10th edition  2020

A brave new world

24 ⁄ 29 NOV. PARTNERS

6 Concept

8 Festival Board

10 Festival Team

11 UNATC / UNARTE Presentation

12 Partner Festivals

15 About the 2020 Edition

17 International Competition Jury

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

19 A BRAVE NEW WORLD - EMBRACING UTOPIA International Competition I

25 A BRAVE NEW WORLD – THE SPECTRE OF DYSTOPIA International Competition II

31 PUBLIC EYE, PRIVATE I International Competition III

39 THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY International Competition IV

47 AN ACT OF VIOLENCE International Competition V

55 SUBLIME BODIES International Competition VI

65 A STATE OF GRACE International Competition VII

SPECIAL PROGRAMS

73 GOLDEN SHORTS: BEST FILMS IN MAJOR FESTIVALS

79 BERLINALE SPOTLIGHT: FORUM EXPANDED

85 BIEFF - A DECADE OF CINEMATIC INNOVATION

SIDE EVENTS

96 PANELS @ BIEFF 2020 Special Acknowledgments to all the filmmakers, producers and distributors whose films are screened in BIEFF 2020 and to the following persons and institutions:

Alice Lea - LUX Films Ioana Dragomirescu – French Institute Bucharest

Anca Drăgoi - Fundația 9 Irit Neidhardt - Mec Film

Anca Poterașu - Galeria Anca Poterașu Joachim Umlauf - Goethe Institut

Andreea Chindriș - Ministerul Culturii Małgorzata Kramek - KFF Sales & Promotion

Angelika Ramlow – Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art María Vera - Kino Rebelde Berlin Marina Neacșu – Goethe-Institut Bucharest Bela Zoltan - Diptych Artspace Marta Świętek - KFF Sales & Promotion Brigitta Burger-Utzer – Sixpackfilm Austria Marthe Lamy - Apaches Films Camelia Ciucă – Romanian National Film Center Miguel Armas - Light Cone Carmen Stejeroiu – Romanian National Film Center Natalia Trebik – Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Cătălin Bălescu – UNARTE National University of Arts Bucharest Contemporains

Centrul de Teatru Educațional Replika Paolo Moretti – Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, Cannes Film Festival Charlotte Procter - LUX Films Perrine Bernollin - Autour de Minuit Chloé Cavillier - La Fémis Peter Greenaway Claudia Sánchez Jiménez - Video Power Salette Ramalho – Agência da Curta Metragem Dietmar Schwärzler – Sixpackfilm Austria Suzana Dan - Rezidența 9 Dorina Oargă - TIFF Unlimited Thomas Kaske - Kaske Film Edith van der Heijde – EYE Film Institute Netherlands Ulrich Ziemons – Berlinale Forum Expanded Elise Notseck - SHORT/CUTS Wouter Jansen – Square Eyes Filipa Henriques – Portugal Film Xavier Leroux - Institutul Francez ​Flavio Armone - Lights On and to all BIEFF 2020 media partners and festival friends. Ingrid Ene - Galeria Anca Poterașu Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival BIEFF - Concept

Created under the patronage of the National University of We believe BIEFF is a highly necessary event, its main goal Theatre and Film "I.L. Caragiale" and the National University of being to broaden perception, to open a whole new artistic Arts Bucharest, with the support of the Ministry of Culture of territory, both for the general and the specialized audience, Romania and the Romanian National Film Center, BUCHAREST particularly for film and visual art students. INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL BIEFF has as its main focus the experimental in cinema and experimental Therefore we present films which are lessons in cinema, visual art. emblematic pieces, eye-openers with regard to the unlimited possibilities offered by the cinematic medium, the ways to Founded by film director, screenwriter and university professor transcend any possible borders between fiction, documentary Copel Moscu and Golden Bear winning director Adina Pintilie, and visual art, the transgression of boundaries on every level BIEFF is the first showcase of avant-garde cinema and visual art ranging from concept, structure, rhythm, to the construction of in Romania, a non-commercial event with educational purpose, the shot. aimed at bringing to the audience highly innovative films and filmmakers with strong personal views on contemporary The centerpiece of the programme of films that BIEFF reality, which also daringly explore the boundaries of cinematic proposes is its INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILM language. A cinema of total creative freedom and lack of COMPETITION, consisting of some of the most intriguing compromise. and innovative visual experiments from the past year, titles awarded and screened in prestigious festivals, museums and Starting with 2012, PETER GREENAWAY has become the galleries all over the world, such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, HONORARY PRESIDENT of the Bucharest International Rotterdam, Locarno, Oberhausen, Toronto, etc. Experimental Film Festival BIEFF, generously joining us in our \\ educational initiative.

6 In 2020, the competition comprises 39 films directed by artists Festival, BERLINALE Forum Expanded – Berlin International from 24 countries, grouped into 7 theme programmes that Film Festival, ARSENAL Institute for Film and Video Art, invite the audience to reflect on topics that are of relevance International Film Festival ROTTERDAM, SARAJEVO to the current social and political context, but also to imagine Film Festival, Le FRESNOY – Studio National des Arts alternative scenarios about the present and the future. Contemporains, SIXPACKFILM Austria and EYE Film Institute Netherlands, who bring to Bucharest a selection of highly As for each of our editions, we are honored to welcome in innovative multi-awarded films from their selections each year, our International Competition Jury prestigious films and and with whom continue our fruitful collaborations for this visual arts professionals such as: MAHA MAAMOUN – artist anniversary edition of our festival. and curator, representative of BERLINALE Forum Expanded; CHARLOTTE SERRAND – filmmaker and curator, representative of QUINZAINE DES RÈALISATEURS; IRINA TROCAN – film critic and lecturer at the Film Faculty of the National University of Theatre and Film "I.L. Caragiale" in Bucharest.

Furthermore, during its ten years of existence BIEFF was honored to collaborate with some of the major international film festivals and institutions in the area of avant-garde cinema and visual art, recognized worldwide for their consistent creative support of innovative, radical filmmaking BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL and visual art: QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS – Cannes Film \\

7 FESTIVAL BOARD

PETER GREENAWAY COPEL MOSCU ADINA PINTILIE HONORARY PRESIDENT FESTIVAL DIRECTOR FESTIVAL CO-FOUNDER

Since 2012, Peter Greenaway has been the Copel Moscu is the director and main founder Adina Pintilie is the co-founder and Honorary President of Bucharest International of Bucharest International Experimental Film international partnerships consultant of Experimental Film Festival Bucharest BIEFF. Festival BIEFF. One of the key authors of the Bucharest International Experimental Film One of the key voices of contemporary avant- Romanian Documentary New Wave from the Festival BIEFF. A graduate of the National garde cinema, Peter Greenaway is one of the ‘80s (together with Ovidiu Bose Paștină, Tereza University of Theatre and Film Bucharest, most ambitious and controversial experimental Barta, Laurențiu Damian, Sabina Pop), he was a filmmaker and curator Pintilie works on the filmmakers of our time. Trained as a painter pioneer in challenging the borders of cinematic boundary between fiction, reality and visual and heavily influenced by theories of structural language in controversial, subversive films, art. In the new Romanian cinema landscape, linguistics, ethnography, and philosophy, Peter which concealed under daring conceptual and her body of work stands out through a Greenaway’s films often traverse unexplored formal experimentation a fierce criticism of highly personal visual style, daring cinematic territories, rejecting conventional narrative the communist regime, many of which were experimentation and an uncompromising structures in favor of an awe-striking imagery, banned by the establishment’s censorship. exploration of human psychology. Her first constantly testing the limits and canons of Copel Moscu created over 50 short and feature feature TOUCH ME NOT won the Golden the cinematic medium. Regularly nominated films (The Evening School, On the Ozana Bear and the GFWW First Feature Award in prestigious film festivals such as Cannes, Shore, My Beloved School, The Bronze Age, A at Berlinale 2018, followed by an extensive Venice and Berlin, he has an impressive body Day Will Come, I Chose Freedom), as director festival circuit and cinema distribution in of work, consisting of 13 feature films and over and scriptwriter, for which he was awarded more than 35 countries. The film was also 50 shorts and documentaries, plus exhibitions, over 25 international and national prizes. He nominated for the European Discovery 2018 visual installations, VJ performances, paintings, presently teaches film directing at the National – Prix FIPRESCI at the European Film Awards, books, opera librettos. His first narrative University of Theatre and Film “I.L. Caragiale” selected in major international festivals: feature film, The Draughtsman’s Contract, ( U N ATC ) and video art at the National Toronto, Karlovy Vary, BFI London, Viennale, completed in 1982, received great critical University of Arts Bucharest (UNARTE) and Sarajevo, Sydney, Seville, Jerusalem, Moscow,

\\ acclaim and established him internationally is referred to as an artistic consultant for Thessaloniki etc. and screened in cultural as an original filmmaker, a reputation television and cinema. In 2010, consistent venues such as MOMA Museum of Modern Art consolidated by his following films, such as The with his free innovative vision and educational Cook, the Thief, His Wife, And Her Lover, The commitment, he took the challenge to offer Pillow Book and The Tulse Luper Suitcases. Romanian audiences, and particularly cinema and visual arts students, the first International Experimental Film Festival in Romania: BIEFF. 8 OANA GHERA FLAVIA DIMA ARTISTIC DIRECTOR ASSOCIATE CURATOR

