Schaefer MUSIC: Dirk Schaefer SUPPORTED BY: Land Niederosterreich BKA. Kunst
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
PETER TSCHERKASSKY
FILM PRESENTATION: Awarded Special Mention upon its debut at last DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: While I derived most of my films near year’s Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in Cannes, THE EXQUISITE CORPUS exclusively from a single found footage source, THE EXQUISITE CORPUS is PETER TSCHERKASSKY’s long-awaited follow-up to his 2009 Coming is based on several different films, referencing the surrealist “exquisite Attractions. Using as material and thematic basis erotic footage culled corpse” technique. You’ll find several rushes from commercials, an from various sources, Tscherkassky employs his trademark techniques American erotic thriller from the 1980s, a British comedy from the 1960s, of analog manipulation, creating a veritable garden of delight: arriving a Danish as well as a French porn film (both most likely from the 1970s), amongst a nudist colony, a couple approaches a woman sleeping on an Italian soft-core sex movie from 1979, and a (British?) amateur movie...I the beach. Her fortuitous state of reverie takes over and we’re thrown mainly focused on these erotic films; they are related in that each tells a into every celluloid fan’s erotic dream. Montage and manipulation completely insane story that is entirely irrelevant but achieves the main guide Tscherkassky’s formal narrative of the seduction and coital goal of showing naked human bodies. I play on this attitude by raising the triumph of the body, as it is reinforced by frequent collaborator Dirk body of film itself to the forefront, which thereby becomes the central Schaefer’s hypnotic sound collages. With its beautiful craftsmanship, theme of THE EXQUISITE CORPUS.These diverse sources serve as a basis The Exquisite Corpus disassembles cinema and the body in a delicious for THE EXQUISITE CORPUS, giving rise to heterogeneities I willingly celebration of arousal. accepted in the spirit of the surrealist technique of the “cadavre exquis”. At the same time the title of the film refers to the “exquisite corpse” which (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) analog cinema nowadays represents: an exquisite corpus but stamped with an expiration date. The exact date remains unknown, but it is foreseeable. BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Special Mention - Quinzaines des Réalisateurs 2015 / Toronto International Film Festival 2015 / 25fps Film & Video (PETER TSCHERKASSKY) \\ Festival 2015 / BFI Film Festival 2015 / Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Montréal 2015 / New York Film Festival 2015 / Jihlava Documentary Film Festival 2015 / Vienna International Film Festival 2015 / Mar de Plata International Film Festival 2015 / Vila do Conde International Short Film Festival 2015 / Melbourne Incernational Film Festival 2015 / Chicago International Film Festival 2015 WORLD SALES: SIXPACKFILM T: (+43-1) 526 09 90 15 | E: [email protected] 45 W: www.sixpackfilm.com
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] W: http://www.sixpackfilm.com/en/catalogue/show/2241 DEAR DIRECTOR 14’, 2015, Sweden DIRECTOR: MARCUS LINDEEN
CAST: Kazzrie Jaxen, Thomas Bosket SCRIPTWRITER: Marcus Lindeen CINEMATOGRAPHY: Lisabi Fridell EDITING: Therese Elfström SOUND: Hans Appelqvist MUSIC: Hans Appelqvist PRODUCER: Juan Pablo Libossart JOURNEYS INTO SUBCONSCIOUS INTO JOURNEYS
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
MARCUS LINDEEN
FILM PRESENTATION: Winner of the Cinema & Gioventù prize for Best DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: International Short at the 2015 Locarno International Film Festival, Dear Director, MARCUS LINDEEN’s movie is an absorbing mood-piece on the search for identity within the mirrored reflection of cinema. In 1980 jazz My name is Kazzrie Jaxen and I am a jazz pianist from New York City. I am musician Kazzrie Jaxen had a life-changing experience watching Ingmar writing to you because I need to tell you what happened to me when I saw Bergman’s From the Life of Marionettes. Immersed within his cinematic your incredible movie. world of duality and fissured identities, she realized she was a ‘womb- It was as if your film catapulted me out of the theater and deep into twin survivor,’ the only child born from a dual pregnancy. Lindeen myself. I was transported back through allthe memories of my life to explores this with utmost gentility through a form of cinematic stream- the very beginning, before I was even born. I felt like the movie screen of-sub-consciousness, observing Jaxen episodically as she engages collapsed and the images came pouring out of the screen like a flood of in the process of internalizing this discovery. Accessible but hiding water, filling the theater and slowly transforming it into a gigantic womb. intricate layers of narrative and formal complexity, DEAR DIRECTOR is What if there was a struggle and I killed my own twin, inside the womb, a wonderful objet d’art of cinematic musicality that unwinds more with and then ate the body? So no one would ever know what had happened each viewing. in there. Or maybe I loved my twin and was so sad when she died next to (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) me that I wrapped myself around her, until she slowly grew into me. And that way I could save her, forever captured inside my body. As an artist
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL III myself, I know how challenging it is to create something meaningful. And I want to tell you that you have changed at least one person’s life with your
\\ FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Cinema & Gioventù Prize for Best International beautiful film. Short Film - Locarno Film Festival 2015 Yours sincerely, Kazzrie Jaxen.
(MARCUS LINDEEN)
WORLD SALES: Swedish Film Institute 46 [email protected] | T: +46 8 665 11 41 W: www.filminstitutet.se
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: T: +46 - 70 712 37 62 | E: [email protected] W: www.marcuslindeen.com | W: www.marcuslindeen.com/dear-director DANGER IS MY BUSINESS
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION IV BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL \\
47 DANGER IS MY BUSINESS PRESENTATION INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION IV
Curatorial presentation by: BIANCAANDREI TĂNĂSESCUBĂNICĂ
Danger surrounds us at every corner. Be it man-made or part of our natural environment, we are placed in constant peril, relying on our instincts of adaptability to help us cope with it. This natural tendency of ours to excel beyond the ‘fight or flight’ survival reactions and observe, rationalize and ultimately, understand, the dangers we face, is what sets us apart from other species. The human spirit as such is a compelling one - willing to put itself at risk, it carries forth, accepting the consequences, for the
sake of its evolutionary growth. Adaptability breeds understanding and knowledge, tiny steps along the evolutionary ladder. The films selected for the competition section DANGER IS MY BUSINESS convey the fortitude of the human spirit in light of its battle against the hazards of life. Through their looking-glass, man’s daily entanglement with the elements, health disorders, small and large scale brutality, brings her/himself towards a transcendental state of evolutionary conquest.
FABIAN KAISER’s THE BREATH offers an entrancing, original look at the fortitude of society’s unsung hero of safety, the firefighter. Heavy on atmosphere and free of dialogue, Kaiser’s hybrid documentary observes a group of firemen as they go about their exercise drills, decked out in recognizable orange suits and hermetically sealed oxygen helmets. Their mechanical movement, assured in its steps and slowed by the weight of their gear, expresses steadfast confidence, but the eyes of their
superior hide human vulnerability. facts of some of the most violent crimes in the USA. Working as a defense forensic When it’s his turn to don the mask, investigator, his role in the 2009 mass shooting at a US military base took three he proceeds down a labyrinthian years to reconstruct the crime scene that director TOM ROSENBERG maps out for passageway, on a rite of passage into us in a spacious warehouse. Within this minimal mise-en-scene, Akin literally walks fear and the unknown. With bated us through the events of that tragic day, leaving it up to the viewer to mentally breath we witness his transcendence reconstruct the carnage mapped out in words and diagrams. As the information NTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONNTERNATIONAL IV
I and inevitable return to our material accumulates, the mind tries to make sense of it all, but the incomprehensibility of world, cleansing himself for the next mankind’s constant propensity to violence is too much to bear. Using the simplest \\ day to come. of cinematic tools, NOTHING HUMAN opens our eyes to the abstract irrationality of violence and the paradox at the heart of what makes us human. For more than 25 years, Louis Akin has retraced Death’s footsteps, Setting its parameters from the first words spoken, I REMEMBER NOTHING exists separating and re-arranging with precariously on the edge of chaos and poetry, structured around the five stages of detached objectivism the sequential epilepsy while looking at a day in the life of teenager Joan. Stuck in the tedium of
48 small-town America and the humdrum the aesthetic mechanics found in stop-motion animation, Wenninger’s real-life of high-school, she is the poster-girl protagonists move as marionettes in a theatre of war that flashes at every interval of teenage angst, a budding life-force with the fear and danger. Impelled by survival instincts and a balletic camerawork arrested in development. Her only that transverses time and space in awe-inspiring long-takes, the two soldiers escape appears at a baseball game, as emerge out of the ruins of war, shell-shocked and spiritually defeated. Atmospheric a source of curiosity and excitement and compelling, Uncanny Valley offers a potent statement on the inevitable offered by her blossoming puberty. abstraction of history, erasing individual experience in favour of posterity’s ZIA ANGER purposefully induces a superficial representation. sense of disorientation and peril through casting choices and flourishes THE BUREAU OF MELODRAMATIC RESEARCH delivers the last installment of their of magical realism, framing Joan’s Alien Passions trilogy with the video performance titled ABOVE THE WEATHER. sexual exploration against epilepsy’s Hidden by the genre veil of the road movie, artists Alina Popa and Irina Gheorghe impending assault. By the end, perform as two coquettish socialites on their way back home. Framed in their turn we’re left dazed, confused but fully of the century convertible, their preening conversation stands in oblivious contrast submissive to the powerful impact of to the surrounding desolate industrial landscape of Romania’s oil-fields and the love and its menacing consequences. radio announcements forecasting an impending environmental apocalypse. Captive
to the pathetic fallacy of 1950s Hollywood melodramas, Above the Weather is an BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Like the flicker of silent films or incisive commentary on our catastrophic dependency on fossil fuels, beckoning the delay of memory recall, PAUL us to ‘keep calm and carry on’ gently into the good night, to the telling tune of \\ WENNINGER’s UNCANNY VALLEY Eurovision’s parochialism. unravels its story of wartime trauma through the camaraderie of two lone soldiers fighting their way out of the trenches of World War I. Employing
49 I REMEMBER NOTHING 18’, 2015, USA DIRECTOR: ZIA ANGER
CAST: Audrey Turner, Eve Alpert, India Menuez, Adinah Dacynger, Lola Kirke SCRIPTWRITER: Zia Anger CINEMATOGRAPHY: Miranda Rhyne EDITING: Zia Anger, Lucy Munger, Miranda Rhyne DANGER IS MY BUSINESS SOUND: Arjun G Sheth MUSIC: Julianna Barwick PRODUCER: Miles Joris-Peyrafitte
ZIA ANGER
FILM PRESENTATION: Setting its parameters from the first words CURATOR’S STATEMENT: With each new stage of sensations, a spoken, I Remember Nothing exists precariously on the edge of character’s face changes and the world shifts. Zia Anger’s I Remember chaos and poetry, structured around the five stages of epilepsy Nothing is about a girl, a game and epilepsy. Cruising on a pulsing rhythm while looking at a day in the life of teenager Joan. Stuck in the reflecting the different chapters and a howling soundtrack, I Remember tedium of small-town America and the humdrum of high-school, she Nothing is a mood piece of the highest order. Bringing the audience is the poster-girl of teenage angst, a budding life-force arrested in quickly into this sort of estranged subjectivity, we are brought deep into a development. Her only escape appears at a baseball game, as a source point of view that seems increasingly removed from reality. of curiosity and excitement offered by her blossoming puberty. Many of the best moments come in textural details that breath so much Zia Anger purposefully induces a sense of disorientation and peril life into the film. Some images that stand out are light hitting Joan’s through casting choices and flourishes of magical realism, framing stubbled legs, the framing of a closed fist against a wrinkled baseball Joan’s sexual exploration against epilepsy’s impending assault. By the uniform and waking up in the dirt. This, combined with the film’s best end, we’re left dazed, confused but fully submissive to the powerful selling point — its sense of humour — make for an incredibly rich impact of love and its menacing consequences. experience. Creating something beyond just an experience of mood (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) and sensuality, Zia Anger offers a film that is consistently engaging and fun. Directed by an incredibly promising voice on the horizon of a new American cinema, I Remember Nothing should be on your radar. NTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONNTERNATIONAL IV I (Justine A. Smith, Vague Visages)
\\ FESTIVALS/AWARDS: New Directors/New Films, New York 2015 / Maryland Film Festival 2015 / Festival del Film Locarno 2015 / Denver International Film Festival 2015 / AFI 2015 / Imagine Science Film Festival 2015 / Ann Arbor Film Festival 2015 / Basilica Soundscape, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art 2015 / Vienna Independent Shorts 2015.
WORLD SALES: ZIA ANGER 50 E: [email protected] | W: https://zia-anger.squarespace.com NOTHING HUMAN 17’, 2015, USA DIRECTOR: TOM ROSENBERG
CAST: Louis Akin SCRIPTWRITER: Tom Rosenberg CINEMATOGRAPHY: Juan Pablo Gonzalez, Jim Hickcox, Michael Roberson, Patrick Hoy, Ivy Chiu EDITING: Tom Rosenberg, Kyle Seaquist SOUND: Rui Silva, Samantha Skinner, Evan Roberts, Amanda Gotera, Jacob Weiss, Florian Habito PRODUCER: Lauren Kinsler
TOM ROSENBERG
FILM PRESENTATION: For more than 25 years, Louis Akin has DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: A minimalist study in extreme violence, retraced Death’s footsteps, separating and re-arranging with detached Nothing Human is about forensic investigator Louie Akin’s experience objectivism the sequential facts of some of the most violent crimes in reconstructing the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood where Major Nidal the USA. Working as a defense forensic investigator, his role in the 2009 Hasan, a military psychiatrist, killed 13 soldiers preparing to deploy to mass shooting at a US military base took three years to reconstruct the Afghanistan. crime scene that director Tom Rosenberg maps out for us in a spacious Akin recounts the 3 year investigation that placed him at the intersection warehouse. Within this minimal mise-en-scene, Akin literally walks us of America’s endemic mass shootings and ongoing military campaigns in through the events of that tragic day, leaving it up to the viewer to the Middle East. After years analyzing every blood trail and bullet hole, mentally reconstruct the carnage mapped out in words and diagrams. interviewing hundreds of traumatized witnesses, Akin’s is an exhaustive, As the information accumulates, the mind tries to make sense of it systematic accounting of this violent scene. His work necessitates all, but the incomprehensibility of mankind’s constant propensity to distance, precision and rigor, while simultaneously forcing him to confront violence is too much to bear. Using the simplest of cinematic tools, the most troubling aspects of human behavior. Nothing Human opens our eyes to the abstract irrationality of violence and the paradox at the heart of what makes us human. The film consists mostly of a single interview with Louie walking around a sound stage painted with a full scale enlargement of his own (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) reconstruction of the crime scene - a giant array of numbers and arrows, showing with clinical precision the positions and movements of the shooter and his victims. The film refuses imagery of the crime scene itself, BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Locarno International Film Festival, 2015 / True/ rejecting the aesthetics of sensationalized cinematic violence and placing \\ False Film Festival 2015 / Denver Film Festival 2015. the audience more firmly in the perspective of a bureaucrat, a perspective that is both fascinating and unnerving for its sober precision.
(TOM ROSENBERG)
WORLD SALES: TOM ROSENBERG E: [email protected] | T: +1 862 204 121 51 W: www.nothinghumanfilm.com THE BREATH 11’, 2014, Switzerland DIRECTOR: FABIAN KAISER
CAST: Ueli Alder, Alireza Bayram, Sawas Wassiliadis, Matthias Hungerbühler, David Flury, Ralf Frehner SCRIPTWRITER: Fabian Kaiser CINEMATOGRAPHY: Kevin Rodriguez EDITING: Fabienne Andreoli DANGER IS MY BUSINESS SOUND: Remie Blaser, Can Isik MUSIC: Can Isik PRODUCER: Filippo Bonacci
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
FABIAN KAISER
FILM PRESENTATION: Winner of the Vienna Short Film Award, CURATOR’S STATEMENT: In an unreal, abstract environment, safely Fabian Kaiser’s The Breath offers an entrancing, original look at the wrapped-up members of the voluntary fire department train for the fortitude of society’s unsung hero of safety, the firefighter. Heavy moment they are called out. On treadmills and moving ladders in a on atmosphere and free of dialogue, Kaiser’s hybrid documentary concrete cellar, men wearing orange suits and oxygen tanks work on observes a group of firemen as they go about their exercise drills, their condition in a kind of silent ballet, the silence punctuated only by decked out in recognizable orange suits and hermetically sealed their rhythmic breathing. In the factory building where a fire is raging it oxygen helmets. Their mechanical movement, assured in its steps and is dark – there are flashes of light, and a fire glows in the distance. The slowed by the weight of their gear, expresses steadfast confidence, firefighters move slowly, like Martians across unknown terrain. All they but the eyes of their superior hides human fallibility. When it’s his can hear is their own breathing, and their fear becomes palpable. Does the turn to don the mask, he proceeds down a labyrinthian passageway, suit offer sufficient protection? How heavy are those oxygen tanks? Above on a rite of passage into fear and the unknown. With bated breath the monitors in the control room, all that can be seen are the peering eyes we witness his transcendence and inevitable return to our material of an officer following the maneuvers on flickering screens. It is only when world, cleansing himself for the next day to come. the big helmets have been removed and the whole team is standing in the shower that their vulnerability becomes visible: the anonymous suits (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) become flesh-and-blood people. This oppressive, silent visual poem is an illustration of the sensory experience of firefighting. With limited vision, little freedom of movement and danger lurking around every corner, the NTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONNTERNATIONAL IV I rhythm of the breathing apparatus is all that counts.
\\ FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Vienna Short Film Award - Vienna Independent (IDFA 2014) Shorts 2015 / IDFA International Documentary Festival Amsterdam 2014 / Festival dei Popoli, Firenze 2014 / Rio de Janeiro International Short Film Festival 2014 / International Short Film Festival Winterthur 2014 / DOK Fest 2015 / Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2015 / Astoria Film Festiva, New York 2015.
WORLD SALES: ZURICH UNIVERSITY FOR THE ARTS (ZHdK): 52 Laura Zimmermann | T: +41 43 446 31 12 | E: [email protected]
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: T: +41 79 404 92 68 | E: [email protected] ABOVE THE WEATHER 11’, 2015, Romania DIRECTOR: THE BUREAU OF MELODRAMATIC RESEARCH (Irina Gheorghe and Alina Popa)
CAST: Alina Popa, Irina Gheorghe, Nicola Masciandaro SCRIPTWRITER: The Bureau of Melodramatic Research CINEMATOGRAPHY: Virgil Babușcov, Alexandru Andrei EDITING: Alexandru Andrei
IRINA GHEORGHE & ALINA POPA
FILM PRESENTATION: The Bureau of Melodramatic Research DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Above the Weather (2015), the third work in delivers the last installment of their Alien Passions trilogy with the the trilogy Alien Passions, makes reference to Douglas Sirk’s Written on video performance titled Above the Weather. Hidden by the genre the Wind (1957), taking the title literally, and hinting at the immaterial veil of the road movie, artists Alina Popa and Irina Gheorghe perform aspects of weather, and to the materiality of emotions, to the circuit as two coquettish socialites on their way back home. Framed in linking affective and natural climates. One of the main characteristics of their turn of the century convertible, their preening conversation the melodramatic genre was the emotional charge of its characters pitted stands in oblivious contrast to the surrounding desolate industrial against nature, while the broader context of global warming and climate landscape of Romania’s oil-fields and the radio announcements change recasts emotions as alien forces coming from the nonhuman realm forecasting an impending environmental apocalypse. Captive to as an uncontrollable demonic possession. Above the Weather, a simple the pathetic fallacy of 1950s Hollywood melodramas, Above the breath is the start of a new climate, a whirl of thought is a cyclone and Weather is an incisive commentary on our catastrophic dependency drops of tears gather in dubious waste ponds. on fossil fuels, beckoning us to ‘keep calm and carry on’ gently into (THE BUREAU OF MELODRAMATIC RESEARCH) the good night, to the telling tune of Eurovision’s parochialism.
(Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: International premiere / The Dark Side \\ of Nature, group show - Nationa lMuseum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, 2016
WORLD SALES: E: [email protected] 53 W: thebureauofmelodramaticresearch.blogspot.ro/ UNCANNY VALLEY 14’, 2015, Austria, France DIRECTOR: PAUL WENNINGER
CAST: Raúl Maia, Jan Jakubal, Paul Wenninger SCRIPTWRITER: Paul Wenninger CINEMATOGRAPHY: Paul Wenninger EDITING: Michael Derrossett ANIMATION: Nick Hummer DANGER IS MY BUSINESS SOUND: Nick Hummer, Michael Moser PRODUCER: Films de Force Majeure, Kabinett and Co., KGP Kranzelbinder Filmproduction
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
PAUL WENNINGER
FILM PRESENTATION: Like the flicker of silent films or the delay of CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Paul Wenninger traces the arc of memory recall, Paul Wenninger’s Uncanny Valley unravels its story representational history to representation-critical parable: he straddles of wartime trauma through the camaraderie of two lone soldiers the Uncanny Valley with motifs from found footage material from World fighting their way out of the trenches of World War I. Employing the War I, which he connects to the actors´ performances, to bring them aesthetic mechanics found in stop-motion animation, Wenninger’s into the image again using techniques from animation and then, with a real-life protagonists move as marionettes in a theatre of war that diorama, to land in a museum-like ambiance. What the film documents is a flashes at every interval with the fear and danger. Impelled by parable about the difficulty of making present what one wants to show: in survival instincts and a balletic camerawork that transverses time this film, the soldiers´ fear and wounds also applies to the distance, which and space in awe-inspiring long-takes, the two soldiers emerge out of is injured here, in order to gapingly gaze in the semblance of illusion. the ruins of war, shell-shocked and spiritually defeated. Atmospheric The stop-motion aesthetics jiggles at the seamless course of images, and compelling, Uncanny Valley offers a potent statement on the making the representation stutter: the body language follows the media´s inevitable abstraction of history, erasing individual experience in staccato, which intrudes in the dance to perforate the movements, punch favour of posterity’s superficial representation. holes through the appearance of humanity. What is then shown is a distance, which affects us deeply, the impossibility of backing away, an (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) iconoclastic dance.
(ANDREAS SPIEGL) NTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONNTERNATIONAL IV I
\\ FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Best Austrian Animation & Audience Award - One Day Animation Festival, Vienna 2015 / International Jury Mention - Anima Festival de Film d’Animation Cordoba 2015 / Annecy International Animation Festival 2015 / Uppsala International Short Film Festival 2015 / Les Sommets du Cinéma dAnimation de Montréal 2015 / Airport Animation Film Festival 2015 / ReAnimania IAFFY Yerevan 2015. WORLD SALES: SIXPACK FILM: 54 T: (+43-1) 526 09 90 15 | E: [email protected] W: www.sixpackfilm.com
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] | W: http://www.kabinettadco.at THE ARTIST IS PRESENT
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION V BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL \\
55 THE ARTIST IS PRESENT PRESENTATION INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION V
Curatorial presentation by: ANDREI TĂNĂSESCU
The insertion of an artist within their work - besides the formal and thematic tropes - is a statement of creative authority, control and self-reflexivity. It also invites the viewer to engage with the artwork on a deeper level of reading, requiring that one goes beyond the surface to extract the suggestive elements that make up its artistic core. The films compiled for the competition
program THE ARTIST IS PRESENT offer themselves as meta-texts whose authorial presence manifests itself in a myriad of ways. These are movies about artists and their métier, whose formal and thematic audaciousness will require repeated viewings to decipher.
Wonderfully refreshing and meaningful in its subtextual discourse, TERRITORIAL MARKING is a beautiful work of naïf art by DANIEL DJAMO. We see the artist appear on screen, waving the Romanian flag through a forest. On voiceover, we hear a recording of his anxious mother discouraging him from creating his next controversial art piece. Blessed with an artist’s stubbornness, Djamo refuses to submit to his mother’s fear of the French authorities and continues the back-and-forth until the perfect alternative is discovered (accidentally and under duress) by the matriarch. Yet listen closely, for behind their domestic argument and the mother’s
consternation, you’ll find the traumatic a work of art should produce. Compiled from TV, radio and online reports, SYMBOLIC paralysis of the immigrant Other, THREATS traces the lifespan of Leinkauf and Wermke’s art installation, bringing made worse by the scar of Communist forward the predictable rhetoric seeking culpability rather than discourse. Once the oppression, rearing its head like Djamo’s proverbial dust settles and the fever-pitch frenzy of the media machine dies down, flailing flag. we’re afforded poetic tranquility to ponder not only the role of art in our world, but that of our own citizen-selves.
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL V On July 22, 2014, New York woke up to an unexpected silent declaration: Brooklyn Carlo Mollino, famed designer and architect, departed from our physical world in 1973, \\ Bridge’s Old Glory was gone, replaced by leaving behind an astounding legacy of form and beauty. In his latest film, YURI ANCARANI two white flags blowing in the high winds. capitalizes on Mollino’s preoccupation with the occult to conduct a live séance in the artist’s In a post-9/11 New York, this gesture home. Seated at the dining table with the resident caretaker in service, psychic medium galvanized city officials and the media Albania Tomassini becomes a conduit for the architect, whose spectral voice reflects on his into knee-jerk reactions of fear, anger past life’s work. Ancarani’s aesthetic eye is a perfect match for Casa Mollino’s baroque décor, and panic. In short, a response that every incubating us within the walls of the lush apartment and its sonic atmosphere of hushed
56 spirits. SÉANCE summons the perfect Eisensteinian montage, October is Over Once upon a time, before people came interlocutor for the intense life-force at is a wonderful homage to cinema and the along, all the creatures were free and work in Ancarani’s films, pulling us into its creative spark that gives it life. able to be with one another”, narrates the house of memories and catapulting us into voiceover. “All the animals danced together the state of transcendence offered by the In direct address, VIKA KIRCHENBAUER and were immeasurably happy. There act of creation. invites you to PLEASE RELAX NOW. You’re was only one who wasn’t invited to the about to experience liberty and desire, under celebration – the frog. In his rage about the The analogy of life and cinema has never the guiding voice of the artist. Calm and injustice, he committed suicide.” Something been so delightfully and cleverly laid composed, Kirchenbauer breaks down the Romani and frogs have in common is that bare, as in KAREN AKERMAN and MIGUEL cinematic screen’s barrier of distanciation they will never be unseen, or stay unnoticed. SEABRA LOPES’ OCTOBER IS OVER. as she methodically lays bare (pun well- In her film, young director Leonor Teles Cherubic protagonist Tontom declares intended) the power-relationships at play weaves the life circumstance of Romani in that ‘film grows old’ and is rightfully met between art and its consumer. As spectators, Portugal today with the recollections of a with the appropriate response from his we are encouraged to subvert passivity and yesterday. Anything but a passive observer, unseen parents (played by the filmmakers reclaim our position within the space we Teles consciously decides to participate themselves). Their gift of a Super8 camera occupy. How? By exploring, here and now, and take up position. As a third pillar, she
sparks the toddler’s imagination and the the pleasure principle of art to its extreme. establishes an active applied performance BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL journey of life begins. Discovery leads to Abandon all preconceptions, democratize art that becomes integrated in the cinematic frustration (there’s never enough funding!) the space and fully submit to - and indulge narrative. Thereby transforming “once upon \\ and under the sleep suggestion of his in - the communal experience. Political and a time” into “there is”. “Afterwards, nothing progenitors (Godard, always!) nocturnal playful, Please Relax Now’s deceivingly will be as it was and the melody of life will inspiration reaps rewards. Constructed simple premise will become one of your have changed”, explains a voice off-camera. with a formal simplicity that reveals deeper most challenging viewing experiences. layers of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Should you resist? No, just relax.
57 OCTOBER IS OVER 24’, 2015, Portugal, Brazil DIRECTOR: KAREN AKERMAN, MIGUEL SEABRA LOPES
CAST: Antonio Akerman Seabra, Karen Akerman, Miguel Seabra Lopes SCRIPTWRITER: Miguel Seabra Lopes, Karen Akerman CINEMATOGRAPHY: Paulo Menezes THE ARTIST IS PRESENT EDITING: Karen Akerman, Miguel Seabra Lopes SOUND: Ives Rosenfeld, Bernardo Uzeda, Ricardo Cutz PRODUCER: Karen Akerman, Miguel Seabra Lopes, Alessandra Castañeda, João Matos
KAREN AKERMAN, MIGUEL SEABRA LOPES
FILM PRESENTATION: The analogy of life and cinema has never been CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Tomtom – the directors’ son and the film’s so delightfully and cleverly laid bare, as in KAREN AKERMAN and protagonist – precociously discovers his interest in cinema and throws MIGUEL SEABRA LOPES’ OCTOBER IS OVER. Cherubic protagonist himself into the adventure of making his first film, encouraged by his Tomtom declares that ‘film grows old’ and is rightfully met with parents and by the fascination that images and sounds hold over him. the appropriate response from his unseen parents (played by the October is over uses metalanguage and its character’s fantastical image in filmmakers themselves). Their gift of a Super8 camera sparks the order to refer back to the infancy of cinema itself. toddler’s imagination and the journey of life begins. Discovery leads (CARLAMAIA- Belo Horizonte International Short Film to frustration (there’s never enough funding!) and under the sleep Festival) suggestion of his progenitors (Godard, always!) nocturnal inspiration reaps rewards. Constructed with a formal simplicity that reveals deeper layers of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Eisensteinian montage, October is Over is a wonderful homage to cinema and the creative spark that gives it life.
(Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: New Trends Award - Rio de Janeiro International \\ INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL V Film Festival 2015 / Public Award - National Competition, Award for Innovation in Language, Best Film – Young Jury - Curta Cinema 2015 / Best direction award - Goiânia Short Film Festival 2015 / IndieLisboa - International Independent Film Festival 2015 / São Paulo International Short Film Festival 2015 / Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival 2015 / IndieCork Festival of independent film & music 2015 / 2Morrow/Zavtra International Film Festival 2015 WORLD SALES: PORTUGAL FILM: Rui Mendes | T: +351 213 466 172 58 E: [email protected] | W: www.portugalfilm.org/
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] http://portugalfilm.org/film_detail.php?cd_movie=10 SYMBOLIC THREATS 15’, 2015, Germany DIRECTOR: MISCHA LEINKAUF, LUTZ HENKE, MATTHIAS WERMKE
SCREENWRITER: Mischa Leinkauf, Lutz Henke, Matthias Wermke EDITING: Mischa Leinkauf, Lutz Henke, Matthias Wermke SOUND: Mischa Leinkauf, Lutz Henke, Matthias Wermke PRODUCER: Mischa Leinkauf, Lutz Henke, Matthias Wermke
MISCHA LEINKAUF, LUTZ HENKE, MATTHIAS WERMKE
FILM PRESENTATION: On July 22, 2014, New York woke up to an DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: On the night of 22 July 2014, Matthias unexpected silent declaration: Brooklyn Bridge’s Old Glory was Wermke and Mischa Leinkauf hoist two white American flags on the gone, replaced by two white flags blowing in the high winds. In a Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. They take the US flags down and post-9/11 New York, this gesture galvanized city officials and the fold them in the prescribed orderly fashion. Poetry or threat? An act of media into knee-jerk reactions of fear, anger and panic. In short, a surrender or perhaps art? These were the theories that New York puzzled response that every a work of art should produce. Compiled from over last summer. How can one incident be interpreted in so many ways? TV, radio and online reports, SYMBOLIC THREATS traces the lifespan By means of press reports, Symbolic Threats allows the public at large to of LEINKAUF and WERMKE’s art installation, bringing forward the express their extreme disparity of interpretation. Inspired by the heated predictable rhetoric seeking culpability rather than discourse. Once debate over the two flags that suddenly appeared on the towers of the the proverbial dust settles and the fever-pitch frenzy of the media bridge, the film asks what kind of societal scope art has in the present day. machine dies down, we’re afforded poetic tranquility to ponder not What happens when threatened freedom reinstates art with the element only the role of art in our world, but that of our own citizen-selves. of danger? Who or what makes it into a threat? Are we safe in the city? What is next? (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) (Berlin International Film Festival)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Best German Short & Audience Award Hamburg BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
2015 / Audience Award Madrid 2015 / European Film Award Nominee \\ Grimstad 2015 / Edward Snowden Award - Signes de Nuit International Festival 2015 / Clermont Ferrand 2016 / Berlinale 2015 / Documenta Madrid 2015 / Hamburg 2015 / Grimstad 2015 / Timishort Timişoara 2015 / Winterthur Flilm Festival 2015 / Sevilla European Film Festival 2015 / Leeds International Film Festival 2015
WORLD SALES: Wermke/Leinkauf E: [email protected] | W: www.wermke-leinkauf.com 59 TERRITORIAL MARKING 20’, 2014-2015, Romania DIRECTOR: DANIEL NICOLAE DJAMO
CAST: Daniel Nicolae Djamo and his mother CINEMATOGRAPHY: Daniel Nicolae Djamo EDITING: Daniel Nicolae Djamo SOUND: Daniel Nicolae Djamo THE ARTIST IS PRESENT PRODUCER: Daniel Nicolae Djamo
DANIEL NICOLAE DJAMO
FILM PRESENTATION: Wonderfully refreshing and meaningful in DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: I’m marking the area surrounding the home its subtextual discourse, TERRITORIAL MARKING is a beautiful work of my mother in Nogent-sur-Vernisson (Loiret, France) with the flag of of naïf art by DANIEL NICOLAE DJAMO. On screen we see the artist Romania. I marked a Romanian territory in France. appear in still-frame, waving the Romanian flag through a forest. On My mother left the country when I was 20, being one of those who left voiceover, we hear a recording of his anxious mother discouraging in the first waves of immigration after Romania’s acceptance in the him from creating his next controversial art piece. Blessed with an European Union. She works as a doctor and has her own private business artist’s stubbornness, Djamo refuses to submit to his mother’s fear close to Montargis, France, while having problems in fitting in. Olga was of the French authorities and continues the back-and-forth until the forced to leave the first commune where she came (Bonny-sur-Loire), being perfect alternative is discovered (accidentally and under duress) by the seen as a leech. Her patients refused to see her because of her nationality, matriarch. Yet listen closely, for behind their domestic argument and preferring to go to French doctors. the mother’s consternation, you’ll find the traumatic paralysis of the immigrant Other, made worse by the scar of Communist oppression, The sound represents my mother’s reaction to a work I had planned to rearing its head like Djamo’s flailing flag. do in Paris, on July 14th, 2014. I wanted to take yellow graffiti spray and transform all of the French flags from Champs Elysee into Romanian ones. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) (DANIEL NICOLAE DJAMO)
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL V FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Combat Award for Video Art, Museo Giovanni
\\ Fattori, Livorno, Italy 2015 / ALL (ArtLanguageLocation) work of particular merit award winner, Anglia Ruskin University - Cambridge School of Art and University of Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2015 / Incinerator Art Award - Art for Social Change Special Mention, City of Moonee Valley and Incinerator Gallery, Australia 2015 / Kassel International Documentary Film Festival 2015
WORLD SALES: 60 T: +33 640 292 120 | E: [email protected] | W: www.djamo.weebly.com PLEASE RELAX NOW 12’, 2014, Germany DIRECTOR: VIKA KIRCHENBAUER
CAST: Vika Kirchenbauer SCRIPTWRITER: Vika Kirchenbauer CINEMATOGRAPHY: Martin Sulzer EDITING: Vika Kirchenbauer SOUND: Vika Kirchenbauer PRODUCER: Vika Kirchenbauer
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
VIKA KIRCHENBAUER
FILM PRESENTATION: In direct address, VIKA KIRCHENBAUER DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: PLEASE RELAX NOW uses the screen as invites you to PLEASE RELAX NOW. You’re about to experience a source of light and darkness drawing attention to the issue of art liberty and desire, under the guiding voice of the artist. Calm and consumption as individual vs. collective experience and extending the composed, Kirchenbauer breaks down the cinematic screen’s barrier video piece into physical space. Motivational language is interwoven of distanciation as she methodically lays bare (pun well-intended) with metaphysical gestures of salvation characteristic of economics the power-relationships at play between art and its consumer. As as well as of what is considered “Political Art.” The piece examines spectators, we are encouraged to subvert passivity and reclaim the overlap of current developments in performance art, art display, our position within the space we occupy. How? By exploring, here economics, marketing and the participatory nightmare of life and work and now, the pleasure principle of art to its extreme. Abandon all as theatre. The striking similarities between Experience Economy – the preconceptions, democratize the space and fully submit to - and rendering of memory as a source of profit - and the eventisation of art are indulge in - the communal experience. Political and playful, Please deconstructed and ironically reassembled in an artwork made possible Relax Now’s deceivingly simple premise will become one of your most only through the social element of spectatorship as a form of immaterial challenging viewing experiences. Should you resist? No, just relax. and affective labour. Staging a darkroom as a promise of intensity and using transgression in its sexual and economic sense, the art space is (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) portrayed as a transformation business. By addressing the spectator as a passive consumer, collaborator, client, spiritual follower, raw material and immaterial worker questions the capacities of art as a social and political FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Honourable Mention - European Media Art field within ever-evolving capitalism. BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Festival 2014 / Jury Award - FLEXfest Florida Experimental Film/Video \\ (VIKA KIRCHENBAUER) Festival 2015 / Lolly Award - XPOSED International Queer Film Festival 2015 / Hamburg International Short Film Festival 2014 / Timishort Film Festival 2014 / Queer Lisboa International Queer Film Festival 2015 / Queer City Cinema: Media Arts Festival, Canada 2015 / Tel Aviv International LGBT Film Festival 2015 / Queer Arts Festival, Vancouver 2015 / Helsinki Short Film Festival 2015 WORLD SALES: VIKA KIRCHENBAUER T: +491749992915 | E: [email protected] 61 W : www.vk0ms.com/ SÉANCE 30’, 2014, Italy DIRECTOR: YURI ANCARANI
CAST: Albania Tomassini, Fulvio Ferrari SCRIPTWRITER: Yuri Ancarani CINEMATOGRAPHY: Yuri Ancarani EDITING: Yuri Ancarani THE ARTIST IS PRESENT SOUND: Mirco Mencacci PRODUCER: Marco Alessi SUPPORTED BY: Film Commission Torino Piemonte, Fondazione Casa Museo Carlo Mollino
YURI ANCARANI
FILM PRESENTATION: Carlo Mollino, famed designer and architect, CURATOR’S STATEMENT: It is important to Ancarani that Séance is a departed from our physical world in 1973, leaving behind an astounding work on the artist in the general sense, on how artists feel and why they legacy of form and beauty. In his latest film, YURI ANCARANI define themselves as such. This is why he opted to show all the credits capitalizes on Mollino’s preoccupation with the occult to conduct a live at the end, to avoid providing viewers with any distractions from his séance in the artist’s home. Seated at the dining table with the resident intention. Although the work is a documentary on Mollino, the famous caretaker in service, psychic medium Albania Tomassini becomes a architect is a secondary presence. However, the short film, lasting 30 conduit for the architect, whose spectral voice reflects on his past life’s minutes, is more than simply this. work. Ancarani’s aesthetic eye is a perfect match for Casa Mollino’s Ancarani constructs a story not lacking in irony and turns the apartment baroque décor, incubating us within the walls of the lush apartment into a far more fascinating place than it actually is. With skilful lighting and its sonic atmosphere of hushed spirits. SÉANCE summons the and excellent sound design – created by Mirco Mencacci who mixed voices perfect interlocutor for the intense life-force at work in Ancarani’s of the dead and ambient sounds – and occupied by two people in flesh and films, pulling us into its house of memories and catapulting us into the blood, plus a “stone guest”, both apartment and story come to life. Some state of transcendence offered by the act of creation. parts feature insistent shots and slow camera panning, taking on pictorial (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) qualities that bring out the yellows, greens and reds in what can be interpreted as almost Pop or even quasi-Renaissance effects, depending on your preferred visual repertoire.