New York and ICA Institute of Contemporary Oana Ghera studied film criticism and Working as a film critic since 2015, Flavia Arts London. Adina Pintilie’s medium length screenwriting at the National University of Dima is an alumn of the Center for Excellence DON’T GET ME WRONG premiered in Locarno Theatre and Film in Bucharest. During her in Image Studies, with a masters’ thesis on 2007 - Filmmakers of the Present Competition, studies she was a contributing editor for Film Romanian Queer Cinema, and of international won the Golden Dove Award at Dok Leipzig Menu and she participated in international programmes such as Berlinale Talents (2018), and screened in 50 international festivals such programs dedicated to film critics such as Locarno Critics Academy (2018), Sarejevo as: Thessaloniki, Montpellier, Trieste, Namur, Sarajevo Talents (2014), Nest Film Students, Talents (2017) and Warsaw FIPRESCI Young Munchen, Moscow, Sarajevo, Warsaw, Krakow during the 2014 edition of the San Sebastian Critics Project (2016). She is a collaborator of etc. International Film Festival, as well as in the Films in Frame, FILM MENU and Acoperișul Her medium length OXYGEN premiered in young jury of the Giornate degli Autori section de Sticlă, and her texts have been published Rotterdam Tiger Awards Shorts Competition of the Venice International Film Festival. in outlets such as MUBI Notebook, Reverse 2010, screened in BAFICI, Montpellier, Her professional activities include curatorship, Shot, Kinoscope and Scena9. She has an ample Thessaloniki, Tampere etc. Her short DIARY#2 film education and cultural management, with experience working for various local festivals won the ZONTA Award at Oberhausen cinema and audiovisual art as her primary such as TIFF and NexT, and was the lead International Short Film Festival 2013, while interest. She was the co-programmer of the programmer of the Filmul de Piatra national her previous short SANDPIT#186 (co-directed NexT International Film Festival, coordinator short film festival between 2017 and 2019. with George Chiper) premiered in Locarno of two film education programs - Education à 2008 and won the Runner Up Award at Miami l’image (2015-2018) and One World Romania Film Festival 2009. at School (2018-2020) – and starting 2019 she coordinates the activity of the cultural association Bloc Zero, which she co-founded. BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL \\

9 FESTIVAL TEAM

FESTIVAL DIRECTOR PRODUCTION & TECHNICAL ASSISTANT Copel Moscu Andrei Jakab

FESTIVAL CO-FOUNDER AND INTERNATIONAL VIDEO DEPARTMENT PARTNERSHIPS CONSULTANT Alice Gheorghiu – department coordinator Adina Pintilie Iulia Necșulescu – camera operator

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR PHOTO DEPARTMENT Oana Ghera Anda Stancescu

ASSOCIATE CURATOR TRANSLATIONS & SUBTITLING Flavia Dima Roxana Marin

FESTIVAL MANAGER & PRODUCTION COORDINATOR ACCOUNTING AND FINANCE Oana Furdea Gabriela Mitrofan – coordinator Cristina Serafim – accountant PROGRAMMING DEPARTMENT Ioana Florescu – department coordinator 10th BIEFF POSTER DESIGN Calin Boto, Emil Vasilache – curatorial texts Studio Fluid – Teodor Bradu Adina Marin – catalogue editor DESKTOP PUBLISHING PR & PRESS DEPARTMENT Mihaela Vas Alexandra Scînteianu – PR, press&website coordinator WEB DEVELOPER PRINT TRAFFIC & TECHNICAL DEPARTMENT Tiberiu Andrisan \\ Elena Gageanu – department coordinator

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, Adina Pintilie.

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. BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL 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.

11 PARTNER BERLINALE FORUM FESTIVALS / EXPANDED INSTITUTIONS

QUINZAINE DES

RÉALISATEURS CANNES The Berlinale Forum stands for new trends in world cinema and fresh narrative forms. Unconventional, essayistic works of cinema, long-term BERLINALE FORUM observations, documentaries, cinema from countries off the beaten track - everything which goes beyond the mainstream is brought together in EXPANDED this section of the Berlinale. There are few formal limitations when it comes to the selection of films, SARAJEVO FILM FESTIVAL resulting in even greater freedom. 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 INTERNATIONAL FILM varying themes and in multiple venues across Berlin, works in FORUM EXPANDED provide a critical perspective and an expanded sense of FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM cinematography.

Within the educational partnership with Bucharest International INTERNATIONAL Experimental Film Festival BIEFF, ARSENAL Institute for Film and Video Art have presented selections of thought provoking works from SHORT FILM FESTIVAL BERLINALE FORUM EXPANDED program. OBERHAUSEN \\

12 QUINZAINE DES SARAJEVO FILM RÉALISATEURS FESTIVAL

A parallel section of Cannes Film Festival created by the French The Sarajevo Film Festival is an international film festival with a special Directors Guild in the wake of the events of May ’68, QUINZAINE DES focus on the region of South-East Europe (Albania, Armenia, Austria, RÉALISATEURS (The DIRECTORS’ FORTHNIGHT) seeks to aid filmmakers Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, and contribute to their discovery by the critics and audiences alike. From Georgia, Hungary, Kosovo, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, its initial program in 1969, it cast its lot with the avant-garde (the glorious Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey), shining an international spotlight on seventies), as well as it created a breeding ground where the Cannes films, talent and future projects from the region. Festival would regularly find its prestigious auteurs. High quality programming, a strong industry segment, and educational Since its inception, QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS has showcased the and networking platform for young filmmakers and thus generated first films of Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima, presence of the international film industry, film authors and media George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Ken Loach, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke, representatives alongside a paying audience of over 100,000, confirm Chantal Akerman, Spike Lee, Luc et Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Sofia Coppola, its status as the leading film festival in the region, recognised by both Robert Bresson, Manoel de Oliveira, Stephen Frears, Jerzy Skolimowski, professionals and the wider audiences. The Competition Program gives William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppola among others. Among the various priority to the films which have either their world or the international sections at the Cannes Film Festival, QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS is premiere at the Sarajevo Film Festival. distinguished by its independentmindedness, its non-competitive nature Over the past years, this Program has become the most important and its concern to cater to non-professional Cannes audiences, which can meeting point of the Eastern European cinema. A most noteworthy buy a subscription for the entire Fortnight program or purchase tickets section of the Competition Program is Short Films, which presents for individual screenings. films by young and courageous authors who examine the borders film Striving to be eclectic and receptive to all forms of cinematic expression, language and create powerful interpretations of the world around us. BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL \\ BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS pays particular attention to the annual In an emerging territory of more than 140 million inhabitants, Sarajevo production of fiction features, short films and documentaries, to the Film Festival serves as a common platform for film businesses from all emergence of independent fringe filmmaking, and even to contemporary over the region, setting the future standards in festival organisation, film popular genres, provided these films are the expression of an individual promotion and presentation in South Eastern Europe. talent and an original directorial style

13 INTERNATIONAL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL SHORT FILM ROTTERDAM FESTIVAL OBERHAUSEN

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) offers a high quality The International Short Film Festival OBERHAUSEN is one of the major line-up of carefully selected fiction and documentary feature films, international crossroads for the short form, unique in the range of forms short films and media art. IFFR is one of the largest audience and and genres it presents to the public, and particularly well known for its industry-driven film festivals in the world. Famously, only seventeen spotlight on experimentation. In the course of more than five decades, people attended the opening night of the first Film International filmmakers and artists ranging from Roman Polanski to Cate Shortland, Rotterdam on 28 June 1972. from George Lucas to Pipilotti Rist, have presented their first works in OBERHAUSEN. Presently, during twelve festival days, hundreds of filmmakers and other artists present their work to a large audience. The festival’s Official The Festival organizes an International Competition, a Children’s and Selection includes feature, mid-length, and short films out of over 50 Youth Films and a German Competition and the MuVi Award for the best countries. The Shorts section of International Film Festival Rotterdam German music video as well as the NRW Competition for productions has no fixed agenda, boundaries or statement, but aims to show films from North Rhine- Westphalia. In addition, OBERHAUSEN is known for that are experimental, innovative and contemporary, with a maximum its strong line of thematic programs. length of 60 minutes. It contains, besides the regular competition and The festival also operates a well-stocked Video Library, a non- spectrum programs, special thematic and solo programs. commercial short film distribution branch and a unique archive of short The selection committee of the IFFR Shorts doesn’t thoroughly reflect films from more than 60 years of festival history. \\ in advance on what experimental or innovative means. They are rather “Short film is a great first step for a budding filmmaker. That’s how I interested in work that challenges generic designations (including the made my beginnings and OBERHAUSEN was an important step on my traditional “avant-garde”, “underground” or “video art” ones). Work may path to become a Director” says Roman Polanski, and Wim Wenders also draw on documentary, narrative, animation or any other tradition – remembers that “I smoked my first cigarette here. For years, I saw every or no tradition at all. single film at the Westdeutsche Kurzfilmtage, looking forward to those days in OBERHAUSEN every year. These events were important for me, 14 for my decision to become a filmmaker.” About the 2020 Edition

Oana Ghera, Artistic Director Flavia Dima, Associate Curator

This has been a year tainted by a crisis like no other the world has experienced for over a century, and which came as a superimposition on a wide range of distinct crises already in place in today's society from environmental issues to the migrant crisis, going through systemic violence, racism, and misogyny to name but a few. This whole setting invites us to contemplate the vision of a new world and to renegotiate our own relationships with the Other and with ourselves. But in order to do so, we need to conjure up the parameters that used to govern the functioning of the old world. Are we living in a time of monsters? Or is an Edenic vision of the world the last straw for us to cling to?