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL V FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Winterhur Short Film Festival, Switzerland 2014 (SIMONA BORDONE - DOMUS)
\\ / Shit and Die, casa Mollino, Artissima, Torino 2014 / Milano Design Film Festival 2014 / Biennale of Image in Motion, Teatrino Palazzo Grassi, Venice / Cinéma du Réel 2015 / Monash University Museum of Art, VIC, Australia 2015 / La Casa di Mollino curated by Fulvio Ferrari, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Paris 2015
WORLD SALES: ANCARANI STUDIO: Caterina Viganò 62 T: +39 333 171 25 91 | E: [email protected] W: www.yuriancarani.com
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] | W: www.yuriancarani.com http://yuriancarani.com/works/seance/ BATRACHIAN’S BALLAD 11’, 2016, Portugal DIRECTOR: LEONOR TELES
SCRIPTWRITER: Leonor Teles CINEMATOGRAPHY: Leonor Teles EDITING: Leonor Teles SOUND: Bernado Theriaga, Joana Niza Braga PRODUCER: Filipa Reis
LEONOR TELES
FILM PRESENTATION: Once upon a time, before people came along, DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: The genesis of Batrachian’s Ballad occurred all the creatures were free and able to be with one another”, narrates when I learnt a surprising fact – the Portuguese tradition of placing the voiceover. “All the animals danced together and were immeasurably ceramic frogs in the doorways of restaurants and other commercial happy. There was only one who wasn’t invited to the celebration – the premises to ward off gypsies. Through this personal tale of mine, I wanted frog. In his rage about the injustice, he committed suicide.” Something to call attention to a growing tendency to use belief and superstition to Romani and frogs have in common is that they will never be unseen, or deride other human beings and to keep them at bay. stay unnoticed. In her film, young director Leonor Teles weaves the life (LEONOR TELES) circumstance of Romani in Portugal today with the recollections of a yesterday.
Anything but a passive observer, Teles consciously decides to participate and take up position. As a third pillar, she establishes an active applied performance art that becomes integrated in the cinematic narrative. Thereby transforming “once upon a time” into “there is”. “Afterwards, nothing will be as it was and the melody of life will have changed”, explains a voice off-camera.
(Berlinale) BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL \\ FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Golden Bear for the Best Short Film - Berlinale 2016
WORLD SALES: PORTUGAL FILMS T: +351 213 466 172 | E: [email protected] 63 W: www.portugalfilm.org URBAN RITUALS PRESENTATION INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION VI
Curatorial presentation by: ANDREI TĂNĂSESCU
We all take part in rituals, whether we’re aware of it or not - it’s all a matter of perspective. Daily routine could be the individual’s ceremonial procession through society while on a larger scale it becomes ‘convention.’ Sometimes, we participate in these ceremonies of culture either without knowing it, pulled into the force of an unseen current that shapes and defines us. At other times, our involvement is deliberate, drawn to the ritual of a collective consciousness.
Urban Rituals groups together four comfort of suburbia is unsettled as the Juggalo ethos manifests itself, plunging us films which play with the particularities into its surreal psyche. By the end, we’re left seduced and abandoned by Cummings’ that make up our various socio-cultural celebration of sub-cultural Americana, a visceral life-force whose life philosophy is No practices. Be they dominant or sub- Fucks Given. cultural, these customs thrive with a life- force that renders each of them unique Under the balmy skies of the American Dream, Romanian filmmaker MARA TRIFU and indispensable to their practitioners. reaches for the stars in PERFECTION IS FOREVER, an acutely observant allegory for Who knows, you might find yourself our endless search for beauty and wholeness. Within Los Angeles’ culture of glamour within them. and alter-egos, we’re guided by two crusaders of the ideal: a Superman impersonator and drag-queen MonaLiza Doomsday. Captured in their environment on the periphery If Magritte’s Treachery of Images ‘n’est of downtown’s hustle-and-bustle, they take us through their rituals of beautification pas une pipe,’ in SCOTT CUMMINGS’ as breasts are tucked, make-up is applied and the all-important hair products produce own words, “BUFFALO JUGGALOS is the Superman curl. Out in the open, society calls ‘action’ and the role-playing not a documentary.” At first, it even performance begins. Trifu’s trademark approach of lensing documentary through starts off as a stylized portraiture of the magical gives a poignant touch to the film’s closing message: there is, indeed, a America’s Juggalo community, the fan Superman in all of us.
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL VI base devoted to the rapcore group Insane Clown Posse (and its affiliate Douwe Dijkstra returns to BIEFF with his latest award-winning movie, SUPPORTING \\ label bands). Hidden behind their FILM. A love (and hate) letter to cinema, Dijkstra’s clever and inventive film explores ritualistic makeup, a procession of the fussy relationship between you, the viewer, and cinema. Be it communal or Juggalos stare into the camera with solitary, the personal experience of watching films is scrutinized by spectators of all passive nonchalance as they are framed ages, whose recorded testimonies become in Dijkstra’s illustrative, animating hands, in commonplace suburban settings. individual worlds of artisanal wonder and childlike exuberance. From the opening Yet with each still-life tableaux, the credits to the closing scrawl and everything in-between, individual idiosyncrasies
64 clash and bond with film language, in a becomes a ritualistic act that plunges celebration of cinema and its power to him in an altered state of consciousness suspend our disbelief. among the unknown of darkness and miscellanea. Carrying itself with the How does a city of 20 million people wide-eyed fascination of a Jules Verne cope with an antiquated sewage system story, THE DIVER is a captivating portrait at risk of daily mass flooding due to of a social worker’s metaphysical the accumulated refuse? Enter deep- pilgrimage. sea diver and gonzo Jacques Cousteau Julio César cú Cámara, who for the past 30 years has immersed himself in the
terra fluida of Mexico City to unclog BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL the sewer passageway of society’s detritus. Under Esteban Arrangoiz’ \\ direction, Julio’s story transcends its social utility by submerging us past grainy Super16mm images of abstracted landscapes of garbage into an unseen, silent realm. For us and Julio, each dive
65 SUPPORTING FILM 12’, 2015, The Netherlands DIRECTOR: DOUWE DIJKSTRA
SCRIPTWRITER: Douwe Dijkstra
URBAN RITUALS URBAN CINEMATOGRAPHY: Douwe Dijkstra EDITING: Douwe Dijkstra SOUND: Rob Peters MUSIC: Rob Peters PRODUCER: Bart Jansen
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
DOUWE DIJKSTRA
FILM PRESENTATION: DOUWE DIJKSTRA returns to BIEFF with his DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Go Short invited several filmmakers to latest award-winning movie, SUPPORTING FILM. A love (and hate) submit a plan for a supporting film, and my pitch was chosen. My idea was letter to cinema, Dijkstra’s clever and inventive film explores the fussy to ask people with very different backgrounds and opinions about the relationship between you, the viewer, and cinema. Be it communal or ways in which they experience films. I used the resulting audio and then solitary, the personal experience of watching films is scrutinized by worked on accompanying images. This approach allowed me to work in a spectators of all ages, whose recorded testimonies become in Dijkstra’s very inquisitive manner. The framework is clear, but the outcome of the illustrative, animating hands, individual worlds of artisanal wonder and interviews is always a surprise. I went to visit film buffs from 6 to 60 years childlike exuberance. From the opening credits to the closing scrawl of age, including religious people who don’t want to watch films, and a and everything in-between, individual idiosyncrasies clash and bond blind woman who only listens to films. This produced such a wealth of with film language in a celebration of cinema and its power to suspend material that the biggest challenge was to reduce the hours of interviews our disbelief. into a film of six minutes.
(Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) (DOUWE DIJKSTRA)
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL VI FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Special mention - Prizren International
\\ Documentary and Short Film Festival, Dokufest (Kosovo) 2015 / Special Mention - Message to Man, St. Petersburg International Film Festival - Message to Man 2015 / Special Mention - Novi Sad International Video Festival 2015 / Best Experimental Film Videorama Award - Timisoara International Short Film Festival 2015 / International Award Best Short - Tallinn Student and Short Film Festival 2015.
WORLD SALES: LIMA 66 T: +31 (0)20 389 20 30 | E: [email protected] | W : www.li-ma.nl
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] W: douwedijkstra.nl/projects/voor-film/ PERFECTION IS FOREVER 18’, 2015, UK DIRECTOR: MARA TRIFU
CAST: Christopher Lloyd Dennis, Monaliza Doomsday SCRIPTWRITER: Mara Trifu CINEMATOGRAPHY: Mara Trifu EDITING: Jojo Erholtz SOUND: Dayo James MUSIC: Terence Dunn PRODUCER: Mara Trifu
MARA TRIFU
FILM PRESENTATION: Under the balmy skies of the American Dream, DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: A tree is what it is, complete in its own being. Romanian filmmaker MARA TRIFU reaches for the stars in PERFECTION Human beings, on the other hand, always aspire to become something IS FOREVER, an acutely observant allegory for our endless search for more, doing their best to hold back time in pursuit of eternal love, youth beauty and wholeness. Within Los Angeles’ culture of glamour and and beauty. In Hollywood, two lost souls seek to become heroes under the alter-egos, we’re guided by two crusaders of the ideal: a Superman shade of a lonely palm tree. impersonator and drag-queen Monaliza Doomsday. Captured in their (MARA TRIFU) environment on the periphery of downtown’s hustle-and-bustle, they take us through their rituals of beautification as breasts are tucked, make-up is applied and the all-important hair products produce the Superman curl. Out in the open, society calls ‘action’ and the role- playing performance begins. Trifu’s trademark approach of lensing documentary through the magical gives a poignant touch to the film’s closing message: there is, indeed, a Superman in all of us.
(Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Chicago International Film Festival 2015 / BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Sheffield International Film Festival 2015 / Greenhorn Short Film \\ Festival 2015 / Frontline Club London 2016.
WORLD SALES: E: [email protected] | W: www.maratrifu.com 67 BUFFALO JUGGALOS 30’, 2014, USA DIRECTOR: SCOTT CUMMINGS
CAST: Robert Hunt (aka Bobbo), Paul Fucking Mack, Sandy,Kaitlin
URBAN RITUALS URBAN Wentland (aka Titz), William “Noki” Galpine (aka Koz), Ryan Hanson (aka Shaggz) CINEMATOGRAPHY: Nandan Rao EDITING: Scott Cummings SOUND: Gene Park MUSIC: Locrian PRODUCER: Molly Gandour, Eliza Hittman, Shrihari Sathe Supported by The Jerome Foundation and sponsored by Fractured Atlas
SCOTT CUMMINGS
FILM PRESENTATION: If Magritte’s Treachery of Images ‘n’est pas une DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: I’ve given up explaining that Buffalo Juggalos pipe,’ in SCOTT CUMMINGS’ own words, “BUFFALO JUGGALOS is not isn’t a documentary. a documentary.” At first, it even starts off as a stylized portraiture of I come from a narrative background but I should make clear that Buffalo America’s Juggalo community, the fan base devoted to the rapcore Juggalos is not really a narrative film either. Three years ago I decided group Insane Clown Posse (and its affiliate label bands). Hidden behind Buffalo Juggalos would be a 30-minute film, shot on video, composed their ritualistic makeup, a procession of Juggalos stare into the camera of thirty shots, each one minute long. The film would be a series of with passive nonchalance as they are framed in commonplace suburban scenes featuring real Juggalos. There would be no interviews or music; if settings. Yet with each still-life tableau, the comfort of suburbia is there was dialogue, it would have absolutely nothing to do with being a unsettled as the Juggalo ethos manifests itself, plunging us into its Juggalo. Even though there are narrative elements throughout, they have surreal psyche. By the end, we’re left seduced and abandoned by been subjugated by the film’s form. I guess I could call the film “a formal Cummings’ celebration of sub-cultural Americana, a visceral life-force fictional experimental portrait of real people.” whose life philosophy is No Fucks Given. My hope is that through the film the myth of the Juggalo deepens and (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) they become more mysterious, more other and more confrontational. That when you are confronted by the film you are confronting that face in war paint. That you actually live the Dark Carnival for thirty minutes and come out not knowing what you’ve just seen.
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONINTERNATIONAL VI FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Grand Jury Prize, Live Action Short - AFI Film (SCOTT CUMMINGS)
\\ Festival 2014 / Honourable mention - Chicago Underground Film Festival 2014 / Best Experimental Film - Columbus International Film + Video Festival 2015 / Visions du Reel 2014 / CPH:DOX 2014 / RIDM Montreal 2014 / Rotterdam International Film Festival 2015 / 25fps Film & Video Festival 2015 / Indie Lisboa 2015 / Viennale - Vienna Film Festival 2015 / FICUNAM, Mexico 2015 / Adelaide Film Festival 2015
WORLD SALES: 68 E: [email protected] | T: +1 661 714 0215
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: T: +33 640 292 120 | E: [email protected] T: +1 661 714 0215 http://buffalojuggalosfilm.tumblr.com/ THE DIVER 16’, 2015, Mexico DIRECTOR: ESTEBAN ARRANGOIZ
CAST: Julio César cú Cámara SCRIPTWRITER: Esteban Arrangoiz with the collaboration of Mariana Rodríguez CINEMATOGRAPHY: Martín Molina EDITING: Mariana Rodríguez, Esteban Arrangoiz SOUND DESIGN: Pablo Lach SOUND MIXERS: Estíbaliz Márquez, Daniel Rojo MUSIC: Juan Felippe Waller PRODUCER: Esteban Arrangoiz, Victor Hugo Jiménez, Jaime B. Ramos, Mariana Rodríguez
ESTEBAN ARRANGOIZ
FILM PRESENTATION: How does a city of 20 million people cope DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: I am scuba diver, I think I started diving for with an antiquated sewage system at risk of daily mass flooding due the need I have to discover new worlds. When I found about Julio´s work, to the accumulated refuse? The answer is deep-sea diver and gonzo I could not imagine what it was to dive into the black void of the sewerage Jacques Cousteau Julio César cú Cámara, who for the past 30 years has waters, knowing the risk involved. I was especially interested in how Julio immersed himself in the terra fluida of Mexico City to unclog the sewer lived that experience,in the bottom of sewage. I think that Julio and his passageway of society’s detritus. Under Esteban Arrangoiz’ direction, activities reflect a historic moment and can be a mirror of certain aspects Julio’s story transcends its social utility by submerging us past grainy of the human condition. Super16mm images of abstracted landscapes of garbage into an (ESTEBAN ARRANGOIZ) unseen, silent realm. For us and Julio, each dive becomes a ritualistic act that plunges him in an altered state of consciousness among the unknown of darkness and miscellanea. Carrying itself with the wide- eyed fascination of a Jules Verne story, The Diver is a captivating portrait of a social worker’s metaphysical pilgrimage.
(Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Best Short Film - UNAM International Film BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Festival Mexico 2016 / Best Documentary Short Award - Morelia \\ International Film Festival 2015 / Berlin International Film Festival 2016 / Cartagena International Film Festival 2016 / UNAM International Film Festival 2016.
WORLD SALES: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía T: +52 55 54485339 | E: [email protected] 69 W: www.imcine.gob.mx
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] | W: www.estebanarrangoiz.com W: www.estebanarrangoiz.com/el-buzo--the-diver.html THEME PROGRAMS \\
70 QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS CANNES
SPECIAL SCREENING: PEACE TO US IN OUR DREAMS BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL \\
71 PEACE TO US IN OUR DREAMS 107’, 2015, Lithuania, France, Russia DIRECTOR: SHARUNAS BARTAS
SCRIPT: Sharunas Bartas MUSIC: Alexander Zekke CINEMATOGRAPHY: Eitvydas Doshkus CAST: Sharunas Bartas, Lora Kmieliauskaite, Ina Marija Bartaite, Edvinas EDITING: Gintare Sokelyte Goldsteinas, Eugenijus Barunovas, Aushra Eitmontiene SOUND: Vytautas Kizala, Sigitas Motoras, Benjamin Laurent, Vladimir Golovnitskiy, Jean-Guy Véran
PEACE TO US IN OUR DREAMS WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
SHARUNAS BARTAS
The plot, if there is any, and Bartas is not particularly keen to reveal its Wrapped in magical images of a peaceful, calm nature disturbed only by details, revolves around an intellectual from the city (played by Bartas the presence of man, this looks very much like a painful, meditative and himself) who takes his daughter (Bartas’s own daughter, Ina Marija sad reflection on life from the point of no return for a character just like Martaite) and his partner, a violinist (reallife violinist Lora Kmielliauskaite) the one Bartas chose to play himself. to his country house for a summer breather. Or is it much more? [...] None (Dan Fainaru, Screen Daily) of the film’s characters has a name, just to indicate how emblematic they are supposed to be, but they are all in a state of personal crisis which they are trying desperately, but not very successfully, to make sense of. “Humans always doubt,” says a father to his daughter. “Just imagine if Locked in tight closeups, Bartas’s characters are constantly trying to suddenly everything (were) clear. What would you do?” What indeed? Such reach out to each other in their own ways, and finding it difficult either to questions serve as a substitute for drama in Sharunas Bartas’ “Peace to Us express their feelings in Our Dreams, an oldschool
and their fears or to provide the advice they are expected to give. They broodfest in which a man, his daughter and his violinist companion seek someone to lean on, and find answers to questions they don’t even openly ponder Big Themes during a country getaway. Bartas casts know how to ask. [...] himself in the lead, a father who is distant from his daughter. He shows her an old homemovie in which she can be glimpsed with her mother on a merrygoround. The girl is played by Ina Marija Bartaite, Bartas’ actual FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Quinzaine des Réalisateurs Cannes 2015 / daughter, and the mother by Katia Golubeva, Bartaite’s actual mother, Diploma for Sound Solution of High Artistic Merit - Minsk FF / Haifa who died in 2011 — all of which suffuses the film with a sense of loss that
QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS CANNES RÉALISATEURS DES QUINZAINE International Film Festival / CPH:FORUM persists as the three living characters retreat to the country.