The 10th Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival creates a very special space, which invites reflection, debate and imagining alternate visions of a possible future. Caught between utopia and dystopia, the cinematic works presented in the festival's selection advocate for social change and chart new transformative horizons and collective

emancipations through artistic means that are both innovative FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL and provocative. A brave new world is born in a polyphony \\ of perspectives that integrate experiences and identities largely marginalized in the past, working simultaneously as a speculative mirror turned towards contemporary realities.

15 INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION JURY CHARLOTTE SERRAND IRINA TROCAN MAHA MAAMOUN ARTISTIC DIRECTOR LECTURER REPRESENTATIVE OF BERLINALE - La Roche-sur-Yon International Film Festival - The National University of Theatre and FORUM EXPANDED Film "I.L.Caragiale", Bucharest PROGRAM ADVISOR - Directors' Fortnight, Cannes FOUNDER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF – Acoperișul de sticlă magazine

Born in 1988, Charlotte Serrand studied Irina Trocan teaches at the National University Maha Maamoun is an artist, curator and literature and then obtained a master's of Theatre and Cinema in Bucharest and independent publisher. Her work examines degree in cinema (University Paris 3 Sorbonne coordinates the online film magazine the form, function and currency of common Nouvelle). Since 2012, she has been working Acoperișul de Sticlă (“the Glass Roof”). Irina visual and literary images as an entry point regularly with catalan filmmaker Albert Serra. edited an anthology of documentary theory, to investigating the cultural fabric that we Since 2012, she has been working at the La The reality of fiction, the fiction of the real weave and are woven into. She is a founding Roche-sur-Yon International FIlm Festival (Hecate Press, 2018, together with Andra board member of the Contemporary Image where she has been appointed this year as the Petrescu) and Romanian Cinema Inside Out — Collective (CiC), co-founder of the independent new Artistic Director. In 2017, her first feature Insights on Film Culture, Industry and Politics publishing platform Kayfa ta (www.kayfa-ta. has been presented in several international 1912-2019 (Romanian Cultural Institute com), and a member of the curatorial team of film festivals including FIDMarseille and Bafici. Press, 2019). Her latest volume is Audiovisual Forum Expanded, Berlinale. Since 2018, she is also a reader at the CNC and opposition: critical thinking in video essays and a program advisor at the Directors' Fortnight essay cinema (Idea Design & Print, 2020). in Cannes. She programmed short films for the NexT International Film Festival (2011-2016) and her writing was published in journals and film magazines such as Close Up, Cineaste, Sight & Sound, Photogénie, IndieWire, Dilema Veche. Her research interests include videographic criticism, digital media, the essay film, film festivals, racial representation, historical

representation in non-classical cinema. FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL \\

17

A BRAVE NEW WORLD - EMBRACING UTOPIA PRESENTATION INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION I

EMBRACING UTOPIA is a manifesto, Understood as images of an ideal a reaffirmation of the transformative “elsewhere”, both tangible and and emancipatory force of the utopian imaginary, of a terra incognita image. Described in the words of the transformed by man, yet forever artist Marwa Arsanions as “an image transforming in spite of him, or of that is in the movement, that has a distant planet where time and no fixed frames and so can be easily suffering have ceased to exist, the extended”, “an image that cannot be films gathered in this program reflect identified and placed into a genre”, the world as it could be, through the utopian image belongs as much to a looking glass turned towards the realm of the unconscious as it does contemporary realities, and invite us to consciousness. to embrace utopia even in the turmoil of this brave new world.

(Oana Ghera, BIEFF 2020) BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL \\

19 I AM HERE 15', 2020, Romania DIRECTOR: ALINA MANOLACHE

SCRIPTWRITER: Alina M anolache EDITING: Alina Manolache MUSIC: Bob Chilcott, Greener’s Sound ADDITIONAL FOOTAGE: Laurențiu Răducanu PRODUCER: Alina Manolache, Andrei Tănăsescu, Anca Hrab

CURATOR’S STATEMENT: ALINA MANOLACHE’s film starts as an effort to map a series of landscapes both familiar and strange to the audience,

A BRAVE NEW WORLD - EMBRACING UTOPIA NEW WORLD A BRAVE vistas from a world that is apparently asleep, as seen in the midst of a global crisis. Recorded by the mechanical eye of utility cameras, these ALINA MANOLACHE views appear, at first, as dystopian visions of the world, foretelling a bleak post-human future. This impression is then overruled by additional footage,

FILM PRESENTATION: A world asleep, in quarantine, seen through showing a series of buildings which are illuminated in the dark by the warm the lens of its invisible observers. Surveillance cameras, a police drone, lights of the windows, juxtaposed by a choral musical piece - „I see life/ a futuristic telescope view of the sun all combined in the artificial With all its energy/ The city streets/ The rush of time/ This is my world/ perspective of an ubiquitous kino-eye that relentlessly surveys a post- It's where I like to be”. I AM HERE is a visual poem that has the value of a human landscape of global proportions. manifesto, a declaration of love composed out of messages spoken in a plurality of voices and languages, out of casual human gestures that briefly (Oana Ghera, BIEFF 2020) appear on screen, of the gentle breeze that we can feel even if it cannot reach us.

FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Jihlava International Film Festival 2020 / (Oana Ghera, BIEFF 2020) European Film Festival, Romania, 2020

WORLD SALES: Alina Manolache DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: ALINA MANOLACHE (b.1990) is E: [email protected] a Romanian director, writer and producer of documentary films. Her films are collective portraits that follow the logic of experience and the

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION I COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL sensuality of the moment, rather than traditional chronologies. Her filmography also includes the short films YOUR VISIT STARTS HERE, shot during a scholarship in France and set at the prestigious Centre Pompidou, and END OF SUMMER, produced by Aristoteles Workshop and premiered at Visions du Réel (2016). In 2020, Manolache premiered the documentary LOST KIDS ON THE BEACH, her feature film debut developed through Archidoc (Lisbon – La Femis – Nyon) and presented 20 in the selection of IDFA.

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] T: +40 723 024 402 THEY PARLAIENT IDÉALE 28', 2019, France, Belgium, Italy DIRECTOR: LAURE PROUVOST

CAST: Arnaud Arini, Alexandre Boumbou, Kader Bueno, Marine Buridant, Nicolas Faubert SCRIPTWRITER: Laure Prouvost, Paul Buck, Karim Kattan CINEMATOGRAPHY: Laure Prouvost, Ciaran Wood EDITING: Tomas Sinkevičius SOUND: Léopold Roy MUSIC: Flavien Berger, Lafawndah PRODUCTION COMPANY: Studio Prouvost, ARTER

LAURE PROUVOST CURATOR’S STATEMENT: PROVOUST’s personal journey has evolved through her works, from setting herself at the center of attempts to communicate with the exterior, to being immersed in the world. THEY FILM PRESENTATION: What does it mean to be a citizen of a nation, PARLAIENT IDÉALE, the central component of the artist’s DEEP SEE BLUE especially when one's identity is rather ambiguous? A cross-generational SURROUNDING YOU project for the French pavilion at the Venice 2019 and interracial group of performers embarks on a road trip from the Biennale, is particularly compelling in its complexity, setting out to answer north of France to Venice that soon becomes an escapist journey, a series of current societal questions. With her unique use of puns and both tangible and imaginary, towards an ideal “elsewhere”. Edited in playful political commentary, in this film PROUVOUST explores themes PROVOUST’s feverish editing style, THEY PARLAIENT IDÉALE invites the such as identity and generations, disconnection and incomprehension, as audience down the rabbit-hole into the liquid and tentacular universe well as utopias and surrealism. of an utopian collective subconscious, spiralling towards the sublime in (Videoex 2020) the whispered rhythm of the tales recounted by the cast of musicians, dancers and magicians.