\\ The season is summer, but the natural lighting often suggests a wintry, twilight gray. [...] WORLD SALES: LUXBOX Lenser Eitvydas Doshkus captures some stunning silhouettes, and Anne Sophie Trintignac there are times in “Peace to Us in Our Dreams” when it’s possible to be Head of Festivals transfixed simply by fog, blowing trees or raindrops on lapping water. 00 33 7 63 42 26 12 [email protected] (Ben Kenigsberg, Variety) 72 DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: I think that at the heart of it, all my films DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: Born in 1964 in Lituanie, Sharunas are about me and originate from my own experiences and feelings. Over Bartas is director, screenwriter and actor. He has brought the Lithuanian the years, this material becomes richer, and consequently this time, I was cinema to the most important European Festivals, including Cannes, able to use this material in a more direct and explicit manner, without Berlin and Venice. Through his films he deals with the life of people living falling into literary digressions. It’s like in a book, where you can use “I” in difficult and undefined lands. In 1995 at the Cannes Festival Bartas or “he” in an equally personal manner. presents Few Of Us and two years later, The House. Seven Invisible Men (2005) is nominated for the FIPRESCI Award as well as his Indigène (Interview by Jean-Michel Frodon, Paris 2015) d’Eurasie (2010) for the Lux Award of the European Parliament. His last work, Peace to us in Our Dreams (2015), has been presented at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at the Festival of Cannes.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: In art, there is nothing to explain. It is more about raising questions or showing something. In general, in literature, in paintings, in music and in cinema, what we can do is show a piece of peoples’ lives. Our souls are very close, but we are all very isolated and we cannot see who we are from the outside. By showing these pieces of life of certain people, we can take a step back, we can just feel that we are close to them and feel less alone. That’s the main reason: being close to someone who is speaking straight from the soul, something that differs from the kind of dialogue we regularly have in our day-to-day lives. BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (Interview by Fabien Lemercier for Cineuropa) \\
73 REBRANDING HUMANITY PRESENTATION THEME PROGRAM: BERLINALE FORUM EXPANDED
Curatorial presentation by: ADINA MARIN
True to its main focus on cinematic experimentation, BIEFF is honoured to take further its educational partnership with the INTERNATIONAL FORUM OF NEW CINEMA, BERLINALE FORUM in short, the most daring section of BERLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL. The theme program REBRANDING HUMANITY offers Romanian film lovers the rare opportunity to watch several thought-provoking and conceptually innovative titles from the BERLINALE FORUM EXPANDED line-up.
Organized by ARSENAL INSTITUTE in our world change the very questions sole survivor of a nuclear disaster. We FOR FILM AND VIDEO ART, BERLINALE about the meaning of being human experience a disconcerting feeling as FORUM includes avant-garde, that have been addressed by artists the camera hovers over the deserted experimental works, essays, long- and scholars for centuries. A could- place to follow the increasingly frantic term observations, political reportage be future environmental dystopia, movements of the hairy creature in a and yet-to-be-discovered cinematic a cine-philosophical essay on the blue uniform and wearing a humanlike landscapes: there are few formal eventual perfection of humankind, and mask, like a human-animal hybrid limitations when it comes to the a deeply personal attempt to cope with trapped in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. selection of films, resulting in even the alienation of exile, question and greater freedom. The films in the interpret the human predicament with The future of humankind in a utopian FORUM straddle the line between art the unlimited creative possibilities of vision that promises immortality and and cinema. In 2006, FORUM EXPANDED filmic language. resurrection is approached by ANTON was launched. Presenting film, video, VIDOKLE in THIS IS COSMOS, a complex installation and performative works A blend of reality and fiction unfolds work focusing on the works of Russian on varying themes and in multiple against the backdrop of a desolate place philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. “Fedorov venues across Berlin, the works in in UNTITLED (HUMAN MASK). There is a was one of the Cosmo-Immortalists, a
BERLINALE FORUM EXPANDED FORUM EXPANDED provide a critical real story attached, that of the monkey surge of thinkers that emerged in Russia perspective and an expanded sense of trained to work as a waitress for the
\\ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. cinematography. amusement of the clientele. And there They linked Western Enlightenment is the dystopian setting somewhere with Russian Orthodoxy and Eastern The theme program REBRANDING in the Fukushima nuclear disaster philosophical traditions, as well as HUMANITY brings together films which exclusion zone, where visual artist Marxism, to create an idiosyncratically look into the human condition today, at PIERRE HUYGHE chooses to transpose concrete metaphysics. For the Russian a time when ever faster developments her as a lonely figure appearing like the
74 cosmists, cosmos did not mean outer space: rather, they wanted to create ‘cosmos’ on earth. ‘To construct a new reality, free of hunger, disease, violence, death, need, inequality - like communism.’” (Berlinale). The film is constructed like a visual and auditory collage abruptly interrupted at intervals by red screens with an alleged therapeutical effect. “This video can improve your health” says one of the red-screen captions. Undeniably, it will improve our cinephile experience.
AND ON A DIFFERENT NOTE is a deeply personal insight into human behaviour in crisis situations. The author, MOHAMMAD SHAWKY HASSAN, is an Egyptian expat
living in New York, who experiences the ongoing political developments in his BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL country by exposing himself to a ceaseless flux of political Egyptian talk-shows. Shots of silent empty rooms with windows overlooking a backstreet intermix with \\ the noise of the angry and bigoted discourse in Arab, of which but a few keywords are translated, making it even more effective. As the audio stream becomes overwhelmingly intense, a growing sense of alienation carries the viewer into the director’s interior world.
75 UNTITLED (HUMAN MASK) 19’, 2014, France DIRECTOR: PIERRE HUYGHE
CINEMATOGRAPHY: André Chemetoff EDITING: Pierre Huyghe, Nicolas Chaudeurge, Katie Mcquerrey SOUND EDITOR: Raphael Sohier SOUND MIXER: Cyril Holtz LINE PRODUCER : Florence Cohen REBRANDING HUMANITY REBRANDING PRODUCER: Anna Lena Vaney, Victorien Vaney
PIERRE HUYGHE
FILM PRESENTATION: A blend of reality and fiction unfolds against DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: I discovered that there was a monkey in a the backdrop of a desolate place in Pierre Huyghe’s UNTITLED restaurant in Japan serving towels to the clients wearing a mask of a (HUMAN MASK). There is a real story attached to it, that of the monkey young woman,” he says. He ended up visiting that restaurant, which is trained to work as a waitress for the amusement of the clientele. And near areas irradiated by the Fukushima nuclear power–plant disaster. there is the dystopian setting somewhere in the Fukushima nuclear Drones with cameras visit the wreckage now. “I got very interested in disaster exclusion zone, where the artist chooses to transpose her as these two things—machine replacing man, animal replacing man,” he a lonely figure appearing like the sole survivor of a nuclear disaster. adds. The film imagines what the monkey does when it is not playing the We experience a disconcerting feeling as the camera hovers over the role of human. “It’s nature that has lost its naturality, and there’s no way deserted place to follow the increasingly frantic movements of the to go back,” he says. “I see that as a kind of Greek tragedy. hairy creature in a blue uniform and wearing a humanlike mask, like a (PIERRE HUYGHE interviewed by Andrew Russeth) human-animal hybrid trapped in a post-apocalyptic dystopia.
(Adina Marin, BIEFF 2016)
BERLINALE FORUM EXPANDED FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Think:Film Award - Berlin International Film
\\ Festival, Forum Expanded / CPH:DOX, New Vision / Torino Film Festival, Waves/Artrum / Main Award - Kino Der Kunst / Hong Kong International Film Festival
WORLD SALES: Anna Lena Films - Florence Cohen, Line Producer 76 M : + 33-6 18 58 63 01 | E : [email protected]
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: M: +1 917 445 4410 / +33 781 049 584 E: [email protected] THIS IS COSMOS 30’, 2014, USA DIRECTOR: ANTON VIDOKLE
CAST: Iman, Musa, Kulmohhametov & Svetlana SCRIPT: Anton Vidokle / Based on writings by Nikolai Federov CINEMATOGRAPHY: Marcello Bozzini EDITING: Meggie Schneider, Anton Vidokle MUSIC: John Cale, Sun Blindness,1965 MUSIC MIX: Carsten Nicolai PRODUCER: e-flux Photos © Anton Vidokle / Courtesy of the artist
ANTON VIDOKLE
FILM PRESENTATION: The future of humankind in a utopian vision CURATOR’S STATEMENT: THIS IS COSMOS is not about ‘the cosmos’ but that promises immortality and resurrection is approached by ANTON about the cosmic dreams and projects of Russian thinkers before and after VIDOKLE in THIS IS COSMOS, a complex narrative focusing on the the October Revolution. They believed in progress, technology and social works of Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, and revolving around revolution. And they believed that, eventually, mankind would become the indestructibility of energy and the enhance of the human condition immortal and make all of outer space its home. So the video is a piece of as core concepts of cosmism, the movement that emerged in Russia in memory—memory about certain radical modernist projects that we still the early 20th century and survived communism. Drawing on powerful experience today as fascinating and motivating. images filmed in Siberia, Crimea and Kazakhstan, and on close-ups of (BORIS GROYS) faces, the film is constructed like a visual and auditory collage abruptly interrupted at intervals by red screens with an alleged therapeutical effect. “This video can improve your health” says one of the red-screen captions. It is also bound to improve our cinephile experience.
(Adina Marin, BIEFF 2016)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Sphinx Award for Best Video/Film - BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Videomedeja International Video Festival, Serbia 2015 / Oberhausen \\ International Film Festival / Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival / Hamburg International Short Film Festival / Cyprus International Film Festival / Winterthur International Short Film Festival / Berlin International Short Film Festival / Exground Film Fest
WORLD SALES: e-flux E: [email protected] | W: http://www.e-flux.com 77
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] | W: www.e-flux.com AND ON A DIFFERENT NOTE 24’, 2015, Egypt DIRECTOR: MOHAMMAD SHAWKY HASSAN
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Michael Kennedy/ Mohammad Shawky Hassan EDITING & SOUND DESIGN: Michael Kennedy/ Mohammad Shawky Hassan COLOR CORRECTION: Louly Seif REBRANDING HUMANITY REBRANDING PRODUCER: Mohammad Shawky Hassan
MOHAMMAD SHAWKY HASSAN
FILM PRESENTATION: AND ON A DIFFERENT NOTE is a deeply DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: AND ON A DIFFERENT NOTE is a navigation personal insight into human behaviour in crisis situations. The author, of an attempt to carve out a personal space amid an inescapable sonic Mohammad Shawky Hassan, is an Egyptian expat living in New York, shield created primarily by prime time political talk shows with their who experiences the ongoing political developments in his country by indistinguishable, absurd and at times undecipherable rhetoric/ noises. exposing himself to a ceaseless flux of political Egyptian talk-shows. Equally repulsive and addictive, these noises travel across geographies Shots of silent empty rooms with windows overlooking a backstreet gradually constituting an integral part of a self-created map of exile. intermix with the noise of the angry and bigoted discourse in Arab, (MOHAMMAD SHAWKY HASSAN) of which but a few keywords are translated, making it even more effective. As the audio stream becomes overwhelmingly intense, a growing sense of alienation carries the viewer into the director’s interior world.”
(Adina Marin, BIEFF 2016)
BERLINALE FORUM EXPANDED FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Berlinale Forum Expanded 2015 / AFAC Film
\\ Week, Zawya, Cairo 2015 / Films from Here, MoMA 2015
WORLD SALES: 78 T: +2011-2641-3044 | E: [email protected] YOU RUN THROUGH MY VEINS
THEME PROGRAM: INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL \\
79 YOU RUN THROUGH MY VEINS PRESENTATION THEME PROGRAM: INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM
Curatorial presentation by: ADINA MARIN
Taking further the inspiring collaboration with the innovative International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival BIEFF presents some of the most thought-provoking 2015 Tiger Awards For Short Films Nominees within the theme program YOU RUN THROUGH MY VEINS. Going beyond the conventional views on family and, in particular, on trans-generational dynamics, both at personal and society level, the works included in this program are
an invitation to reflect on the ways account of vivid dreams induced by we perceive reality, revealing it from the hallucinogen African Dream Root, unexpected subjective perspectives. and eventually races along the African landscape, a surreal red filter applied Questioning beliefs and practices of over its lens. It is an exercise in what ancestral divination in South-African Ben Russell defines as psychedelic societies, visual artist Ben Russell ethnography: a way to allow for the (winner of BIEFF Main Award in 2013 apparently objective facts of existence with RIVER RITES), comes back to to be constantly reframed by radical Bucharest with Greetings to the subjective experience. Ancestors, winner of the Tiger Award for Short Film, an investigation on the divine power of dreams and the invisible ways through which the spirits An intimate space where the highly personal note fuses with the general human of our forefathers still live in our blood. condition is created by Nina Yuen in Raymond, allegedly a monologue of the artist’s Ben Russell intermixes ingredients of father, in fact an indirect account of her own family background. The visually
INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM FILMINTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL documentary, ethnography and dream striking narrative moves freely and playfully from calculations of the most curious cinema, to illustrate the fluidity of sorts, such as the total number of miles driven from their home to her school or \\ the borders of consciousness, which the equivalent in calories of the quantity of fruit the father has harvested during dissolve and expand. The camera is seventeen years, to reminiscences of his childhood, and memories of him as a either anthropologically engaged young father and of her as a baby. At some point, the artist ingeniously weaves in the trance-inducing ceremony of deep subjects into the fabric, like the origins of the universe, mortality and the the Jericho Congregation, or quietly passage of time, with captivating effect, creating a tender and enchanting personal tracking healers or poets who give discourse on the spiritual and emotional baggage bestowed on her.
80 In an attempt to plot his own existence against the coordinates “time”, “place” and family history, Martijn Veldhoen turns his camera on his mother’s life story in a unique cinematic experiment. Time and Place, A Talk With My Mom retraces
fifty years in the life of Veldhoen’s mother. She fell in love with his father, they BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL had four children, then a painful separation followed and the wearisome years as a single mother of four. Beyond reminiscences of her personal story, we witness \\ the turbulent cultural and social changes of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. The recorded material being insufficient, Martijn Veldhoen masterfully employs original visual reconstructions to create a personal and affectionate narrative.
81 RAYMOND 12’, 2014, USA DIRECTOR: NINA YUEN
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Nina Yuen EDITING: Nina Yuen SOUND: Nina Yuen PRODUCER: Nina Yuen YOU RUNYOU THROUGH MY VEINS
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
NINA YUEN
FILM PRESENTATION: An intimate space where the highly personal CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Drawing from sources including her own note fuses with the general human condition is created by NINA YUEN memories and experiences, literature, poetry, science, and art history, in RAYMOND, allegedly a monologue of the artist’s father, in fact an Nina Yuen merges the personal and the universal in her lush, evocative indirect account of her own family background. The visually striking videos. Incorporating herself into her films as protagonist and narrator, narrative moves freely and playfully from calculations of the most she builds dreamlike, loosely constructed scenes out of hypnotic image curious sorts, such as the total number of miles driven from their home series that seem to unspool into snippets of music and the rhythm of her to her school or the equivalent in calories of the quantity of fruit the voice, as she recites poetry, reads passages from a wide assortment of father has harvested during seventeen years, to reminiscences of his texts, and recounts her own and other people’s memories. [...]. Though childhood, and memories of him as a young father and of her as a baby. such weighty philosophical themes as death, time, and beauty run At some point, the artist ingeniously weaves deep subjects into the throughout her films, Yuen’s subtle humor keeps things light, surprising, fabric, like the origins of the universe, mortality and the passage of and wonderfully strange. time, with captivating effect, creating a tender and enchanting personal (Artsy.net) discourse on the spiritual and emotional baggage bestowed on her.
(Adina Marin, BIEFF 2016)
INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM FILMINTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL FESTIVALS/AWARDS: International Documentary Film Festival
\\ Amsterdam IDFA / International Film Festival Rotterdam / Kassel Documentary FF / Oberhausen FF / European Media Art Festival / International Short Film Festival, Winterhur, Switzerland / OK Video Festival, Jakarta, Indonesia / Stuttgart Filmwinter / Sequences Festival, Reykjavík, Iceland.
WORLD SALES: LI-MA 82 Theus Zwkhals | T: +31(0)20 389 20 30 | W: http://www.li-ma.nl
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] | W: www.ninayuen.info TIME AND PLACE, A TALK WITH MY MOM 35’, 2014, The Netherlands DIRECTOR: MARTIJN VELDHOEN
CAMERA: Martijn Veldhoen EDITING: Martijn Veldhoen SOUND: Martijn Veldhoen MUSIC: Michel Banabila, Mickey Smid PRODUCER: Pieter van Huystee (for Pieter van Huystee Film), Rene Huybrechtse (for Dutch Mountain Film)
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
MARTIJN VELDHOEN
FILM PRESENTATION: In an attempt to plot his own existence DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Reconstructions: Time and Place is, in some way, against the coordinates “time”, “place” and family history, MARTIJN a film about the melancholy of reconstruction [...] an emphasis on the memories VELDHOEN turns his camera on his mother’s life story in a unique (and failing memories) of the principal character: my mother. By directly cinematic experiment. TIME AND PLACE, A TALK WITH MY MOM converting her memories into image, I’m visualizing her frantic attempts to retraces fifty years in the life of Veldhoen’s mother. She fell in love remember what happened in the house she lived in for 52 years. with his father, they had four children, then a painful separation Time: Through the memories of the mother, the film is a witness of the followed and the wearisome years as a single mother of four. Beyond turbulent cultural and social changes that went about in the sixties seventies reminiscences of her personal story, we witness the turbulent cultural and eighties in Amsterdam [...] and social changes of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. The recorded material being insufficient, Martijn Veldhoen masterfully employs Place: The 18th century canal house is situated in the famous Jordaan original visual reconstructions to create a personal and affectionate neighborhood, which, during this time, made a 180-degree turn, from the narrative. poorest to one of the richest and most popular neighbourhoods in the city.