(Oana Ghera, BIEFF 2020) DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: LAURE PROUVOST (b. 1978 Lille, France) received the prestigious Turner Prize in 2013 and has exhibited internationally at renowned institutions such as Tate Britain, FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Rotterdam International Film Festival 2020/ Whitechapel Gallery in London, Portikus in Frankfurt Neuer Berliner BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL Venice Biennale 2019 Kunstverein and New Museum in New York. Playing with language

as a tool for the imagination, Prouvost is interested in confounding \\ linear narratives and expected associations among words, images and WORLD SALES: meaning. She combines existing and imagined personal memories with LUX Moving Image artistic and literary references to create complex film installations that E: [email protected] muddy the distinction between fiction and reality. In 2019, her project W: www.lux.org.uk DEEP SEE BLUE SURROUNDING YOU was presented at the French Pavilion during the Venice Biennale 2019. 21

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: W: www.laureprouvost.com LOOK THEN BELOW 22', 2019, United Kingdom DIRECTOR: BEN RIVERS

CAST: Therese Heningsen SCRIPTWRITER: Mark von Schlegell CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ben Rivers EDITING: Ben Rivers SOUND: Ben Rivers, Christina Vantzou MUSIC: Christina Vantzou PRODUCER: Josephine Lanyon A BRAVE NEW WORLD - EMBRACING UTOPIA NEW WORLD A BRAVE

BEN RIVERS CURATOR’S STATEMENT: While BEN RIVERS is often understood to be a cinematic chronicler of land and sea, working mostly in the realist FILM PRESENTATION: Revisiting the journey-to-the-center-of-the-earth tradition, there has always been a thrumming energy throughout his work genre of speculative fiction, LOOK THEN BELOW carries the audience that points toward the surreal, the uncanny, or even the post-human. under vermillion skies, over iridescent oceans and through a lush forest Ben Rivers’ third collaboration with writer Mark von Schlegell, takes this of irradiated vegetation into a new anthropocenic landscape shown tendency to its outer reaches. An exploration of the Wookey Hole caves in through a combination of 16mm footage and CGI. Accompanied by a Somerset, this film infuses recognizable forms – rock, water, and air – with scratchy, distant voice-over, written in the fashion of a logbook, the a hallucinatory neon glow. film descends into the netherworld of caverns carved out in the depths (Michael Sicinski - Viennale) of time, once held remnants of lost civilisations, that foretell a future subterranean biotope, occupied by a species that will have evolved from our environmentally challenged world. At once hypnotic and strange, DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: BEN RIVERS (born in 1972) is an the film blurs the lines between past, present and future into a liminal artist and experimental filmmaker based in London. His work ranges space that is hauntingly beautiful. from themes about exploring unknown wilderness territories to candid (Oana Ghera, BIEFF 2020) and intimate portrayals of real-life subjects. Rivers's practice as a filmmaker treads a line between documentary and fiction. He prefers to use near-antique cameras and hand develops the 16 mm film, which

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION I COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL shows the evidence of the elements it has been exposed to – the FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Rotterdam International Film Festival materiality of this medium forming part of the narrative. His films have 2020 / New York Film Festival 2020 / Viennale 2020 / Hong Kong been shown in prestigious festivals all over the world and he is the International Film Festival 2020 recipient of numerous prizes including: FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, 68th Venice Film Festival for his first feature film, TWO YEARS AT SEA. WORLD SALES: T: LUX Moving Image 22 E: [email protected] | W: www.lux.org.uk

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: W: www.benrivers.com THE END OF SUFFERING (A PROPOSAL) 14', 2020, GREECE DIRECTOR: JACQUELINE LENTZOU

CAST: Sofia Kokkali SCRIPTWRITER: Jacqueline Lentzou CINEMATOGRAPHY: Konstantinos Koukoulios EDITING: Smaro Papaevaneglou SOUND: Leandros Ntounis PRODUCER: Fenia Cossovitsa PRODUCTION COMPANY: BLONDE S.A.

JACQUELINE LENTZOU

CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Evoking textures of the past by shooting on FILM PRESENTATION: Panic-stricken, Sofia finds herself caught up in an 16mm, THE END OF SUFFERING (A PROPOSAL) operates as an imaginary otherworldly exchange with the Universe, meant to explain the purpose ethnography of the red planet. But if traditional ethnography is driven by of her earthly experience. Imagined by LENTZOU as an emanation, the objective of making the unfamiliar comprehensible, this fantastical the presence of the surreal is ever suggested, but never materialized. ethnography does the inverse as shots of animals and athletes are Lying somewhere between revelation and hallucination, this direct defamiliarized, their earthly associations abandoned for new ones. This inter-planetary transmission oscillates between advice inspired by self- imagined Mars is a place where people dream while they’re awake and help advice and unexpected disclosures about the true nature of the fight in the name of love. Mars-born protagonist. Shot on 16mm film tinged in a bright red hue, And why not? What do we really know anyway? Is the film’s titillating this speculative journey towards the mother planet - where time does proposition. not exist, the old is the same as the new and dream is the true reality - (Emily Wright - Kinoscope) has the rhythm of a planetary symphony, immersing the audience in an endless floating state.

(Oana Ghera, BIEFF 2020) DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: JACQUELINE LENTZOU (b. Athens, 1989) is a Greek writer and director interested in experimenting with formats, duration and feelings in order to create visual poetry through BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Locarno Film Festival 2020 / New York Film unexpected word and image associations. She has directed four shorts

Festival 2020 / BFI London Film Festival 2020 / Riga International Film which have screened in numerous festivals, including Cannes, Berlin \\ Festival 2020 / 25FPS Festival 2020 and Locarno. Her short film HECTOR MALOT: THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR has won the Cine Leica Discovery Award in Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique (2018). WORLD SALES: SQUARE EYES Wouter Jansen T: +31622076717 | E: [email protected] W: www.squareeyesfilm.com 23

A BRAVE NEW WORLD – THE SPECTRE OF PRESENTATION DYSTOPIA INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION II

In the midst of a pandemic, faced with the spectre of fascist politics, the the worrying resurface of extremist four films included in this program discourses across the world, the function as cautionary tales for the spectre of dystopia seems to be upon present, shaped in the form of an us, raising questions about bio-politics omen foretelling a possible future that and the destiny of our species. carries an uncanny resemblance to our past. Dealing with subjects such as genetic engineering, body politics, ecology, (Oana Ghera, BIEFF 2020) and our impending extractivist doom, as well as with the failure of recent revolutionary attempts and BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL \\

25 IN VITRO 28', 2019, Palestine, Denmark, UK DIRECTOR: LARISSA SANSOUR, SØREN LIND OF DYSTOPIA

CAST: Hiam Abbass, Maisa Abd Elhadi, Marah Abu Srour, Leila Sansour SCRIPTWRITER: Søren Lind CINEMATOGRAPHY: Anna Valdez Hanks ART DIRECTION: Simon Godfrey EDITING: Sue Giovanni

A BRAVE NEW WORLD - THE SPECTRE NEW WORLD A BRAVE SOUND: Tom Sedgwick MUSIC: Niklas Schak

PRODUCER: Alexandra Roche DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: LARISSA SANSOUR is a Palestinian PRODUCTION COMPANY: Spike Island artist/director. Central to her work is the tug and pull between fiction and reality. In her recent works, she uses science fiction to address social and political issues. Working mainly with film, Sansour also produces installations, photos and sculptures. Sansour’s work is shown in film LARISSA SANSOUR SØREN LIND festivals and museums worldwide. In 2019, she represents Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennial. She has shown her work at Tate Modern, MoMA, Centre Pompidou and the Istanbul Biennial as well as the FILM PRESENTATION: IN VITRO is set in the aftermath of an eco- Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival and BFI London Film disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Festival. Recent solo exhibitions include Bluecoat in Liverpool, Dar El- Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using Nimer in Beirut and Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen. Sansour lives and heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, works in London. a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above. In the SOREN LIND (b. 1970) is a Danish author, director and scriptwriter. With hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing a background in philosophy, LIND wrote books on mind, language and founder, 70-year-old Dunia is lying in her deathbed, as 30-year-old Alia understanding before turning to film and fiction. He has published comes to visit her. Alia is born underground as part of a comprehensive novels, shorts story collections and several children’s books. Lind cloning program and has never seen the town she’s destined to rebuild. screens and exhibits his films at museums, galleries and film festivals worldwide. Recent venues and festivals include the 58th Venice Biennial, MoMA (US), Barbican (UK), Nikolaj Kunsthal (DK), Berlinale (D), FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Locarno International Film Festival 2019/ BFI International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL) and BFI London Film Festival INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION II COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL London Film Festival 2019/ Guanajuato International Film Festival 2020 (UK). He lives and works in London.