(Adina Marin, BIEFF 2016) Visual material: I had to make some unorthodox decisions in the visual reconstruction of my mother’s memories - and of the conversation we had. The film has therefore become more of a re-enactment of this conversation then an actual “objective” recording of it. As a result, Time and Place has also become a
personal exploration of how to visualize something very dear BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Sao Paulo International Film Festival /
International Filmfestival Rotterdam / DocAviv / Clermont Ferrand (MARTIJN VELDHOEN) \\ Short Film Festival / Edinburgh International Filmfestival / Dutch Filmfestival Utrecht, The Netherlands / Brooklyn Filmfestival, New York / Macau Arts Festival, China / Transat Video, Caen, France / EMAF European Media Art Festival Osnabruck, Germany / International Festival of Contemporary Cinema, Mexico City / SENEF Fimfestival, Seoul, South Korea WORLD SALES: LI-MA Theus Zwkhals | T: +31(0)20 389 20 30 | W: http://www.li-ma.nl 83
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: [email protected] GREETINGS FROM THE ANCESTORS 29’, 2015, USA, South Africa, UK DIRECTOR: BEN RUSSELL
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ben Russell EDITING: Ben Russell SOUND: Ben Russell PRODUCER: Ben Russell YOU RUNYOU THROUGH MY VEINS
BEN RUSSELL
FILM PRESENTATION: Questing beliefs and practices of ancestral DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Set between Swaziland and South Africa, divination in South-African societies, GREETINGS TO THE ANCESTORS, in a region still struggling with the divisions produced by an apartheid winner of the Tiger Award for Short Films, looks towards the invisible world government, GREETINGS TO THE ANCESTORS documents the dream lives and investigates the divine power of dreams. BEN RUSSELL intermixes of the territory’s inhabitants as the borders of consciousness dissolve ingredients of documentary, ethnography and dream cinema, to illustrate and expand. Equal parts documentary, ethnography and dream cinema, the fluidity of the boders of consciousness, which dissolve and expand. herein is a world whose borders are constantly dematerializing. [...] Taken The camera is either anthropologically engaged in the trance-inducing as a whole, GREETINGS TO THE ANCESTORS draws from subjects already ceremony of the Jericho Congregation, or quietly tracking healers or poets deeply invested in the divine power of dreams to produce a work that is at who give account of vivid dreams induced by the hallucinogen African once embodied, political, and deeply hypnagogic. GREETINGS takes on the Dream Root, and eventually races along the African landscape, a surreal red challenge that the Surrealists outlined in the 1920s – for cinema to be fully filter applied over its lens. It is an expercise in what Ben Russel defines as realized as the waking state of dreams, one that we all can inhabit. psychedelic ethnography: a way to allow for the apparently objective facts (BEN RUSSELL) of existence to be constantly reframed by radical subjective experience.
(Adina Marin, BIEFF 2016)
INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM FILMINTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Tiger Award for Short Films 2015 - International
\\ Film Festival Rotterdam / Torino International Film Festival / Wexner Center for the Arts / Documenta Madrid / solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Viennale, and the Museum of Modern Art.
WORLD SALES: LIGHT CONE / VIDEO DATA BANK 84 LIGHT CONE W: www.lightcone.org , VIDEO DATA BANK W: www.vdb.org
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] | W: www.dimeshow.com OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS
THEME PROGRAM: CINEDANS FILM FESTIVAL BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL \\
85 OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS PRESENTATION THEME PROGRAM: CINEDANS FILM FESTIVAL
Curatorial presentation by: ADINA MARIN
The special program dedicated to dance-films returns to the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival BIEFF due to our inspiring partnership with Europe’s main dance-film festivals, the unique CINEDANS - Dance on Screen Festival Amsterdam. In the ever-changing media landscape, creators are increasingly seeking different ways to tell their stories. Contemporary dance films are often autonomous art works with a language of their own and an expressiveness that cannot be pigeonholed. Cinema and dance are
brought to synthesis reactions resulting in Digital art, dance and physics blend to Claron McFadden, which eventually pure artistic gems. create a rumination on the philosophical transports him to an interior world, as an mysteries swirling around in our universe expression of how our drive for rational Bucharest International Experimental in SYMMETRY, a film that touches on love, knowledge of the universe is rooted in Film Festival BIEFF 2016 is proud to philosophy and the nature of life. (Heba a deeper, more emotional desire inside present the selection entitled Of Love Hasan, Tech Times) ourselves. (Hyperallergic) And Other Demons with four exquisite films that speak about or rather dance us Filmed on location in Switzerland at CERN When the interior world is disturbed, through the deepest and most powerful (European Organization for Nuclear it reveals itself to the others under human emotions transcending space, Research) - home of The Large Hadron assorted forms of madness, the cultural time, and gravity through the magic of Collider, the world’s largest and most representations of which vary with time, film. powerful particle collider, the largest and so do the possibilities and nature of experimental facility ever built, and the healing society believes to have at hand Dancing is a physical inquiry, a way of largest single machine in the world, – at certain points. A SHORT HISTORY OF experiencing and participating in the the film follows a researcher working MADNESS choreographs in six stirring world. Movement creates meaning, but it passionately on the theory of everything tableaux rituals of psychiatry practiced
CINEDANS FILM FESTIVAL also asks questions. About the origins of and the smallest particle. in Quebec over the past century and a humanity. About distressed individuals in half. An array of symbolic, experiential, \\ search of family ties. About the fluidity RUBEN VAN LEER skilfully utilises a and political dimensions of healing of such notions as sanity and madness. unique interplay of choreography and practices are on display as the dancers About bodies urging to get together. sound to express the two sides of our embody unfortunate souls haunted by And about the serenity of a white world understanding, one rational, the other the demons of insanity moving frantically before the Big Bang, when time didn’t emotional. The scientist’s routine is inside settings which alter as mentalities exist and everything was love. interrupted by the voice of soprano change. From the bleak victorian
86 like asylum to the sordid backstreet struggling to get near the people in his life who are supposed to offer them. But they warehouse and the teenager’s bedroom are nothing more than chimerical apparitions and, as in nightmares, they would remain that attempts (and fails) to re-create a out of reach and leave him face his demons alone. homey environment, ISABELLE HAYEUR takes us on an exploration of society’s Of all -isms that govern our lives, the one suffixing the concept of love opens the way ways to deal with the frightening and ever for virtually unbounded philosophical investigation. Inspired by Erich Fromm’s book fascinating state of madness. The Art of Loving, choreographer MOR SHANI embarked upon a long-term study of intimacy, seeking answers to questions related to caring for and depending on another Even in the absence of diagnosed insanity, human being weighed on a scale that ranges from sin to sacredness. The collaboration exclusion is likely to occur. GIANNI GROT’s with video artist PAUL SIXTA resulted in the project LOVE-ISM - THINGS THAT MATTER, proclaimed aim to put hip hop on the map a blend of documentary material and honest tales of inter-human togetherness. In the as a physical form of theatre materializes ambiance of sterile white rooms, the camera records with a thorough yet empathic eye, brilliantly in FARM OF MEMORIES, a fluid lovers, family members, and dancers as they come close to each other, the increasing tale moving back and forth between degree of their intimacy capturing the human experience of meeting a significant the conscious and the unconscious, and ‘other’. populated by visions likely to have been
unleashed by the contents of a syringe BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL injected in the vein. A destitute young man hip-hops his way around a derelict \\ warehouse as he tries to put together memories of his childhood or of more recent years. The emotionally charged choreography creates a touching portrait of a man longing for love and security and
87 A SHORT HISTORY OF MADNESS 27’, 2015, Canada DIRECTOR: ISABELLE HAYEUR
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jessica Lee Gagné EDITING: Isabelle Hayeur SOUND EDITOR: Alexis Pilon-Gladu, Bruno Bélanger MUSIC: Timber Timbre, Scout Niblett, The Ex, Peter Broderick ART DIRECTION: Laura Nhem CHOREOGRAPHER: Virginie Brunelle DANCERS: Carol Prieur, Isabelle Arcand, Luc Bouchard- OF AND LOVE OTHER DEMONS Boissonneault, Sophie Breton, Claudine Hébert, Carl Hennebert Faulkner, Hélène Langevin, Simon-Xavier Lefebvre, Lael Stellick PRODUCER: Isabelle Hayeur
ISABELLE HAYEUR
FILM PRESENTATION: Cultural representations of madness vary CURATOR’S STATEMENT: A beautifully choreographed journey through with time, and so do the possibilities and nature of healing society visceral and poetic perspectives of a reality that transcends time. This believes to have at hand at certain points. A SHORT HISTORY OF evocative, dance-centric film follows the history of treating mental illness MADNESS choreographs in six stirring tableaux rituals of psychiatry when contemporary dance and architecture merge inside the mind and practiced in Quebec over the past century and a half. An array of movement of psychosis. symbolic, experiential, and political dimensions of healing practices (Chicago International Moveis&Music Festival) are on display as the dancers embody unfortunate souls haunted by the demons of insanity moving frantically inside settings which alter as mentalities change. From the bleak victorian like asylum to the sordid backstreet warehouse and the teenager’s bedroom that attempts (and fails) to re-create a homey environment, ISABELLE HAYEUR takes us on an exploration of society’s ways to deal with the frightening and ever fascinating state of madness.
(Adina Marin, BIEFF2016)
CINEDANS FILM FESTIVAL FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Rendez-vous du Cinéma Québécois 2016 / RVCQ et francophone de Vancouver 2015 / Oklahoma Dance Film Festival 2015
\\ / Festival International du Film d’Art Montréal 2015 / Festival International de films de femmes de Créteil France 2015 / CineDans Amsterdam 2015 / Festival TransAmériques Montréal / CIMMFest Chicago / Female Eye Festival Toronto / DMJ International VideoDance Festival Japan / San Francisco Dance Film Festival / Ciné Danse Québec / Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema / Au contraire Film Festival Montréal / Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival Toronto
WORLD SALES: LES FILMS DU 3 MARS 88 E: [email protected] | W: www.f3m.ca
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] W: www.isabelle-hayeur.org FARM OF MEMORIES 8’, 2015, The Netherlands DIRECTOR: GIANNI GROT
CAST: Romario Gomes, Serano Pinas, Mercedes Go, Rubén Sánchez CHOREOGRAPHER: Gianni Grot PRODUCTION: Chanel Wouter, Enzio van Engel, Richard Koot
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
GIANNI GROT
FILM PRESENTATION: GIANNI GROT’s proclaimed aim to put hip hop CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Gianni Grot is a young choreographer and film on the map as a physical form of theatre materializes brilliantly in director who created a film in which dance attributed convingly to the FARM OF MEMORIES, a fluid tale moving back and forth between the build-up of the storyline. Who wrote an interesting scenario in which not conscious and the unconscious, and populated by visions likely to have linearity is the guiding force but a scenario which gets it’s a multi-layered been unleashed by the contents of a syringe injected in the vein. A content through the memories of protagonist about his family and each destitute young man hip-hops his way around a derelict warehouse as individual position towards him. He subtly mixes past with present and he tries to put together memories of his childhood or of more recent uses, very convingly, spoken word in the film, attributing to the poetic, years. The emotionally charged choreography creates a touching albeit grim development and sad ending of the film portrait of a man longing for love and security and struggling to get (Cinedans Jury Statement) near the people in his life who are supposed to offer them. But they are nothing more than chimerical apparitions and, as in nighmares, they would remain out of reach and leave him face his demons alone.
(Adina Marin, BIEFF 2016)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Winner of the Cinedans Dioraphte BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Encouragement Award - Cinedans 2015 / Moving Futures Festival (NL) \\ 2015 / Screening at SinemaDans Ankara (Turkey) 2015
WORLD SALES: E: [email protected] 89 LOVE-ISM 40’, 2014, The Netherlands DIRECTOR: PAUL SIXTA
CONCEPT AND CHOREOGRAPHY: Mor Shani FILM: Paul Sixta PERFORMERS: Pawel Konior, Connor Schumacher, Majon van der Schot, Chris Tandy, David Krugel, Simon Versnel, Inge van Huijkelom ARTISTIC MANAGEMENT: Shiran Shveka MUSIC: Jaap van Keulen OF AND LOVE OTHER DEMONS PRODUCTION: Dansateliers, SKVR Rotterdam, ICKAmsterdam, Act Your Age and Frascati Productions WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
PAUL SIXTA
FILM PRESENTATION: Of all -isms that govern our lives, the one DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: In Love-ism ‘The problem of our being suffixing the concept of love opens the way for virtually unbounded together’ and the need to resolve it are the conceptual fundaments philosophical investigation. Inspired by Erich Fromm’s book The Art of guiding the physical and compositional research. In the absence of Loving, choreographer MOR SHANI embarked upon a long-term study pre-choreographed material a silent and empty territory is established of intimacy, seeking answers to questions related to caring for and between two people or more – a void in which authentic choice making depending on another human being weighed on a scale that ranges takes place and in which transparent transformation of relationships from sin to sacredness. The collaboration with video artist PAUL SIXTA occur just because of the metaphysical force that makes us move together. resulted in the project LOVE-ISM - THINGS THAT MATTER, a blend of (MOR SHANI · PAUL SIXTA) documentary material and honest tales of inter-human togetherness. In the ambiance of sterile white rooms, the camera records with a thorough yet empathic eye, lovers, family members, and dancers as they come close to each other, the increasing degree of their intimacy capturing the human experience of meeting a significant ‘other’.
(Adina Marin, BIEFF 2016) CINEDANS FILM FESTIVAL \\
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Cinedans Festival Amsterdam / Cinédanse Québec
WORLD SALES: Paul Sixta 90 T: 0031 6 46638354 | E: paulsixta.yahoo.com | W: www.love-ism.nl SYMMETRY 29’, 2015, The Netherlands DIRECTOR: RUBEN VAN LEER
CAST: Lukas Timulak, Claron McFadden CINEMATOGRAPHY: Paul Ozgur EDITING: Amber Hooijmans MUSIC / SOUND: Henry Vega COMPOSER: Joep Franssens PRODUCER: CTM Pictures & truth.io
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
RUBEN VAN LEER
FILM PRESENTATION: Digital art, dance and physics blend to create a CURATOR’S STATEMENT: I’m interested in a world where human rumination on the philosophical mysteries swirling around in our universe in a emotions are a result of dancing geometric structures at the foundation of film that touches on love, philosophy and the nature of life. (Heba Hasan, Tech our being. A place where hard science is a result of a long term perceptual Times) trajectory. Like Spinoza was looking for symmetry between science and perception. We are tragic beings for whom this harmony gets lost all too Filmed on location in Switzerland at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear often. For me technology also refers to our human body and history, not Research) - home of The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most constraint by contemporary artificial intelligences. I want to know what powerful particle collider, the largest experimental facility ever built, and the Gesamtkunstwerk of the 21st century looks like. I’m sure it’s musical the largest single machine in the world, –SYMMETRY follows a researcher by nature, it integrates multiple disciplines that people can reflect upon. working passionately on the theory of everything and the smallest particle. And that it addresses the ambiguity of our “modern” information age. My RUBEN VAN LEER skilfully utilises a unique interplay of choreography and latest film Symmetry is about the alignment of this fine balance between sound emotion and abstraction; the entire cosmos and the smallest particle; science and art; you and me… I’m most interested in the “quantum story” to express the two sides of our understanding, one rational, the other the audience make themselves by experiencing the film. emotional. The scientist’s routine is interrupted by the voice of soprano Claron McFadden, which eventually transports him to an interior world, as an (RUBEN VAN LEER) expression of how our drive for rational knowledge of the universe is rooted
in a deeper, more emotional desire inside ourselves. BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
(Hyperallergic) \\
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Best Director Award and Best Visual Effects Award - San Francisco Dance Film Festival 2015 / All Lights Award - India IFF 2015 / 1st Prize RAW Science - Los Angeles FF / Choreo Scope Award - International Dance FF Barcelona / Aesthetica Art Prize / Special Prize “Documentary” - Festival Fiver 2016 WORLD SALES: SND Films / Sydney Neter E: [email protected] | W: http://www.sndfilms.com 91
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] | W: www.rubenvanleer.net W: www.symmetrymovie.com PARADISE IN RUINS: VISUAL ART ACTIVISM PRESENTATION THEME PROGRAM: INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM FESTIVAL OBERHAUSEN
Curatorial presentation by: ADINA MARIN
Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival BIEFF continues its inspiring long-term collaboration with the legendary INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM FESTIVAL OBERHAUSEN, offering again to the Romanian cinema buffs the chance to get acquainted with some of the most powerful samples of contemporary visual art activism, titles screened and awarded at the previous editions of OBERHAUSEN.
We live in a time of failed ideologies. fairy tale in which Melhus performs all characters himself was partly shot in a Berlin Communism, National-Socialism, morgue and new urban environments in Istanbul. In a tour de force that oscillates Capitalism, took turns in claiming to between musical, comedy, horror film and fairy tale, this high definition trip trawls offer a clear way towards the perfect out our global psyche for stored conceptions of promises of salvation, childhood society, and they were all eventually trauma and work ethic, under the imperative of self-optimization. found wanting. Under the theme PARADISE IN RUINS: VISUAL ART ALEX GERBAULET’s SHIFT moves down the shaft of memories, her own family’s ACTIVISM, the films in this program cast and those of the industrial city of Salzgitter, a once blooming project of National- a cinematic eye on a world so engrossed Socialist Germany, home of the “Reichswerke Hermann Göring” and of the adjacent with finding its way towards a lost labour camps. SHIFT employs a rhythm crafting a feeling of implacability. Family and paradise that it fails to notice its own history events are concocted from archival propaganda pieces, newsreels, and family slide into neo-feudalist conditions of photos, and the remains of the mining-cum-steel works shot on location. Moving political and economic inequalities and between layers, the recurrent figure of the widowed father joggs along deserted inequities. streets and eventually returns to an empty home, his wife having passed away some time ago after years of suffering from multiple sclerosis. The industrial city is In FREEDOM & INDEPENDENCE, BIEFF’s gradually invalided by a multiple sclerosis of its own. Reduced to the representation
INTERNATIONAL SHORT OBERHAUSENINTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL longtime favorite BJØRN MELHUS of the ruins of a failed ideology, it faces a future grimmer still, since it is designed to questions the global ideological become the ultimate disposal place for radioactive waste. \\ paradigm change to new forms of religious capitalism, by confronting GANGSTER BACKSTAGE is TEBOHO EDKINS’ follow-up to Gangster Project, a film he ideas of the self-announced objectivist completed a few years before, and for the making of which he ventured in one of philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand, with Cape Town’s most violent black townships where few white people dare to enter, evangelical contents of US-American to observe the life of real gansters at first hand. This time, instead of seeking the mainstream movies. This contemporary gangsters in their natural habitat, he summons them to the neutral setting of an
92 empty classroom by lauching a casting (lost) PARADISE. Instead, the viewer is swept into an artificial greenhouse mimicking call. Interviews, during which the the Garden of Eden, where the Adam character is played by a middle-aged, middle characters talk candidly about the pros class man leafing through a collection of index cards and occasionally reciting into a and cons of gangster life alternate with microphone quotes from The Bible, Rousseau, Der Spiegel, Hesiod, and a bunch of scenes in which they stage their fears academics. The resulting discourse is a multi-faceted complex of ideas, retracing the and dreams, in a barren Dogville-like history of the garden as the primordial protected place, from the literal meaning of decor, with white tapes marking the the Persian word pairidaēza (enclosure) to the present societal tendency towards claustrophobic outline of a prison cell. reclusion while longing for the lost paradise. Between the torment of confinement and the omnipresent threat of an untimely death, these amoral human
beings evolve in the South-African BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL society, which has failed so far to come to terms with itself. \\
“Everything was good. Beyond the reach of all evils.” - a voice utters repeatedly and persuasively in the beginning of MAX PHILIPP SCHMID’s film, hinting to a
93 FREEDOM & INDEPENDENCE 15’, 2014, Germany DIRECTOR: BJØRN MELHUS
CAST: Bjørn Melhus SCRIPT: Bjørn Melhus CINEMATOGRAPHY: Eike Zuleeg PARADISE IN RUINS EDITING: Bjørn Melhus SOUND: Max Schneider MUSIC: Max Schneider PRODUCER: Yuki Jungesblut, Bjørn Melhus
BJØRN MELHUS
FILM PRESENTATION: FREEDOM & INDEPENDENCE by BJØRN DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: When the curator Beral Madra described the MELHUS questions the global ideological paradigm change to situation of Turkey at the start of 2015 she stated that the rapid growth of new forms of religious capitalism by confronting ideas of the self neoliberal capitalism and religious fanaticism could lead to “neofascism announced objectivist philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand with of the 21st century” if they are merged. Istanbul as an outdoor set serves evangelical contents of US-American mainstream movies. This as a prime example in FREEDOM & INDEPENDENCE. The spectres of contemporary fairy tale in which Melhus performs all characters privatisation are global as the current secret negotiations on free trade himself was partly shot in a Berlin morgue and new urban environments agreements like TTIP and particularly TISA suggest. They are advancing – in Istanbul. In a tour de force that oscillates between musical, comedy, amongst others – the privatisation of primary services hitherto provided horror film and fairy tale this high definition trip trawls out our global by the state (like drinking water) to the point where it cannot be reversed. psyche for stored conceptions of promises of salvation, childhood Under the guise of freedom and independence the provision of services to a trauma and work ethic under the imperative of self-optimization. dependent population will lie in the hands of only a few free individuals. The solution lies in the ideal of egocentric and self-optimised consumers who (www.kinoderkunst.de) recognise their own death merely as the end of the existence of the world.
(BJØRN MELHUS)
BEST FILMS IN MAJOR FESTIVALS FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Sphinx Award for Best Video/Film - Videomedeja
\\ International Video Festival, Serbia 2015 / Oberhausen International Film Festival / Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival / Hamburg International Short Film Festival / Cyprus International Film Festival / Winterthur International Short Film Festival / Berlin International Short Film Festival / Exground Film Fest
WORLD SALES: AUG & OHR MEDIEN 94 T: +49 (0) 176 - 62965299 | E: [email protected] | W: www.augohr.de
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] | W: www.melhus.de SHIFT 28’, 2015, Germany DIRECTOR: ALEX GERBAULET
SCRIPT: Alex Gerbaulet CINEMATOGRAPHY: Alex Gerbaulet, Smina Bluth EDITING: Philip Scheffner SOUND: Tom Schön CO-PRODUCER: Uli Plank PRODUCER: Merle Kröger
ALEX GERBAULET
FILM PRESENTATION: Shift (Schicht). Shaft (Schacht). The voice- CURATOR’S STATEMENT: A darkly comic investigation into family, labor over alliterates the terms repetitiously, shifting layer after layer and state, this half-hour cine-poem frames autobiography against secret as ALEX GERBAULET moves down the shaft of memories, her own histories in uncovering the last half-century of Salzgitter, an ostensibly family’s and those of the industrial city of Salzgitter, a once blooming ordinary German town that, between 1937 and 1945, was home to project of National-Socialist Germany, home of the “Reichswerke Reichswerke Hermann Göring — a tellingly named industrial complex and Hermann Göring” and of the adjacent labour camps. SHIFT employs economic stronghold for the Nazis. Both works are typical of what is by a rhythm crafting a feeling of implacability. Family and history now a familiar kind of essay film: found and original images stitched into events are concocted from archival propaganda pieces, news reels, a narrative logic and narrated by an actor whose detached, third-person and family photos, and the remains of the mining-cum-steel works voiceover creates a triangular mode of address between filmmaker, shot on location. Moving between layers, the recurrent figure of viewer and the various topics at hand. Each film is by turns authoritative the widowed father joggs along deserted streets and eventually and speculative, subjective and objective, deadpan and ironic, focused and returns to an empty home, his wife having passed away some time meandering, verbose and tongue-tied, lucid and ambiguous, disciplined ago after years of suffering from multiple sclerosis. The industrial city and self-indulgent. is gradually invalided by a multiple sclerosis of its own. Reduced to (MICHAEL PATTISON, filmmakermagazine.com) the representation of the ruins of a failed ideology, it faces a future grimmer still, since it is designed to become the ultimate disposal place for radioactive waste. BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (Adina Marin, BIEFF 2016) \\
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Prize German Competition - International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2015 / First Film Award - FID Marseille 2015 / German Film Critics Award 2015
WORLD SALES: Pong Film GmbH T: +49-(0)30-61076098 | E: [email protected] | W: www.pong-berlin.de 95
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: M: +49-(0)151-15620353 | E: [email protected] W: www.alexgerbaulet.de PARADISE 15’, 2015, Switzerland DIRECTOR: MAX PHILIPP SCHMID
CAST: Thomas Douglas CINEMATOGRAPHY: Thomas Isler EDITING: Max Philipp Schmid PARADISE IN RUINS SOUND: Max Philipp Schmid SOUND DESIGN: Knut Jensen PRODUCER: Stella Händler
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
MAX PHILIPP SCHMID
FILM PRESENTATION: Everything was good. Beyond the reach of all DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Presented against the backdrop of an evils.” - a voice utters repeatedly and persuasively in the beginning of artificial greenhouse, „Paradise“ interweaves texts, documentary images MAX PHILIPP SCHMID’s film, hinting to a (lost) Paradise. Instead, the and sounds into a cluster of questions. How do we imagine paradise? viewer is swept into an artificial greenhouse mimicking the Garden of How does what we imagine manifest itself in front gardens and urban Eden, where the Adam character is played by a middle-aged, middle landscaping? Is paradise, the ideal world, to be found in the untamed class man leafing through a collection of index cards and occasionally wilderness? Why are all the small paradises made by humans fenced in? reciting into a microphone quotes from The Bible, Rousseau, Der Is a fence perhaps a prerequisite for paradise? The video explores the Spiegel, Hesiod, and a bunch of academics. The resulting discourse is a current societal tendency toward withdrawal and separation within the multi-faceted complex of ideas, retracing the history of the garden as framework of a yearning for an ideal way of life closely linked to Nature. the primordial protected place, from the literal meaning of the Persian (MAX PHILIPP SCHMID) word pairidaēza (enclosure) to the present societal tendency towards reclusion while longing for the lost paradise.
(Adina Marin, BIEFF 2016) BEST FILMS IN MAJOR FESTIVALS FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Bester Kunstfilm (Best Arthouse Film) - Basler \\ Filmpreis, Basel 2015 / First Prize - Videoex Zürich, 2015 / Oberhausen, 61. Internationale Kurzfilmtage / 15th New Horizons International Film Festival Wroclaw / 13th Bogota Short Film Festival / 25th International Exhibition of Video and Cinema Beyond, Milano / 19. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur
WORLD SALES: freihändler Filmproduktion GmbH 96 E: [email protected] |W: www.freihaendler.cH
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] | W: www.maxphilippschmid.ch GANGSTER BACKSTAGE 37’, 2013, France, South Africa DIRECTOR: TEBOHO EDKINS
CAST: Ghaironesa Wessels, Grant du Plessis, Edward Rustin, Lincon Cupido, Brendon Jamsen SCRIPT: Teboho Edkins, François-Xavier Drouet CINEMATOGRAPHY: Samuel Lahu EDITING: Florence Jacquet SOUND EDITOR: Manuel Vidal PRODUCER: Nicolas Anthomé
TEBOHO EDKINS
FILM PRESENTATION: GANGSTER BACKSTAGE is TEBOHO EDKINS’ DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Cape Town has one of the highest murder follow-up to Gangster Project, a film he completed a few years before, rates in the world and a long history of gangs. In GANGSTER BACKSTAGE and for the making of which he ventured in one of Cape Town’s most I adopted the same strategy as I did for GANGASTER PROJECT. I placed violent black townships where few white people dare to enter, to an announcement in the Daily Voice newspaper: ‘Looking for actors for a observe the life of real gansters at first hand. This time, instead of gangster Film, experience of gangsterism appreciated.’ Of the people who seeking the gangsters in their natural habitat, he summons them to answered the call and came to the casting, I chose five characters with the neutral setting of an empty classroom by lauching a casting call. whom we worked in an empty theatre space. Interviews, during which the characters talk candidly about the pros (TEBOHO EDKINS) and cons of gangster life alternate with scenes in which they stage their fears and dreams, in a barren Dogville-like decor, with white tapes marking the claustrophobic outline of a prison cell. Between the torment of confinement and the omnipresent threat of an untimely death, these amoral human beings evolve in the South-African society, which has failed so far to come to terms with itself.
(Adina Marin, BIEFF 2016) BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Principal Prize Of The International Jury - Oberhausen Film Festival 2014 / Short Film Award - Saint Louis Du Senegal 2014 / DocLisboa / Rome Film Festival / Oberhausen / Durban / Saint-Louis du Sénégal / African Film Festival Milano / South African International Documentary Festival (Cape Town) / \\ Berlin Transmediale, Afrykamera (Poland) / FICFA (Canada) / Festival cinémas d’Afrique (Lausanne) / Signes de nuit (Berlin&Paris) / Rencontres Internationales Paris/ Berlin/Madrid / Tamatave (Madagascar) / Iffi (Innsbruck) / Winterthur (Switzerland) / Urban Film Festival (Paris) / Contis, Silhouette (Paris) / Oullins - A nous de voir / Amiens, Cinémas d’Afrique (Apt)
WORLD SALES: BATHYSPERE - Clement Le Penven T: + 33 1 40 21 37 02 | E: [email protected] | W: www.bathysphere.fr 97
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] GOLDEN SHORTS: BEST FILMS IN MAJOR FESTIVALS
SPECIAL PROGRAM \\
98 RATE ME 17’, 2015, UK DIRECTOR: FYZAL BOULIFA
SCRIPT: FYZAL BOULIFA PRINCIPAL CAST: Zehra Zorba, Leo Hatton CINEMATOGRAPHY: Taina Galis EDITING: Taina Galis, Fyzal Boulifa ORIGINAL MUSIC: Felicita PRODUCER: Taina Galis, Fyzal Boulifa
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
FYZAL BOULIFA
FILM PRESENTATION: An unconventional replication of the way we CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Part social commentary, part biography, communicate in virtual medium, each shot in a different style portrays part indictment of the digital age and the fickleness it engenders, RATE a teen escort, Coco, through the prism of others’ trashy and peculiar ME tells the story of a teenage call-girl, Coco, through the interactions, comments. The directors succeeds to create a contradiction of terms tellingly, not so much between Coco and her clients, but between between the critical segments of her clients or random people she the clients themselves. Set out as a series of reviews left for Coco on met, lacking sympathy and offering a wide range of identities and an internet forum, presumably on the website for whom she works, endings which imply harshly some of their obscure desires. Its music sometimes merely commenting on Coco and her services, sometimes gain- backdrops follow an ironic and a potential political discourse in which saying what other reviews say. Always mean-spirited, sometimes funny, the filmmaker wants to oblige us to pay fully attention to structural sometimes flat-out mendacious, sometimes sick and twisted, always identity in a modern and virtual world where self-branding is available without a single thought for anybody’s feelings or for a common decency to each and every one of us and it’s also seen as a lifestyle. long since removed in a world where real cause and effect are separated by a computer screen. RATE ME is filled with all manner of little technical (Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF 2016) tricks and playful visuals, and the computer-based central conceit, though at times at odds with what we see one the screen, allows BOULIFA to really have fun with the soundtrack. As the reviews get more outlandish FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Best British Short - Leeds International Film Festival - UK, and the moderator is compelled to step in, we learn a little more about 2015 / Live Action Short Special Mention for Innovative Storytelling - AFI Film Fest Coco each time. This is a harsh, funny, interesting and, at times, harrowing - Los Angeles 2015 / Honorable mention for Best International Short - Festival du look at how our interactions in the digital world are based in, and affect, BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
nouveau cinéma, 2015 / Honorable mention for Best International Short - Toronto very real situations. \\ International Film Festival, 2015 / Prix Illy - Quinzaine des réalisateurs - Cannes Films (Bruce Bailey, FLICKFEAST) Festival, 2015 / Guanajuato International Film Festival - Guanajuato, Mexico, 2015 / 20th Sarajevo Film Festival, 2015 / Sao Paulo International Short Film Festival, 2015 / BFI London Film Festival - London, 2015 / Encounters Shot Film Festival - Bristol, 2015 / 44th Festival du Nouveau Cinema - Montreal / 51st Chicago International Film Festival / London Short Film Fest - UK, 2016 / Sundance - USA, 2016 WORLD SALES: La Distributrice de Films (CA) E: [email protected] | W: http://www.ladistributrice.ca 99
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] TO BE AND TO COME BACK 14’, 2014, Spain DIRECTOR: XACIO BAÑO
SCREENPLAY: Xacio Baño CINEMATOGRAPHY: Xacio Baño GOLDEN SHORTSGOLDEN CAMERA CAR: Lucía C. Pan SOUND: Xoán Escudero ASSISTANT PRODUCTION: María Zaragoza PRODUCER: Xacio Baño
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
XACIO BAÑO
FILM PRESENTATION: TO BE AND TO COME BACK is a short video DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: ’m unable to remember a film’s synopsis, portrait in which the author gives us a sneak peak of his grandparents, the names of film directors and writers, or the book titles. It is an odd aligning scenes of work, critical discussions about his future and legacy that reaches out not to remember the anecdotes and experiences fragments of a supposed rehearsal for his ”fiction” film. The editing that happened to me over all these years. It can be frustrating. Maybe clearly states his wish to show us through metafiction and metaphor his that is the reason why I chose cinema: to create my memories. The first relationship with his grandparents by explaining what his profession of impulse, the first urge, was to film a video-portrait of my grandparents a filmmaker is about. His grandmother doesn’t seem so well-convinced in order to have them close when they are no longer here. At the exact that he will succeed; therefore, the film turns to a be a funny and moment I started filming them, I discovered that there was something harshly selfportrait of the director, in which we hear the sulky voice of more important to tell. It was not so much about them as it was about me, his grandmother, we see personal fragments and images of their house about discovering what cinema gives me and what do I need to return. and we sense a need to look back and forth for our own good. Little by little the camera was turning around. The eyes that looked were not mine, but theirs, towards me, towards my generation. (Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF 2016) (XACIO BAÑO)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Canal + Award and Jury Special Mention - BEST FILMS IN MAJOR FESTIVALS Clermont-Ferrand Int. Film Festival, LAB Competition / Jury Special
\\ Mention, Audience Award - L’Alternativa - Festival de Cinema Independent de Barcelona / Jury Special Mention and ASECAN Award - Muestra Cinematográfica del Atlántico - ALCANCES / Galiza Award, AGAG Award Best Script – Curtocircuito, Spain / Best Short Film Real image - Festival de Cans, Spain / Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland / European Media Art Festival Osnabrueck / MiradasDoc - Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Guía de Isora. WORLD SALES: Marvin & Wayne 100 E: [email protected] | W: http://www.marvinwayne.com
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: T: +34 606555524 | E: [email protected] W: http://www.xacio.es | W: www.serevoltar.com WAVES 98’ 15’, 2015, Lebanon, Qatar DIRECTOR: ELY DAGHER
SCREENPLAY: Ely Dagher ANIMATION DIRECTOR: Ely Dagher EDITING: Ely Dagher SOUND DESIGN AND SCORE: Zelig Sound CO-PRODUCER: Nina Najjar CO-PRODUCER: Christina Farah PRODUCER: Ely Dagher
ELY DAGHER
FILM PRESENTATION: In his highly acclaimed WAVES ‘98, winner DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Waves ’98 is as much a narrative film as it of the Palme d’or at Cannes in 2015, ELY DAGHER deconstructs his is a personal visual essay dedicated to Dagher’s hometown, Beirut. The love-hate relationship with his home city, in a beautiful self-reflective film is an artistic exploration of the director’s current relation with his piece of filmmaking. Shots of live action are employed together with Lebanon, his home country, projected through the story of a teenager and several types of animation techniques to tell the story of Omar, whose set in 1998. Since moving abroad to study and work, Ely Dagher has been experience of living in segregated post civil war Beirut adds to the spending more and more time outside of Lebanon, and his attachment inherent turmoils that harrow any teenager. Quotidian expeditions to Beirut started to become more and more complicated. The overall up the rooftop of his school reveal yet the same grim view of a city narrative of the film is heavily drenched in despair and uncertainty, parts of which he is not even based on Ely’s efforts to understand his changing relationship with the allowed to tread. Until the day a giant golden elephant turns up drifting city and it’s life, juxtaposed with the narrative of a teenager’s exciting in the sky. Sucked into the giant’s belly, Omar discovers - and the viewer discovery of this segregated city. with him, a world he never knew even existed. It may be a hopeful version of the city that takes shape in Omar’s imagination. At times, it (ELY DAGHER) shatters to pieces, but the fragments come together again. Eventually, the dream comes to an end, and, above a city of a less grim appearance, a golden elephant floats gently away.
(Adina Marin, BIEFF) BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL \\ FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Short Film Palme D’or - Cannes Film Festival 2015 / Short Film Bayard D’or - Festival intl. du film francophone de Namur 2015 / Short animated Film Silver Plaque - Chicago International Film Festival / Toronto Intl. Film Festival 2015 (nominated) / Dubai Intl. Film Festival 2015 (nominated) / Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival (nominated) WORLD SALES: E: [email protected] | W: elydagher.com | W: www.waves98.com 101 KUNG FURY 31’, 2015, Sweden / USA DIRECTOR: DAVID SANDBERG
CAST: David Sandberg, Jorma Taccone, Leopold Nilsson, Steven Chew, Andreas Cahling, Erik Hörnqvist, Eleni Young, Helene Ahlson, GOLDEN SHORTSGOLDEN Per-Henrik Arvidius, Eos Karlsson, David Hasselhoff SCRIPTWRITER: David Sandberg CINEMATOGRAPHY: Martin Gärdemalm, Jonas Ernhill, Mattias Andersson AERIAL CINEMATOGRAPHY: Henning Sandström, Anton Hjalmarsson EDITING: Nils Moström VISUAL EFFECTS: Laser Unicorns, David Sandberg, Klas Trulsson, Simon Tingell, Jimmy Sahlin, Harry Ellard MUSIC: Mitch Murder, Lost Years PRODUCER: Linus Andersson, Eleni Young Antonia WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
DAVID SANDBERG
FILM PRESENTATION: KUNG FURY is an ambitious short film of high DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: The thing that inspired me the most was actually production value, which manages to pack every trope of the 1980s cop the music. I listened to a guy named Mitch Murder. I listened to his music all the movie genre. We encounter a visual compilation of all time monsters time when I wrote the script and he was the biggest inspiration for me, and I’m and patterns of action movies, the notion of going back to the past and so glad he made the soundtrack. I had just bought a green screen, and I was a battle between good and evil, where the first one is helped by the experimenting and did this test where I had Mitch Murder’s music and was presence of human-animal hybrids and the latter is the ultimate villain, doing Miami Vice stuff. And I thought, ‘This was really cool — if I put effort into Adolf Hitler. Apart from being a homage to all the impressive things of this, it could really be something.’ I had initially intended to do the whole short film the 80s, its stylistic approach and thrilling visual effects mark its camp by myself, all the visual effects. But after working on it for a long time, I realized it aesthetic with a sensibility based on deliberate and self-acknowledged was too ambitious. I was completely broke, and my idea was to do a trailer and at theatricality; its graphics and cover story deepens in our brain and the same time launch a Kickstarter in order to raise money to help me out. reveals a metatextual and an iconic construction of a cult and hip short (DAVID SANDBERG) film.
(Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF 2016)
BEST FILMS IN MAJOR FESTIVALS FESTIVALS/AWARDS: European Film Awards - Vila do Conde Short
\\ Film Nominee for the 2015 (nominated) / Cannes Queer Palm Award (nominated) / Quinzaine des Réalisateurs Cannes 2015.
WORLD SALES: Laser Unicorns Productions 102 Lampray | E: [email protected]
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: W: http://www.kungfury.com/ BELLADONNA 18’, 2015, Croatia DIRECTOR: DUBRAVKA TURIĆ
CAST: Aleksandra Naumov, Nada Đurevska, Lana Barić, Anita Matković, Dražen Kühn SCRIPT: DUBRAVKA TURIĆ CINEMATOGRAPHY: Branko Linta, HFS EDITING: DUBRAVKA TURIĆ SOUND DESIGNER: Dubravka Premar ART DESIGNER: Željka Burić PRODUCER: Zdenka Gold
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
DUBRAVKA TURIĆ
FILM PRESENTATION: The message evoked in BELLADONNA consists DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: BELLADONNA is a film about (not) seeing, on a ground of human relations and it switches on an emotional feeling about our superficial perception of each other and the prejudices that and also empathy for the main protagonist. After an internal outbreak result from it. In the context of an ordinary, everyday situation, I wanted she changes her mind when hearing about a misfortune of an old lady to contrast the external with the internal, the visible with the invisible, by that she seems to reject in the first place. The stylistic approach – a using the motif of a Renaissance ” belladonna”, the woman who used a toxic blurred point-of-view – speaks about limitation, not only for her sight substance to widen and brighten the pupils of her eyes. To look beautiful, after an ophthalmological consult but also for communication. The she had to temporarily impair her eyesight. Just like a” belladonna”, the director portrays a woman who will realize that the most beautiful film’s heroine is temporarily unable to see, but at that exact moment she thing about the sensitivity towards the world of others is the experiences something that will metaphorically ‘open her eyes’. This time, emancipation of her own perception and the courage to go beyond the however, the beauty achieved through the loss of eyesight is internal. superficial appearance of things. (DUBRAVKA TURIĆ) (Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF 2016)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film - 72nd BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Venice International Film Festival / Zagreb Film Festival – Checkers \\ Competition / Gijón International Film Festival - International Competition Short Films / Cinemaforum, Poland / Auteur Film Festival Belgrade - The Brave Balkans / Sundance Film Festival - International Competition / International Film Festival Rotterdam - As Long As It Takes: Short.
WORLD SALES: Ivana Ivisic - everything works LLC M: +385 91 1811 002 | E: [email protected] | W: www. 103 everythingworks.hr
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: M: +385 98 1835 714 | E: [email protected] www.belladonafilm.com BATRACHIAN’S BALLAD 11’, 2016, Portugal DIRECTOR: LEONOR TELES
SCRIPTWRITER: Leonor Teles CINEMATOGRAPHY: Leonor Teles GOLDEN SHORTSGOLDEN EDITING: Leonor Teles SOUND: Bernado Theriaga, Joana Niza Braga PRODUCER: Filipa Reis
LEONOR TELES
FILM PRESENTATION: Once upon a time, before people came along, DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: The genesis of Batrachian’s Ballad occurred all the creatures were free and able to be with one another”, narrates when I learnt a surprising fact – the Portuguese tradition of placing the voiceover. “All the animals danced together and were immeasurably ceramic frogs in the doorways of restaurants and other commercial happy. There was only one who wasn’t invited to the celebration – the premises to ward off gypsies. Through this personal tale of mine, I wanted frog. In his rage about the injustice, he committed suicide.” Something to call attention to a growing tendency to use belief and superstition to Romani and frogs have in common is that they will never be unseen, or deride other human beings and to keep them at bay. stay unnoticed. In her film, young director Leonor Teles weaves the life (LEONOR TELES) circumstance of Romani in Portugal today with the recollections of a yesterday.
Anything but a passive observer, Teles consciously decides to participate and take up position. As a third pillar, she establishes an active applied performance art that becomes integrated in the cinematic narrative. Thereby transforming “once upon a time” into “there is”. “Afterwards, nothing will be as it was and the melody of life will have changed”, explains a voice off-camera.
(Berlinale) BEST FILMS IN MAJOR FESTIVALS \\ FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Golden Bear for the Best Short Film - Berlinale 2016
WORLD SALES: PORTUGAL FILMS 104 T: +351 213 466 172 | E: [email protected] W: www.portugalfilm.org REBEL WITH A CAUSE
THEME PROGRAM FOR TEENAGERS BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL \\
105 THE GUESTS 10’, 2015, Australia DIRECTOR: SHANE DANIELSEN
CAST: Matilda Ridgway, Cate Wolfe, Gertraud Ingeborg, Dirk Nagel SCRIPTWRITER: Shane Danielsen SPECIAL PROGRAM SPECIAL CINEMATOGRAPHY: Anna Howard PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Bethany Ryan EDITING: Simon Njoo SOUND: William Ward PRODUCER: Vanessa Humphrey, Raquelle David PRODUCTION COMPANY: Screen New South Wales & Hopscotch Features
SHANE DANIELSEN
FILM PRESENTATION: Inspired, among others, by Roman Polanski’s DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Inspired by the films of Roman Polanski (in Repulsion, as the director himself acknowledges, SHANE DANIELSEN’s particular, classics of domestic horror like Repulsion and The Tenant), and directorial debut was selected in the official Palme d’Or competition by the fiction of Robert Aickman and Julio Cortazar, The Guests is a ten- at Cannes Film Festival 2015. THE GUESTS, set in the Eastern Europe minute meditation of motherhood, travel and identity, as a woman—a of the 1960’s, follows Anna as she admits some uninvited guests into new mother, alone in a new city, awaiting the return of her husband— her home while waiting for her husband’s return. Shortly, an almost finds herself gently besieged by unexpected visitors, and forfeits her psychotic Anna is assailed by shadows and voices while pursuing a own identity in the process. Shot almost entirely in single takes, its desperate quest for her baby in her own home, by now morphed into a classical mise-en-scene foregoes the typical montage-based aesthetics of nightmarish setting. This short film is like a fit of delirium, leaving Anna genre cinema, for something more patient, remorseless and (hopefully) a different person than she had been at first. As for us viewers, we are disquieting. confused, perhaps firghtened, but by no means unmoved. (SHANE DANIELSEN) (Andreea Udrea, BIEFF 2016)
REBEL WITH A CAUSE FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Official Selection, Short Film Palme d’Or – 68th
\\ Festival de Cannes / Competition – 69th Edinburgh International Film Festival / Sydney Film Festival / Competition – Melbourne International Film Festival / Competition – Vladivostok International Film Festival Pacific Meridian / Darwin International Film Festival / Fantastic Fest, Austin Texas / Calgary International Film Festival / Leeds International Film Festival / London Short Film Festival / Sleepwalkers International Short Film Festival (Tallinn). WORLD SALES: PREMIUM FILMS 106 T : +33 (0)1 42 77 06 31 | E: [email protected] W: premium-films.com
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: W: https://www.facebook.com/TheGuestsFilm CUTAWAY 7’, 2014, Canada DIRECTOR: KAZIK RADWANSKI
CAST: Becky Shrimpton, Caitlin Macintosh, Tanya Casole-Gouveia SCRIPTWRITER: Kazik Radwanski CINEMATOGRAPHY: Nikolay Michaylov EDITING: Ajla Odobašić SOUND: Gabe Knox, Finlay Braithwaite PRODUCER: Daniel Montgomery PRODUCTION COMPANY: Medium Density Fibreboard Films
KAZIK RADWANSKI
FILM PRESENTATION: In CUTAWAY, premiered at Locarno Film Festival CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Radwanski’s films are not unlike Côté’s in their 2014, director KAZIK RADWANSKI succeeds in telling a whole lot about generosity to outsiders, their precise, minimalist construction, and their the life story of a young man using nothing more besides close-ups of reliance on strong, singular performances from nonprofessional actors. his hands in motion, and of objects upon which they take action, the The film’s clear-eyed, unsentimental realism also recalls the humanist latter turning into our only temporal and allegorical references. All documentaries of Allan King. we are to know about the personage is conveyed by the image of his Cutaway is both a refinement of those earlier films’ craft and an hands which become, in the absence of dialogue and facial expressions, experimental departure of sorts. It’s an impressionistic study of a young metaphors of his internal experiences. The realism of the shots and the labourer, whose life over a few days is glimpsed entirely through his hands’ minimalistic approach, together with an intentional lack of background interactions with the world around them—from the cracked cell phone on information, enhance rather than restrain a profound empathy with the which he furtively texts his partner to the work materials he transforms character, bestowing an emotional quality on the film, its objectivity into products at the expense of his calloused palm. notwithstanding. (ANGELO MURREDA, Torontoist) (Andreea Udrea, BIEFF 2016)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Locarno International Film Festival 2014 / Clermont- BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2015 / TIFF Canada’s Top Ten, \\ Toronto 2015 / Museum of the Moving Image: First Look, New York 2015 / Hamptons International Film Festival, New York 2014 / Chicago International Film Festival, Illinois 2014 / Dokufest International Documentary and Short Film Festival, Kosovo, 2014 / International Film Festival Message to Man, Russia 2014 / Oldenburg International Film Festival, Germany 2014 / Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival, United Kingdom 2014 WORLD SALES: LA DISTRIBUTRICE DE FILM E: [email protected] | W : www.ladistributrice.ca 107
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: T: + 1 416 885 1998 | E: [email protected] www.ladistributrice.ca/catalogue-films/cutaway/ THE RIVER UNDER THE TONGUE 18’, 2015, Switzerland DIRECTOR: CARMEN JAQUIER
CAST: Marilyne Canto, Marie Cornil, Sacha Gravat-Harsch, Slimane Dazi SCRIPTWRITER: Carmen Jaquier SPECIAL PROGRAM SPECIAL CINEMATOGRAPHY: Thomas Szczepanski EDITING: Raphael Lefevre SOUND: Eleonora Vittoria Polato MUSIC: Grace Core PRODUCER: Consuelo Frauenfelder, Stefan Lauper PRODUCTION COMPANY: Garidi Films WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
CARMEN JAQUIER
FILM PRESENTATION: World premiered at Locarno Film Festival 2016, CURATOR’S STATEMENT: A mother enters the space of her elder the short film THE RIVER UNDER THE TONGUE takes us on an intimate daughter. She is in search of the child who was transformed. At the journey and makes us witness (or partake in) the infringement of one’s heart of this round shaped as a duel, another curious child, the younger, hidden thoughts and desires. After reading his elder daughter’s diary, discovers her love for nature. Against the bark, in the ground, the one mother, feeling to what extend they have drifted apart, takes her fantasies are released. The unknown tree becomes all the sudden and her younger daughter for a walk in the forest. But above the scenic father, brother and lover. It is the missing part, the balance to be found. background, above the pictures that linger on the elder daughter’s lips, Three women’s generations observe their selves in the reflections of a skin and nymph-like hair, floats the erotic poetry of her diary’s entries. lake where the mother, dives into the words of her daughter, pursues After all our senses are engaged, the perversity of infringing on one’s the erotic experience that is lacking in her life. To grow up leaves intimacy is belittled by the philosophic and poetic sensuality. bruises on the bodies. A woman, left to the mere role of mother, forgot to allow herself to grow. But the children are there, such as guides, to (Andreea Udrea, BIEFF 2016) connect living spaces with others, imaginary. And their caresses come to wake the time passing by.
(Claude Forestier)
REBEL WITH A CAUSE FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Competiton Pardi di Domani – Festival del
\\ Film Locarno 2015 / Competition – Festival International du Film Francophone Namur 2015 / Solothurn Filmtage 2016
WORLD SALES: GARIDI FILMS 108 E: [email protected] | W : www.garidifilms.ch
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] SUNDAY LUNCH 13, 2015, France DIRECTOR: CÉLINE DEVAUX
CAST: Vincent Macaigne, George Blagden SCRIPTWRITER: Céline Devaux ANIMATION: Céline Devaux EDITING: Céline Devaux, Chloé Mercier SOUND: Lionel Guenoun MUSIC: Flavien Berger PRODUCER: Ron Dyens PRODUCTION COMPANY: Sacrebleu Productions
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
CÉLINE DEVAUX
FILM PRESENTATION: In SUNDAY LUNCH, the experimental delirium DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: I recently became very aware of the changes of hand-drawn animation, music and voice encapsulates the essence that come along with the first ‘grown up’ experiences, and especially in of all family lunches’ atmosphere. Jean, a young adult, stuck in the the way you consider time. In the family circle, time is an elastic concept family Sunday lunch routine, has to cope with the usual weekly inquiries when you’re growing up, there is seldom such a thing as lacking time. You and boredom. The lunch guests – Jean’s parents, maiden aunts share mornings, evenings, and when you are a teenager, sometimes too and grandmother – take a keen interest in his personal life, sexual much time with your parents and siblings. When you reach this uncertain orientation, job and house. The family reunion stimulates nostalgic age when apparently you are an adult, time is abruptly shrunken to thoughts, discussions on traffic and Tupperware and comments on socially-defined time capsules, such as the Sunday lunch. taxes and life. Enhanced by comedian’s Vincent Macaigne voice and the All the leverage and total transparency that comes with shared everyday instrumental rhythm, the animation’s originality and visual delirium life is replaced by a need to define oneself, even unconsciously, during the hint at both the guests’ tipsiness and unconsciousness. In the end, three hours you are given to do so. And even in the smartest families, three the French director’s Céline Devaux animation sets the scene for a hours is never enough time to be utterly thorough, utterly honest. meditation on growing up, the passing of time, and their effects on intrafamilial dynamics. (CÉLINE DEVAUX for The New Current)
(Andreea Udrea, BIEFF)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Nominated Palme d’Or - Best Short Film, BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Nominated Queer Palm - Short Film – Cannes Film Festival 2015 / \\ Won Best Short Film – Animation – César Awards 2016 / Best French Speaking Animation, Special Jury Award National Competition – Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2016 / Won Silver Hugo Best Animated Short – Chicago International Film Festival 2015.
WORLD SALES: AUTOUR DE MINUIT T: +33 (0)1 42 81 17 28 | E: [email protected] 109 W: www.autourdeminuit.com
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: W: https://vimeo.com/celinedevaux WELCOME AND... OUR CONDOLENCES 30’, 2012, Israel DIRECTOR: LEON PRUDOVSKY
CAST: Ola Schur-Selektar, Gera Sandler, Irit Kaplan, Vitaly SPECIAL PROGRAM SPECIAL Voskoboynikov, Yigal Adika, Anabella Danka Yaakov, Roza Livshitz SCRIPTWRITER: Leon Prudovsky CINEMATOGRAPHY: Israel (Sergei) Friedman EDITING: Evgeny Ruman SOUND: Michael Goorevich, Slava Frenklach MUSIC: Amsterdam Klezmer Band PRODUCER: Haim Mecklberg, Estee Yacov-Mecklberg WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
LEON PRUDOVSY
FILM PRESENTATION: The year is 1991. Young Misha together with his DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: In 1991 I immigrated to Israel from the family and his aunt Roza migrate from the Soviet Union to Israel. Using Soviet Union. My father gave me a camera so I won’t get in the way of a home-video camera, the 12-year-old boy documents this journey my parents, who were busy and stressed, so I started to shoot. Last year, and more than 20 years later, he recreates in WELCOME AND... OUR 21 years later, I decided to make probably the most intimate film I have CONDOLENCES, the emotional state and the reactions generated ever done, and probably I will ever do. I decided to tell the story of my inside himself by the whole immigration process. Merging original immigration, in my comic way, but nevertheless truthful, based on my and staged shots, director LEON PRUDOVSKY pushes the account memories, what it was for a 12 years old kid to change his home, his of the traumatic experiences of immigration towards the absurd, as country, his language and culture. Now, 21 years later I feel I can look Aunt Roza’s passing away in the aeroplane, during the flight to Israel, back, with my adult point of view, with my understanding of the society triggers a series of tragicomic episodes, which convey the feelings of I live in, and tell this story, a story of wishful expectations and absurd confusion, helplessness and senselessness experienced by the director reality, a story of helplessness in front of the unknown, a story of the old at the age of 12. and the new worlds, the story of immigration.
(Andreea Udrea, BIEFF 2016) I chose to tell from the same point of view, of me 21 years younger and I even used some shots I have made back then, combining those documentary shots it with the “staged” mockumentary ones, hoping to FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Youth Jury Award – Clermont-Ferrand ISFF 2013 / get the closest feeling to what I remember.