WORLD SALES: MEC FILM T: +49-30-66766700 E: [email protected] 26 W: http://mecfilm.com/index.php?id=1623

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: W: asianmoviepulse.com/2019/11/short-film-review-in-vitro-2019-by-larissa-sansour-soren-lind THE BITE 26', 2019, Portugal, Brazil

DIRECTOR: PEDRO NEVES MARQUES

CAST: Alina Dörzbacher, Ana Flávia Cavalcanti, Kelner Macedo SCRIPTWRITER: Pedro Neves Marques CINEMATOGRAPHY: Marta Simões ART DIRECTION: Diogo Hayashi EDITING: Pedro Neves Marques SOUND: Tales Manfrinato MUSIC: HAUT PRODUCER: Catarina de Sousa, Pedro Neves Marques

PEDRO NEVES MARQUES

CURATOR’S STATEMENT: PEDRO NEVES MARQUES’ 16-mm film THE FILM PRESENTATION: Between a house in the Atlantic forest and a BITE covers a lot of ground: (bio)politics, gene engineering, pandemics, genetically-modified mosquito factory near São Paulo, a polyamorous, sexuality, ecology and extractivism. Essentially, it all boils down to tension, non-binary relationship struggles to survive an epidemic spreading intensified by its original score – jittery, pulsating, suspicious… The film across Brazil. While in the factory millions of mosquitos are born daily highlights different shades of tension, varying from nervousness to fear, inside test tubes, the power dynamics between Helmut, Calixto, and Tao aggression to hopelessness. While dealing with hybrids, THE BITE turns only intensifies. THE BITE is a film found somewhere between horror, out to be hybrid too. This special world constructed by NEVES MARQUES science fiction and a queer drama highlights the director’s capability to create magical and terrifying universes, filled with codes, secrets and hidden messages about some of the most relevant issues today. He has managed to cross-reference politics FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Vienna Shorts 2020, TIFF - Toronto and body politics, reproduction and pandemics, ultimately creating an International Film Festival 2019/ New York Film Festival 2019/ Thessaloniki International Film Festival 2019/ Go Short 2020, Short opiate juxtaposition between a warning dystopia and a dangerous reality. Waves Festival 2020/ Glasgow Short Film Festival 2020, Encounters

(Līga Požarska, talking shorts) FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL 2020 \\

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: PEDRO NEVES MARQUES is a film WORLD SALES: director, visual artist, and writer. He has exhibited at art institutions such PORTUGAL FILM Miguel Valverde – Sales Coordinator as Tate Modern, Anthology Film Archives, New Museum and e-flux, and T: +351 213 466 172 his films have been shown at film festivals such as TIFF, New York Film E: [email protected] Festival, DocLisbon International Film Festival, IndieLisboa Film Festival W : www.portugalfilm.org and many others. Born in Lisbon, he lives in New York. 27

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: W: glasgowshort.org/latest/community/interview-pedro-neves-marques-director-of-the-bite SUN RAVE 11', 2019, Lebanon DIRECTOR: ROY SAMAHA OF DYSTOPIA CINEMATOGRAPHY: Mark Khalife EDITING: Roy Samaha SOUND: Tatiana Gornefer el Dahdah, Ziad Moukarzel PRODUCER: Karina El Helou PRODUCTION COMPANY: BeMA, Studiocu/art A BRAVE NEW WORLD - THE SPECTRE NEW WORLD A BRAVE

CURATOR’S STATEMENT: In a way, SAMAHA's premise is silly, a sci-fi goof on world history à la Craig Baldwin. However, there is a melancholia ROY SAMAHA coursing through SUN RAVE that only really hits you after the fact. Samaha's film is actually trying to answer a very real question. Why did the revolutions that ended the Cold War succeed, and the Arab Spring revolts FILM PRESENTATION: Like Méliès, SAMAHA achieves his cinema with fail? It can't simply be that one group of insurgents were more dedicated simple means. Blocks of text, displayed over images, list scientific facts or more competent than the other, so Samaha is looking for a scientific about solar storms and short-wave radios which are good for listening to answer. But of course, we know that this is pure irony. The solution doesn't such storms, before the narrative becomes more personal (and possibly lie in the Van Allen belt. One group was aided by the West, the other made-up). In first person, the film’s narrator recounts how, in the late abandoned. Isn't Sun Rave's proposition more satisfying? If you want a less 1980s, when he was 11, a mysterious British couple was living next door tragic explanation, there's always the sun. to his parents’ apartment in Lebanon. Through the walls, a woman’s (Michael Sicinski, MUBI) voice could be heard, repeating numeric sequences, which the family took to be a spiritist ritual, but which was more likely a code.

(Ela Bittencourt, Sight & Sound) DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: Director ROY SAMAHA is a Lebanese artist, living and working in Beirut. In much of his work he explores the boundaries of filmic language, perception of reality and the memory FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Oberhausen International Short Film Festival of personal objects and has been shown at prestigious events such as 2019 / Toronto International Film Festival 2019 / Rencontres Pinacoteca Nazionale (Bologna), Disobedience Archive, Castello di Rivoli International Paris/Berlin 2020 (Torino), Bildmuseet (Umea), Image Counter Image, Haus der Kunst INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION II COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL (Munich), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Rotterdam), Affinités, among others.

WORLD SALES: STUDIOCU/ART E: [email protected] 28 W: studiocurart.com/contactus

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] WATER AND SALT 10', 2019, Brazil, Belgium

DIRECTOR: LUISA MELLO

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Hanna Hovitie EDITING: Luisa Mello SOUND: Domenico Centrone PRODUCER: Luisa Mello PRODUCTION COMPANY: DocNomads

LUISA MELLO CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Choosing an unusually quiet route, the film takes the viewer on a trip to the depth to the ocean and back. The mounting tensions within Brazilian politics is equated with the underwater FILM PRESENTATION: What is it that can sink a person? Away from turmoil of a volcano about to erupt, as the people still float calmly at home, where the infamous Brazilian elections of 2018 take place, a the quiet surface. The smooth soft waves, whooshing over the screen in young woman floats on the surface of the water in a swimming pool. a velvety neon-blue dance, at first bring peace to a young woman in a Down at the bottom of the water lies Brazil, seen as a volcano ready to floating pool. She tries to relax, becoming one with the water. But there is erupt. How’s the situation over there, she asks her mother on the phone. no long-lasting peace when the rumbling under the sea starts, the noises of Everything else seems frivolous. How's the situation there, she insists. news broadcasters, demonstrating women and Bolsonaro all merging into LUISA MELLO's hybrid film translates a panic attack into cinema – fiction, a frightening tune. “I’m fine, I’m fine”, she insists, but how can she be? nonfiction, a concrete here and an uncertain elsewhere. But elsewhere (Susanne Gottlieb, ubiquarian) means home, and the panic attack is not a generic one, but rather the one of the expat, who lives the paradox of feeling vulnerable even though they are safe. DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: LUISA MELLO is a documentary (Călin Boto, BIEFF 2020) filmmaker and cinematographer from Rio de Janeiro. She holds a bachelor’s degree in cinema and a master’s degree in art and philosophy from Pontifical Catholic University. Furthermore she specialised in FESTIVALS/AWARDS: International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020 documentary filmmaking, studying at EICTV in Cuba and at DocNomads, / Vienna Shorts 2020 / Film Festival Netzhaut 2020 / IFEMA 2020 /

from which she holds a joint master’s degree. She describes her filmic FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL Curta Cinema 2019 approach as one that combines observational cinema with fictional \\ elements.

29

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] W: www.luisamello.com

PUBLIC EYE, PRIVATE I PRESENTATION INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION III

The enfranchisement of the "personal Judith Butler, underpin this selection is political" slogan in the feminist of short films, in which femininity is approaches of the last half-century is both the sum of a series of specific reflected in PUBLIC EYE, PRIVATE I – actions undertaken in a public context where the distinction and intersection and, vice-versa, the reflection of an of the two stances are filtered through interiority that becomes aware of the the concept of optics: both external social pressure of performing and its and internal, objective and subjective. consequences.

The fundamental axiom of Simone (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) de Beauvoir’s oeuvre (that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman), placed together with the most important theory that it influenced, namely the concept of gender as a performative act, as proposed by BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL \\

31 UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS 12'31”, 2020, Germany DIRECTOR: VIKA KIRCHENBAUER

SCRIPTWRITER: Vika Kirchenbauer

PUBLIC EYE, PRIVATE I PUBLIC EYE, PRIVATE CINEMATOGRAPHY: Vika Kirchenbauer, Rita Macedo EDITING: Vika Kirchenbauer SOUND: Vika Kirchenbauer MUSIC: COOL FOR YOU PRODUCER: Vika Kirchenbauer DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: The work tests the limits of vision and recordability, contemplating instances where a subject remains opaque VIKA KIRCHENBAUER to itself. Ghosts appear from holes ripped into time by an unremembered childhood, and a recently abolished witch-burning ritual in my rural home town serves as a foil against which to question the politics of visibility. FILM PRESENTATION: In a collage of radically different images, which combines everything from found footage to thermographic images (Vika Kirchenbauer) and figurative color compositions, UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS tries to answer a series of questions starting from the concept of visibility and its paradigmatic twin, invisibility. Ranging from scientific CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Melding her leitmotifs together as a whole, and physical observations about the limits of the optic spectrum and which manages to stay faithful to the zig-zagging nature behind the about electromagnetic waves, which are used to derive meanings about process of self-reflection, VIKA KIRCHENBAUER constructs and essay-film memory, self-perception, and social perception, the film ponders on the in which light is both central subject and central metaphor. Avoiding the fact of seeing and of being seen, and their intersections. mythological, the filmmaker does reconstruct the process through which (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) an observable natural phenomenon becomes sign and significance - which she appropriates in a subjective discourse. Memories about childhood and adolescence are faced with the post-factum revelations of maturity, which structures naturalized concepts such as gender, violence, works and FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Berlinale 2020 / New York Film Festival 2020 / Oberhausen 2020 / CPH:DOX 2020 / Doclisboa International Film laziness. If the sky is an image from the past, and a ghost is the only image Festival / Hamburg ISFF 2020 / EMAF Award and VDFK Media Art that can reverse the process of invisibilization, what is in fact invisibility Prize – European Media Art Festival 2020 once we admit the limits of sight?