REBEL WITH A CAUSE Silver Bir – Seoul International Drama Awards 2013 / CINÉ+ Award – Montpellier (LEON PRUDOVSKY) International Mediterranean FF / Best Short Film – Golden Apricot - Yerevan IFF \\ 2013 / Grand Prix – International Film Festival Nancy Lorraine / Best Short Film – Jameson CineFest International Film Festival, Miskolc, Hungary / Best Short Film, Best Actress – NY Picture Start IFF 2013 / Best Short Film – New Jersey IFF 2013 / Best Independent Short - Tel Aviv SIFF 2013/ Best Short Film, Audience Award, TV Acquisition Rights Award – Panoazorian IFF 2013/ Audience Award – Kaliber ISFF 35, Munich / Best Script – La Cabina – Valencia WORLD SALES: 2-Team Productions: T: + 972 3 687 5111 110 E: [email protected] | W : www.2teamproductions.com EXPERIMENTED IN ROMANIA
SPECIAL PROGRAM BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL \\
111 BUCHAREST. A WORLD OF ION BÂRLĂDEANU AND CARMEN LIDIA VIDU 9’, 2015, Romania DIRECTOR: CARMEN LIDIA VIDU SPECIAL PROGRAM SPECIAL CAST: Ion Bârlădeanu CINEMATOGRAPHY: Adi Bulboacă EDITING: Cristina Baciu MUSIC: Ovidiu Chihaia
CARMEN LIDIA VIDU
FILM PRESENTATION: Ion Bârlădeanu is already an iconic figure, DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: The movie depicts an urban, cultural, known worldwide as a homeless art-world darling starring in Alexander emotional and fantastic Bucharest. It is composed of houses, buildings, Nanău’s documentary, ”The World According to Ion B.” CARMEN parks but also of movie characters, a political and real world, of LIDIA VIDU portrays him as a unique soul who ingenuously asserts his imagined-mainstream figures of today. Ion Bârlădeanu is a character obsessions and favourite things found in Bucharest. Through editing in his own right: he has always dreamt of playing in the movies, of she captures fragments of his digressive desires and memories, becoming a hero...The collages he creates are nothing more than his emphasizing his mercurial personality joined by a significant number of own movies, therefore he is a truly director; he imagines all kind of real and fictional figures which exist in his famous collages. She reaches stories. The inherent dynamics of Ion Bârlădeanu’s collages is in tune his iconography following his artistic direction swamped in irony and with the director’s rhythm of her art video, providing a well-planned social critique. The collages he puts together are his own films but surprise. There is no contrast between the two visual approaches, on Carmen succeeds to create a moving collage placing him in the center the contrary, they make the most of each other. of his own picture. (CARMEN LIDIA VIDU) (Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF 2016) EXPERIMENTED ROMANIA IN \\ FESTIVALS/AWARDS: International premiere
WORLD SALES: E: [email protected] | T: 0722151011 112 W: bucuresti-ion-barladeanu.tumblr.com | W: www.carmenlidiavidu.ro REVOLUTIONARY GEAR: THE HISTORY OF ART RETOLD THROUGH THE BLACK SQUARE 16’, 2015, Romania DIRECTOR: VEDA POPOVICI
CONCEPT & PERFORMANCE: Veda Popovici CINEMATOGRAPHY: Alexandru Dan SOUND: Witch Microphone VOICE: Mihaela Drăgan
VEDA POPOVICI
FILM PRESENTATION: VEDA POPOVICI depicts through this video CURATOR’S STATEMENT: The artist’s body of theoretical work is performance a series of tableaux vivants inspired by art poses of massive, supporting the claims made in the work itself. It is certainly Renaissance paintings, Orientalism or sculptures (such as Venus de no accident that over the course of the instructional video, POPOVICI Milo), providing an intensive discourse about art history retold through at various times looks like contemporary depictions (and misguided the black square created by Kazimir Malevich one hundred years ago. conflations) of terrorism – and indeed, she suggests that the ‘threat’ The artist smashes this sign of erudition and class distinction with an of the work is its most potent component. The attachment of new enchanted story that guides its audience to reflect moments in the meaning to Black Square is itself, perhaps, a kind of revolution. The re- art history and its political contexts. Her delicate movements and historicisation is repeated in the artist’s borrowing from her own oeuvre discerning eyes, disguised and cloacked with the same black square – the triangles from last year’s LGBT workshop, the monumental nature brings attention to the patriarchal structures which dominated our of their presentation from Migrant’s Monument (2014), the attack on world, highlighting a feminist discourse which invites you to choose the supposed neutrality of law and the figure concealed in black derives your own revolutionary gear: to participate or to watch. from Story of the Fall #3 (2014). More than previously in POPOVICI’s works, perhaps, REVOLUTIONARY GEAR has a reflexive quality, flirting (Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF 2016) with introversion, recycling concerns as if re-examining past decisions.
(Richard Pettifer, ARTA Magazine, 2015) BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL \\ FESTIVALS/AWARDS: International premiere
WORLD SALES: E: [email protected] | [email protected] 113
DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: W: http://veda-popovici.blogspot.ro/ NO SHELTER FROM THE STORM 6’, 2015, Romania DIRECTOR: ARNOLD ESTEFÁN & ANCA BENERA
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Anca Benera & Arnold Estefán, SPECIAL PROGRAM SPECIAL Mihai Dină, Liviu Dochiță AERIAL FOOTAGE: Cosmin Giurgiu, Ionuț Voinescu EDITING: Anca Benera & Arnold Estefán SOUND: Attila Faravelli
ARNOLD ESTEFÁN & ANCA BENERA
FILM PRESENTATION: NO SHELTER FROM THE STORM is a video- DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: The Eastern European landscape of mass installation set in woodland that has been devastated by deforestation deforestation provides a backdrop for the song whistled by the artists. and therefore offers no place to hide for those escaping any kind The tune is that of the famous 1960s anti-war song “Where have all the of conflict. Besides its ecological viewpoint which talks in terms of flowers gone”, which has been recorded and performed in many different mass destruction by multinational corporations, the video echoes languages over the years. The original lyrics were adapted by Peter about human condition and loneliness in a homeland that struggles to Seeger in 1956 from a Ukrainian Cossack folk tune mentioned in Mikhail maintain its habitat. An optimistic note is provided by the intermingled Sholokhov’s 1928 novel “And Quiet Flows the Don”, in which war –in the whistling seen as a solitary struggle, in the hope of collective solidarity. form of both international conflict and civil uprising – provides the epic Shot in black and white, the textural images offer a timelessness backdrop to the narrative. Throughout history, forests have provided a feeling of insecurity, while camera movements depict a paradox natural place for people to hide in times of war. Fleeing to the forest was between the absence of the forest and its beauty. often the only choice. Today, in a political landscape in which militarism, global power and war in all its forms are becoming a way of life, almost (Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF 2016) half of the forests that once covered the Earth are gone.
(ARNOLD ESTEFÁN & ANCA BENERA)
EXPERIMENTED ROMANIA IN FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Exhibition: Walking without Footprints, tranzit.
\\ sk - Bratislava, Slovacia 2016/ Exhibition: Austeria, BWA Sokol - Nowy Sącz, Polonia 2015/ Exhibition: The School of Kyiv -The Biennale, Kyiv, Ucraina 2015.
WORLD SALES: W: www.ancabenera.ro | W: www.arnoldestefan.ro 114 E: [email protected] EXERCISING FAILURE 5’, 2013, Romania DIRECTOR: DRAGOȘ ALEXANDRESCU
CAST: Amanda Storm, Dragoș Alexandrescu CINEMATOGRAPHY: Dragoș Alexandrescu, Jukka Rajala-Granstubb SOUND: Stefan Backas EDITING: Dragoș Alexandrescu
DRAGOȘ ALEXANDRESCU
FILM PRESENTATION: DRAGOȘ ALEXANDRESCU is willing to DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Watching someone knit can be a visible show us how the simulative nature of our existence, of the inherent reminder that there are things more valuable than efficiency’ (Kate constraints of the system affect us in our daily life and in our personal M.Daley). The art piece is a documentation of a handicraft process development. The biggest three doctrines exposed with their specific that turned away from its commercial/ornamental purpose and books: marxism, religion and capitalism are buried under the failure of become critical/political.The video is a personal interpretation of the the entire society; they’re being deconstructed through a meticulous contemporary society, in which the idea of failing is getting more like a work process of tearing out and aligning paper fragments in a highly taboo subject to deal with. According with some researchers of cognitive organized labor which gives us the successful ideological image, that of science, knitting is a good example of accepting the failure easier. binding together people. However, the counterpoint is the girl who sits Expanding this idea, my project is dealing with the failure of the society and knits and rejects the nostalgia of simpler times, emphasizing the rather than an individual one, a ‘dogmatic’ failure in which the perfection fact that having flaws still let you succeed in your creation and in what is infallible and can’t be denied. must be reconstructed.
(Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF 2016) (DRAGOȘ ALEXANDRESCU)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Viennafair – Vienna, Austria, 2013/ Silencio – BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Paris, France, 2014/ Loop Fair – Barcelona, Spain, 2014/ ”Appearance \\ & Essence” Contemporary Art Encounters – Timișoara, România 2015/ Between Democracies 1989-2014 – Johannesburg, South Africa 2015/ In Times of Hope and Unrest – MNAC, Bucharest, Romania 2015.
WORLD SALES: E: [email protected] 115 AT THE MIRROR 11’, 2015, Romania DIRECTOR: LARISA CRUNȚEANU
CAST: Larisa Crunțeanu SPECIAL PROGRAM SPECIAL
LARISA CRUNȚEANU
FILM PRESENTATION: In this video LARISA CRUNȚEANU performs DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: “This is a performative video which herself in front of a ”fictional” mirror that extends her beauty routine disappears with every projection. Every new presentation of it is a and converts this action in a memory with every projection of it. A recording of the previous projection. Just like memories, in the end the young girl watches herself in the mirror while she combs her hair and image disappears, leaving behind a fiction resembling the original story. braids it. Her act of performance is underlined by a song she sings; (LARISA CRUNȚEANU) the lyrics are from George Coșbuc – a Romanian poet – which also portrays a beautiful and unique girl with braids. The worshipping tone given by his poetry is overthrown by the final act of our performer. She Larisa Crunțeanu studied Photography and Moving Image and is currently cuts her hair and, therefore, destroys the myth of beauty through her a PHD candidate at the National Arts University of Bucharest. She works authenticity and confidence. at the intersection of video and performance between research and speculation, often collaboratively, creating contexts for the emergence of (Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF 2016) new practices and organisation. From 2012 together with Xandra Popescu she powers Atelier 35, a project space from Bucharest.
EXPERIMENTED ROMANIA IN FESTIVALS/AWARDS: International premiere \\
WORLD SALES: E: [email protected] | T: 0727779636 116 COBALT BLUE 12’, 2015, Romania DIRECTOR: DIANA MIRON
CREDITS: Marina Oprea, Methos Alexandru, Mihai Gheorghe, Gabriela Mateescu
DRAGOȘ ALEXANDRESCU
FILM PRESENTATION: This video performance – two frames in which DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Far from the intention to emanate sexuality, the artist lets a blue liquid flow down a girl’s naked body and mouth COBALT BLUE combines two frames, favoring a parallelism of ideas, – delivers an intensive course which talks about the most important reaching instead a space of comfort and vulnerability; a human fragility factors of defining and understanding aesthetics. Over the course completely permeable to everyday fireworks that give the illusion of of history, art has had many different fixed meanings but the most meaning, obstacles to spiritual elevation. The climax is numb and it difficult thing to define was related to aesthetics. Its interpretation is follows a road between ignorance and helplessness and vice versa. The deepened in the spirit of time and in the nature of being – just like the aesthetic insensibility, coming from the assimilation derived from the two frames which reflect susceptibility and embodiment. The deep synthetic mundane (whether it is subliminal or undisguised) and the incursion in aesthetics shapes the consciousness through our personal human alienation opposite the semantic oscillation in the collective experiences and circumstances, whereas our senses aren’t recorded; consciousness of the concept of time becomes a perpetual violence we let ourselves transformed through senses, guiding our aspirations towards information. and values, reflecting upon perceptual differences which submit to the (DIANA MIRON) idea that we were systematically made as aesthetic beings.
(Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF 2016)
FESTIVALS/AWARDS: International premiere BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL \\
WORLD SALES: E: [email protected] 117 SIDE EVENTS:
Experimental Film Workshop NISI MASA
BIEFF opens LIKE CNDB 2016
Panel: The Lifespan of Cinematic Experimentation - Festival Strategies and Beyond
BIEFF on MUBI
Săptămâna sunetului / Sound Week \\
118 Experimental Film Workshop NISI MASA The Experimental Film Workshop is organized by NISI MASA European Network of Young Cinema, during Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF), between 14 – 20 March.
COORDINATORS: Sorina Ioana Diaconu, the initiator and manager of the project, NISI MASA collaborator and member of the international kino movement and Vlad Andrei Ghinea, director an double alumnus of the NISI MASA workshop, co-founder of the independent production company mc2 film.
TUTORS: Edina Csüllög (http://edinacsullog.com/) Hungarian director and producer, based in Estonia, the creator of the Fino-Ugric Film Festival, founder of NISI MASA Estonia and the Fino-Ugric film fund, Adela Muntean (http:// During the 10-day workshop, 30 young filmmakers from transcinemaexpress.com/) transmedia director and researcher developing Argentina, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, creative concepts that fall within the documentary genre, awarded a Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Russia, Master’s Degree graded excellent and the professional qualification of Sweden, The Netherlands, The United Kingdom and The USA - Media Designer at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest, directors, cinematographers, editors, sound designers, visual Hungary (2015), Francesco Berta (http://francescoberta.com), Italian artists, musicians, composers and performing artists, will be composer and visual artist, based in London, alumnus of the NISI MASA guided by tutors and create short cinematic experiments that workshop in 2014, Mihai Patrascu, CEO and founder of VrView (http:// will be premiered on the very last day of the festival. vrview.ro/), a company that focuses on 360 creative video and virtual reality app development. Along the four tutors, the participants will The working method of the workshop is collaboration, interact with a diverse community of local artists and musicians. reflection and sharing with fellow participants, with the aim of learning, exploring and developing creativity together, The three previous editions of the workshop (November 2012, December combining the principles of the international kino movement 2013 and 2014) have brought together NISI MASA, BIEFF, The National with film school exam frenzy. University of Theatre and Film “I.L. Caragiale” (UNATC), National University of Art, Radio GrooveOn, Refresh Vision, Cinelabs România, This year’s edition encourages and supports the relationship Hostel Doors and Ceainăria Cinci, Cetatea Artelor, Radio DelaHaze, The between film, music, mapping and live performance, aiming to CAN, Carol 53, Elisabeta, The French Institute, Ballasi Institute, Control render obsolete the gap between the screen and the audience, Club and J’ai Bistrot as partners and supporters. The most recent making by making the whole process a great interactive experience for of material can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/122304190. all those involved.
NISI MASA is a European network of associations present in 26 countries. BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Keep up with us: These associations consist of young professionals (aged 18-35), students www.facebook.com/nisimasa | www.vimeo.com/nisimasa | and enthusiasts with a common cause – European cinema.students and \\ www.twitter.com/nisimasanetwork enthusiasts with a common cause - European cinema.
WITH THE SUPPORT OF:
119 BIEFF opens LIKE CNDB 2016 Thursday, March 17th, 7:00pm SIDE EVENT
SYMMETRY, by Ruben van Leer
Screening, making of and debate, with the participation of the director
This year’s BIEFF edition partners with the National Dance Centre Bucharest to open together the third edition of the LIKE CNDB Festival. Stere Popescu Hall will host the screening of the first fiction film shot in The Large Hadron Collider at CERN – Symmetry, a dance-film / dance-opera. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Ruben van Leer, the director and writer of the film, alongside experts and journalists from the fields of culture and science. An evening dedicated to the meeting between intimacy and technology. SIDE EVENTS LIKE CNDB supports thought and experimentation with no set interpretations, and invites you to a series of eclectic events between 17 March \\ and 17 April, most of which are scheduled at the Stere Popescu Hall in Bucharest. The festival aims to bring together in the urban art space an alternative audience enthusiastic about contemporary dance, performance, theatre and experimental film, concerts, screenings, conferences or debates on such topics. LIKE CNDB 2016 fosters abandoned art expressions, such as ‘hybrid forms of performance and other related representations, resulting out of the encounter between arts’.
The complete schedule is available on www.cndb.ro. 120 Panel: The Lifespan of Cinematic Experimentation Festival Strategies and Beyond Saturday, March 19th, 3:30pm, French Institute Foyer
The panel is conceived as a meeting platform for the international PARTICIPANTS: professionals invited at the festival, the main Romanian PAOLO BERTOLIN — Member of the Selection Committee, Venice educational institutions in the field of cinema and visual arts - the International Film Festival National University of Theatre and Film Bucharest and the National University of Arts Bucharest - and film / visual arts students and ULRICH ZIEMONS — Program Coordinator, Berlin International Film professionals. The seminar is an opportunity which should not be Festival – Forum Expanded missed by young Romanian filmmakers and artists, functioning LUDOVIC CHAVAROT — Member of the Selection Committee, Clermont- as an introduction to the international cinema and visual arts Ferrand International Short Film Festival – LABO Competition markets. The seminar is open to all those interested to learn directly from and to gain insight in the experience of experts in ROEE ROSEN — Visual artist and filmmaker, winner of the BIEFF 2011 & major festivals such as Berlinale, Venice IFF and Clermont-Ferrand 2014 Main Awards ISFF, regardless of their creative genre or experience.
THE FILMS:
BIEFF on The Astronauts, by Chris Marker & Walerian Borowczyk (France, 1959, 14’)
La Jetée, by Chris Marker (France, 1962, 29’) BIEFF 2016, in collaboration with MUBI, offers a series of films created by seminal auteurs from the history of experimental Coming Attractions, by Peter Tscherkassky (Austria, 2010, 25’) cinema, to be streamed by MUBI subscribers for a month, starting No compteu amb els dits, by Pere Portabella (Spain, 1968, 26’) with the 7th of March, 2016. On each day until March 13th a new work is made available, and each of them can be streamed for 30 7p., cuis., s. de b., ... à saisir, by Agnès Varda (France, 1984, 27’) days. MUBI is a curated online cinema bringing you cult, classic, Ghosts Before Breakfast, by Hans Richter (Germany, 1928, 6’) independent, and award-winning movies. Available in over 200 countries around the globe and on multiple devices, a subscription Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol: Friendships and Intersections, to MUBI is a passport to the world of cinema. by Jonas Mekas (USA, 1982, 38’) BUCHAREST EXPERIMENTAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL La Jetée Scenes from The Life Of Andy Warhol Friendships \\ And Intersections
121 Sound Week Thursday, March 17th, 7:00pm
SIDE EVENT Săptămâna Sunetului/Sound Week wants to give ears the same attention that the big screen attracts. By addressing sound together with BIEFF, we mean its use in experiments with film, and what better way to start than with Dada, and end with the noise music scene in China!
But Săptămâna Sunetului/Sound Week is also a sound installation with field recordings from Bucharest, a conference with renowned ethnomusicologist Speranța Rădulescu about her life work, a performance with Charlemagne Palestine, a concert with composer and improviser Maja Osojnik & local PFA Orchestra – improvisers in training – and acousmatic music with Stephan Dunkelman, the premiere of a 5.1 surround radio fiction by Ilinca Stihi, a conference about noise and health with Dr. Cristian Mocanu, workshops and presentations...
Because sound can be cinematic, musical, experimental, dangerous, misrepresented and misunderstood, but also a political issue and an identity.
We invite you to discover a full program online at www.saptamanasunetului.ro
Selection from an Artist’s Life, Die Toteninsel by Sándor Vály Ecce homo, a portrait of Célestin Deliège part of the series DADAWORKS – short is a Dada “reconstruction” the artist filmed in is a documentary by Guy-Marc Hinant clips put together by Sándor Vály between 2015 using a 1919 Karl Georg Zwerenz (1874- and Dominique Lohlé filmed in 2011. 2005-2013 in which the artist explores time, 1933) script, which he discovered by chance. It is presented together with another loneliness, vanity and the luxury of facing It recounts the story of the painting with the documentary feature, Fuck you: Fucking death as that which poisons the creative same name by Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901). Noise in China Now, done by the same team
SIDE EVENTS process, often forcing madness in the Music by Éva Polgár and Sándor Vály. from the Belgium label Sub Rosa in 2012. picture. This combo starts thus with the theories \\ of the last great modernist musicologist Célestin Deliège and reaches very far, where the entire avant-guarde esthetics stands on its head, the noise music scene in China. “Because of good documentary starts from an intensification of what i mean is...”
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