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION III COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020)

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: VIKA KIRCHENBAUER (b. 1983) is an artist, writer and music producer based in Berlin. In her work, she WORLD SALES: focuses on topics such as affective subject formation, violence, forms of VIKA KIRCHENBAUER visibility and invisibility, and institutional power structures. Her works T: +491749992915 have been shown in galleries and film festivals across the world and she E: [email protected] has given lectures at institutions such as NYU and UdK Berlin. 32

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] CAUSE OF DEATH 20', 2020, South Africa/Austria DIRECTOR: JYOTI MISTRY

CAST: Napo Masheane (voice) SCRIPTWRITERS: Jyoti Mistry, Napo Masheane EDITING: Nikki Comninos SOUND: Peter Cornell PRODUCER: Florian Schattauer PRODUCTION COMPANY: Süd Nord Film DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: [The starting point for Cause of Death was] looking at the way in which images of women were marginalized historically in the archive or how they were depicted. I wanted to work JYOTI MISTRI through the very small moments or fragments across different titles that captured various facets and experiences of women (...) The woman with a curious and peering-look on her face at the end of the film is one I find FILM PRESENTATION: CAUSE OF DEATH is a simultaneous celebration haunting. She is an every-woman in a way and yet she is distinctive and her and elegy of the female body - extensively using archival footage from stare straight into the camera is arresting because she demands to be seen." the first half of the 20th century as well as animations and documents (Jyoti Mistry) to represent both various feminine rituals across diverse cultures, or moments of intimacy with one's own body, but also to document the burning of "witched" and other forms of extreme violence against women. A cinematic slam poem that encapsulates and reappropriates, CURATOR'S STATEMENT: Rhythmic and lyrical, CAUSE OF DEATH is from a feminist perspective, two millennia in the history of womankind. a cinematic slam poem in terms of voice-over and cinematography: the ways in which Jyoti Mistri joins her shots together and manipulates them, (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) playing and rewinding, grouping them together according to topics and conjugating every shot as she returns to it, brings contemporary poetry to mind. Recovering rare images of the female body, seen both individually FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Berlinale 2020 / Hamburg International Short and collectively, at its most gracious but also as it is tortured and killed for Film Festival 2020 / Queer Lisboa 2020 the fact of being feminine, the film addresses the historical oppression of women, but also pays homage to their resilience and survival.

(Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) WORLD SALES: sixpackfilm FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL Dietmar Schwärzler T: (+43-1) 526 09 90 15 DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: JYOTI MISTRY (b. 1970) is a \\ E: [email protected] filmmaker born in Durban, South Africa. Combining cinematic W: www.sixpackfilm.com tradition and installation art, her works - which range both fiction and documentary, short and feature films - have been screened both in festivals such as Berlinale, Toronto Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Winterthur and Rotterdam Film Festival, as well as in institutions such as Kunsthalle Wien, Museum der Moderne Salzburg and Kunsthaus Zürich. She teaches film at the University of Gothenburg. 33

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] CLEAN WITH ME (AFTER DARK) 21', 2019, France DIRECTOR: GABRIELLE STEMMER

SCRIPTWRITER: Gabrielle Stemmer

PUBLIC EYE, PRIVATE I PUBLIC EYE, PRIVATE EDITING: Gabrielle Stemmer SOUND DESIGN: Emma Zimny PRODUCER: Eliott Khayat

GABRIELLE STEMMER

FILM PRESENTATION: In her debut short, GABRIELLE STEMMER explores one of the most bizarre trends on YouTube: the „Clean With DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: On the one hand, these women are self- Me” vlogs, made by an exclusively (white) female community that posts perpetuating unrealistic images of the perfect mother, and that is toxic. streams of themselves as they scrub their homes down. Beyond the because it maintains an extremely oppressive culture. But on the other facade of cleanliness, inspirational hum-drum, and bland muzak, the hand, it allows them to socialize daily on an unprecedented scale. Besides, „good wife” image slips away to reveal a sense of suffocation, existential it’s the first time that a woman can carry a speech without intermediaries angst and deep depression. Using a desktop movie format that is and broadcast to millions of people. Potentially, it’s a great power. There faithful to the material that it recycles, CLEAN WITH ME (AFTER DARK) are beginnings of reformulations of feminist principles or self-affirmation, is a resourceful exploration of both the vlogging phenomenon and of of speaking out, which are positive. These bottles in the sea are available the desperation of women entrapped by their gender roles. to everyone. And they did not exist 50 years ago. (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) (Gabrielle Stremmer)

FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Jury Award - Clermont-Ferrand 2020 / Las Palmas 2020 / Vienna Shorts 2020 / Uppsala 2020 / RIDM 2020 / DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: After a master’s degree in literature, Young Jury Special Award - Concorto 2020 GABRIELLE STEMMER studied the art of editing at la Fémis. She chose to take advantage of her strange addiction to Clean With Me videos in order to compose her graduation film, which is also her first film. INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION III COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL

WORLD SALES: LA FÉMIS Chloé Cavillier T: + 33 01 53 41 21 16 E: [email protected] W: www.femis.fr 34 WHITE AFRO 6’, 2019, Ghana/USA DIRECTOR: AKOSUA ADOMA OWUSU

CAST: Nana Saah Adwubi Kete CINEMATOGRAPHY: Alexandre Lamarque EDITING: Dylan Bowman SOUND: Kari Rae Seekins MUSIC: Manhyia Tete Nnwomkoro PRODUCER: Akosua Adoma Owusu PRODUCTION COMPANY: Obibini Pictures

AKOSUA ADOMA OWUSU

FILM PRESENTATION: WHITE AFRO is a deceptively simple film about a highly complex phenomenon - that of the appropriation of marginal CURATOR'S STATEMENT: In her fascinating new film, the director Akosua cultures y the white majority, with self-aestheticizing and mercantile Adoma Owusu continues her research that combines hairdressing and purposes. Using an archive instructional film on how to give perms, racial context. The power of her editing, her salutary work of rare archives ADOMA OWOSU subltly uses image to reclaim her heritage. and her aesthetic originality are reinforced by the political significance of her work, underlined in a subtle way by Toni Morrison’s words. This film (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) definitively confirms the extremely original and innovative work of this internationally renowned artist − exhibited and presented in museum collections − who shows how important it is to always redefine the FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Locarno 2019 / Toronto 2019 / Clermont- boundaries between video art and cinema. Ferrand 2019 / MoMA Documentary Fortnight 2020 / Uppsala 2019 / Winterthur 2019 / Vienna Shorts 2020 (Charlotte Corchète)

WORLD SALES: DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: AKOSUA ADOMA OWUSU (n. 1984) Obibini Pictures is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker whose films address a collision E: [email protected] of identities, where the African immigrant in America has a triple

W: obibinipictures.com FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL consciousness. Named by IndieWire as one of six preeminent «Avant-

Garde Female Filmmakers Who Redefined Cinema», she has exhibited \\ at various festivals and galleries worldwide, including at the Centre Pompidou, at Berlinale, Rotterdam, Locarno, and BFI London.

35 SaF05 39', 2019, United Kingdom DIRECTOR: CHARLOTTE PRODGER

VOICE: Charlotte Prodger CAMERA: Emma Dalesman, Sarah Forrest, Susan Gibson, Rodney Knight, Charlotte Prodger, Botswana Predator

PUBLIC EYE, PRIVATE I PUBLIC EYE, PRIVATE Conservation Trust EDITING: Charlotte Prodger SOUND: Charlotte Prodger PRODUCER: Susan Gibb PRODUCTION COMPANY: IF I CAN'T DANCE I DON'T WANT TO BE PART OF YOUR REVOLUTION

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: I was thinking of these small intimate gestures CHARLOTTE PRODGER that are seen in a global sense as inconsequential. You know how it is, growing up as a queer person, visibility is a very complicated and often terrifying thing. I was interested in all these small gestures and intimate FILM PRESENTATION: CHARLOTTE PRODGER's installation film moments, then the zooming out from that into vast landscapes of vast speculates the topic of queerness in the animal kingdom in conjecture power structures. There’s definitely a physicality to the material. Editing with her autobiographical testimony of becoming and sexual self- is a very physical thing. You’re cutting, moving, and layering. Although I’m discovery. Starting from the image and behavioural log of a lioness formally very interested in the physicality of the moving image format, for - the titlulary SaF05, as the researchers name her - that adopts the me it feels very important to rub that up against queer subjectivity. appearance and habits of lions, the filmmaker reflects on her own queer experiences and the ones that surrounded her, mostly over a rich (Charlotte Prodger) selection of austere landscapes.

(Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Examples of queer behavior of various vertebrate animals are oftentimes used to persuade homophobic people that same-sex relationships between humans and atypical gender FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Venice Biennale 2019 / Toronto 2019 / New performances are natural - however, Prodger almost works in the opposite York 2019 sense: seemingly questioning the intimate and subjective nature of her own queer experience against the neutral, impersonal tone in which researchers describe the behavior of lioness SaF05. As such, in spite of its self- DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: CHARLOTTE PRODGER (n. 1974) is a consciousness, humans seen as still at the whim of their animal impulses; \\ British artist working with moving image, printed image, sculpture and or, conversely, one may wonder if SaF05s own thoughts and emotions ring INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION III COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL writing. Her work explores issues surrounding queer identity, landscape, the same. language, technology and time, as seen though an autobiographical (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) prism. She studied at Goldsmiths London and The Glasgow School of Art and is a recepient of the prestigious Turner Award (2018) for "BRIDGIT/ Stoneymollan Trail" and the Margaret Tait Award (2014). Her works have WORLD SALES: been shown in forums such as the Venice Biennale, Tate Britain, Frieze LUX 36 Art Fair and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival. T: +44 (0)20 3141 2960 | E: [email protected] | W: lux.org.uk PLAYBACK 14', 2019, Argentina DIRECTOR: AGUSTINA COMEDI

CAST: Marcos García, La Delpi, Martín Shanly SCREENWRITER: Agustina Comedi DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Magalí Mérida ART DIRECTION: Federico Tapia, Martín Paolorossi EDITING: Valeria Racioppi SOUND DESIGN: Guido Deniro DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: I grew up in a conservative province city. PRODUCER: Magalí Mérida My family wasn’t a traditional family, which was transparent due to the people around my father: his friends, ex-boyfriends, cellmates, and drinking buddies. When my father died, they became my family, my „aunts”. One AGUSTINA COMEDI of them, Delpi, created a group of drag queens in the ’80s who used their shows to fight the police that imprisoned and tortured them, family rejection and the loss of friends during the AIDS crisis. This world, which FILM PRESENTATION: In Cordoba of the late 80s, after the fall of becomes grayer each day, needs to look at their spells, dreams and the military dictatorship, the newly regained freedom of the LGBTQI+ revolutions, because they were good at partying, fighting, and loving, three community is decimated by the HIV-AIDS crisis. La Delpi, one of the few things that this agonizing history requires urgently. surviving drag queens of the scene, tells the bittersweet story of those years over VHS images, stopping on the image of La Colo - whose tragic (Agustina Comedi) end she reimagines, playing back reality. A time capsule that pays tribute to the struggles of the queer community and to its forms of resistance. CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Cinema has proven itself to be both the most (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) appropriate format to „embalm” images and thus memory, but also, simultaneously, the phantasmagoric medium in which the tragic stories of reality can be given a happy ending. PLAYBACK is both: it plays back FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Teddy Award for Best Short Film - Berlinale time and then reinterprets it. Image is an act of resistance - both cinematic 2020 / Best Short Film, National Competition - Mar del Plata 2019 image and drag performance: „Our names were noms de guerre and the / Hot Docs 2020 / New Directors, New Films USA 2020 / Vancouver sequins, uniforms”, remembers La Delphi, encapsulating the ethos od a 2020 / Jeonju 2020 / Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 / Thessaloniki IDFF 2020 / Melbourne 2020 / Black Canvas Mexico City 2020 / Special culture that responds to adversity with diversity. With cinema, La Gallega Mention of the Jury - Kreivės Vilnius Queer Festival 2020 and La Colo can regain their „happy endings and revolutionary fantasies".

(Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL

WORLD SALES: \\ KINO REBELDE DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: AGUSTINA COMEDI (n. 1986) is an María Vera Argentinian filmmaker and screenwriter based in Córdoba, Argentina. T: +351 910 551 325 | E: [email protected] W: www.kinorebelde.com Her debut feature film, SILENCE IS A FALLING BODY / EL SILENCIO ES UN CUERPO QUE CAE (2017), based on her late father’s home movie tapes, had its world premiere at the prestigious IDFA documentary film festival and was selected in more than 50 international festivals. She is working on her second feature film. 37

THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY PRESENTATION INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION IV

If the map is not the territory, then In this economy of means, the how can we trace our relationship sea – one of the main thematic to spaces by means of image and and figurative leitmotifs in these representation? The films included in films – plays an essential part: it is this program reveal the relationships simultaneously the path to salvation of the migrant to the spaces he or and an unmerciful executioner, the she leaves behind, discovers or re- object of a fascination that is both discovers. hypnotic and morbid.

The profound (and, in many cases, (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) violent) trauma of the migratory process is often closely examined by the filmmakers, and manifested not only in a critique of power structures and of the concept of borders, but also in the acknowledgment of the BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL overwhelming human cost of the phenomenon. \\

39 SILENT STORM 13', 2019, Switzerland DIRECTOR: ANAÏS MOOG

SCRIPTWRITER: Anaïs Moog CINEMATOGRAPHY: Anaïs Moog EDITING: Pierre Schlesser SOUND: Ahmed Maalaoui, Björn Cornelius PRODUCER: Gabriela Bussmann PRODUCTION COMPANY: GoldenEggProduction THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY THE MAP IS NOT

CURATOR’S STATEMENT: An anxious eye scans an indefinite horizon. ANAÏS MOOG Then the wind and the waves can be heard. Over the calm sea, a weary voice testifies, in Arabic, to the disappearance of a son. Then some rocks, some ruins, like traces, wrinkles left on the landscape, the shoreline. The FILM PRESENTATION: With a slow, overwhelming rhythm, yet sound of the waves becomes louder. The sea grows threatening. And it’s concealing a tempest that is ready to erupt - this is how the sea is the whole spirit of Jean Epstein’s Le Tempestaire or Robert Flaherty’s Man witnessed from other shores: not as meditative and romantic space, of Aran that pervades these images. Haunted images...“I hate the sea now. but rather an immense border between two estranged worlds. ANAÏS I don’t want to see it anymore.” Yet there’s no anger in the voice, just a MOOG alternates, through the use of sound and image, an immense terrible feeling of resignation. The deep-blue waves proffer their tragic unrest. The turbulent waters and the silence of the earth, the rocks. The shroud. Then the voice evokes a dream, a visit to the kingdom of the dead, resigned, calm voice of a woman laments the loss of a child, hiding in it a final tribute. But the mystery remains unfathomable... And the film ends a force that is equal to that of the waves breaking on the shore. The sea with shaky 16-mm images, like those of a gloomy dream, an appeasement is seen as an omnipotent, passive, but powerful space, both necessary that does not come. and despicable. MOOG relies on a strongly subjective and dreamlike (Bertrand Bacqué, HEAD – Geneva) universe, in which these people’s suffering is illustrated through the dreams they share with us. A kind of connection to an astral suffering. Death and sea, two boundless symbols, both haunted by loss. DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: Born on December 11, 1996. After (Emil Vasilache, BIEFF 2020) completing a preparatory year in cinema in Toulouse and a preparatory year in cinema at the École Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (ECAL), ANAÏS MOOG began a Bachelor’s degree in September 2016 in the Cinema/ FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Pardino d’argento Swiss Life - Locarno 2019

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION IV COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL Cinéma du Réel department at the Haute École d’Art et Design de / IDFA 2019 / GoShorts Nijmegen 2020 / Palm Springs ISFF 2020 / Molodist Kyiv International Film Festival 2020 Genève. Graduated in June 2019, her film Tempête Silencieuse (Silent Storm) was selected in competition at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival.

WORLD SALES: GoldenEggProduction Yan Decoppet 40 E: [email protected]

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] HERE AND THERE 22’, 2019, Argentina, France DIRECTOR: MELISA LIEBENTHAL

SCRIPTWRITER: Melisa Liebenthal CINEMATOGRAPHY: Hélène Motteau EDITING: Florencia Gómez García SOUND: Clément Decaudin PRODUCER: Guylaine Huet PRODUCTION COMPANY: Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains

MELISA LIEBENTHAL

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: After leaving my hometown, Buenos Aires, FILM PRESENTATION: Though an enquiry that is both personal and if I ask myself where my home is, the answer is not evident anymore. I theoretical, MELISA LIEBENTHAL maps out her own past and present, as wanted to translate this feeling of indetermination by connecting it to the well as her family’s history through the usage of utilitarian images, such intricate migration story of my family and by questioning the transparency as Google Maps and aerial photos, whose limits she tries to transgress. of the photographic image. I feel Google Earth, with its replica of the Having a complex family background - a grandparent who migrated from world through satellite photographic images, appeals to our dreams and a Germany that couldn’t accept his Jewish heritage, who arrives in China, imagination. We can travel to remote and unknown places or revisit the where he gets married, and then leaves for South America again due to places of our memory, with the effect at all times of being there, where ethnic discrimination - Liebenthal gathers all these intimate histories, the cursor of our computer is located. However, when we descend with strongly tied to the political context of the 20th century and brings Street View to the street of our childhood, the experience of being there them together in a meta-cinematographic piece. Through HERE AND is unrecoverable. These new technological images give us the impression THERE, she traces a geographical space of the personal, keeping herself of returning a crystalline and direct reflection of the world, but they are close, both physically - by using a voice-over and some spectaculous opaque and impersonal. appearances in the images themselves - and emotionally, throughout (Melisa Liebenthal) the entire process.

(Emil Vasilache, BIEFF 2020) DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: MELISA LIEBENTHAL (b. 1991 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a film director and editor, graduate BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Jurys Special Mention - Punto de Vista 2020 / of Universidad del Cine in Argentina, Escuela Internacional de

Best Film - Panorama 21 le Fresnoy 2019 / Oberhausen International Cine y Televisión in Cuba, and Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts \\ Short Film Festival 2020 / International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020 contemporains in France, from where she graduated with honors. In her work, Melisa Liebenthal seeks to intertwine the fields of essay-film and fiction narrative, through stories that come to play with a reflection on WORLD SALES: image, identity, and the gaze of others. Her films have been awarded in Distribution at Le Fresnoy IFFR, BAFICI, Punto de Vista, and Queer Lisboa and screened in festivals Natalia Trebik such as Torino, Edinburgh, NYFF, and Oberhausen, amongst others. E: [email protected] M: +33 6 60 15 54 52 | T: +33 3 20 28 38 64 41

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] T: +49 176 4275 0712 FORGET ALBERTO FOR NOW 19', 2020, Germany DIRECTOR: BEINA XU

CAST: Beina Xu, Alex Bakri, Soumaya Trefois, Hamdaouï Ilyes, Nabil McQueen, “Mimo” SCRIPTWRITER: Beina Xu CINEMATOGRAPHY: Annegret Sachse ART DIRECTION: Sophie Perl EDITING: Alex Bakri

THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY THE MAP IS NOT SOUND: Beina Xu, Gábor Ripli PRODUCER: Thomas Kaske DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: PRODUCTION COMPANY: KASKE FILM 1. How should we make a documentary about a refugee experience? 2. Who’s “we”? BEINA XU 3. What happens if we don’t want to film the protagonist? 4. Can a pigeon be a protagonist? 5. Is the pigeon a metaphor? FILM PRESENTATION: Director BEINA XU begins the film in an already 6. Is the pigeon getting paid? well-known western convention of the art documentary’s cinematic 7. By whom? language (static, calophilic, atmospheric shots), and pushes it into 8. To whom does the story belong? tautology. We see shots of Alberto’s desolate universe in Athens - 9. At what point does one become a refugee? streets, interiors, flies on the ceiling, a lamp hanging from the wall 10. Why should we make a documentary about a refugee experience? etc. – while the director’s intention in the voice-over, and the issues she raises regarding the process itself. A slight confusion is felt, but Xu (BEINA XU) breaks from it quite easily by introducing meta-cinematic elements, such as a series of shots that the director announces as they appear on

the screen: Athens Sea, take 1; boat shot; Indian restaurant, exterior; CURATOR’S STATEMENT: A refugee known only as Alberto flies from Indian restaurant, interior and so on; thus revealing her own formal Athens to Brussels on a fake passport. Three years later, a small crew from approach. We can attribute the value of the epistemological process Berlin tries to make a film by shooting the landscape of his transit. Things that results thereby to the contrast between the images themselves and fall apart. They film pigeons instead. The artifice of the documentary its seemingly playful, yet matter-of-factual line if questioning. becomes the subject itself: where do we stand between image and (Emil Vasilache, BIEFF 2020) meaning? FORGET ALBERTO FOR NOW is an essay that probes our roles as authors and spectators and interrogates the politics of narrative: to whom do stories belong, and who has the right to tell them? INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION IV COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL FESTIVALS/AWARDS: IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: BEINA Xu is a writer and filmmaker based in Berlin. Born in Beijing and raised in the US, she studied WORLD SALES: comparative literature and visual anthropology in Europe and the States. KASKE FILM Thomas Kaske Her work grapples with memory, language, and migration. Her previous E: [email protected] works include The Origin Tapes (2016), A Good Object (2015), Can You 42 W: www.kaskefilm.de Hear Me Now (2015).

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] SHIPWRECK AT THE THRESHOLD OF EUROPE, LESVOS, AEGEAN SEA: 28 OCTOBER 2015 25', 2020, UK DIRECTOR: FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Pong Films, Amel Alzakout, Richard Mosse, Eric Kempson, Mikel Konate (Associated PRess), Hellenic Coast Guard, Frontex PRODUCERS: Eyal Weizman, Christina Varvia, Stefanos Levidis, Nathan Su

COMMISSIONED BY: Amel Alzakout CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Commissioned by Alzakout, Forensic Architecture reconstructed the boat’s journey, the shipwreck, and the rescue operation that followed. Cross referencing the footage with other FORENSIC ARCHITECTURET sources, including a long-range thermal video taken by artist Richard Mosse, videos by activists, professional press, and the Greek coastguard, as well as satellite images and weather data, helped answer the question FILM PRESENTATION: On the 28th of October 2015, a migrant boat “what happened,” who might be responsible, and revealed some of the left the coast of Western Turkey, heading to the closest European coast complex politics of migration today.” – the Greek island of Lesvos. The shipwreck resulted in the death of at (Berlinale Forum Expanded 2020) least 43 people, making it the deadliest incident of that period, also known as “the long summer of migration.” One of the survivors, artist Amel Alzakout, recorded the journey and the shipwreck on a waterproof DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE is a camera attached to her wrist. This footage – which also forms the basis research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, consisting of her subsequent film PURPLE SEA – provides a uniquely situated of architects, artists, filmmakers, journalists, software developers, perspective on this tragic event at the threshold of Europe. scientists, lawyers, and an extended network of collaborators from (Berlinale Forum Expanded 2020) a wide range of fields and disciplines. Founded in 2010 by Prof. Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture is committed to the development and dissemination of new evidentiary techniques and undertakes FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Berlinale Forum Expanded 2020 / Open advanced architectural and media investigations on cases of state City London 2020 / exhibitions: Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, and corporate violence on behalf of international prosecutors, human Germany 2020 / Meditations in an Emergency, UCCA Great Hall, Beijing 2020 rights and civil society groups, as well as political and environmental BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL justice organizations. Forensic Architecture produces and presents

architectural evidence in a variety of forums: national and international \\ courts, parliamentary inquiries, peoples’ tribunals, as well as in the WORLD SALES: FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE - GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY OF media and in cultural spaces. LONDON The team of Forensic Architecture is composed of: Eyal Weizman Sarah Nankivell - Research Manager (Principal Investigator), Christina Varvia (Researcher in Charge), Stefanos E: [email protected] W: forensic-architecture.org Levidis, Nathan Su, Bethany Edgoose, Mark Nieto, Robert Trafford, Lola Conte, Dimitra Andritsou, Sarah Nankivell, Charles Heller and Lorenzo 43 Pezzani.

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] W: forensic-architecture.org AT THE ENTRANCE OF THE NIGHT 19', 2020, France DIRECTOR: ANTON BIALAS

CAST: Alioune Fall, Ibrahim Doumbia, Nadia Moussa SCRIPTWRITER: Anton Bialas CINEMATOGRAPHY: Anton Bialas / Julia Mingo EDITING: Anton Bialas, Vincent Tricon SOUND: Lucas Doméjean, Matthieu Choux THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY THE MAP IS NOT PRODUCER: Marthe Lamy, Félix de Givry PRODUCTION COMPANY: Apaches films, Remembers

ANTON BIALAS

CURATOR’S STATEMENT: French film AT THE ENTRANCE OF THE FILM PRESENTATION: A story that is dreamlike and ancestral, centered NIGHT (À l’entrée de la nuit), from director Anton Bialas, is an inventive on a civilization that loses its offspring as soon as they’re old enough and evocative treatise on immigration and identity that contains three to leave. AT THE ENTRANCE OF THE NIGHT touches upon a series of individual stories of differing points of view. There is a subtlety and profoundly human sensibilities, which give it its allegorical touch. The simplicity on offer here that belies the myriad of complex emotions that film’s oneiric opening sequence abounds in vivid symbols of childhood, the film is capable of evoking. (Laurence Boyce - Cineuropa) of closeness or, conversely, of distance: a father that is untouchable, a brother that doesn’ know of his own death. Composed of night shots An immigration triptych spanning from Northern Morocco to the Spanish and infrared photographs, the film reminds one of Lynch’s dream world: coast guard to a park in Paris, AT THE ENTRANCE OF THE NIGHT is a something that appears distant and unknown, and yet is perfectly dreamlike exploration of changing identities across nations. An empathetic recognizable. ENTRANCE OF THE NIGHT presents three types of nature, reverie on belonging, friendship, and football. (Redmond Bacon - Directors each carrying a different story, a different point of view. Notes) (Emil Vasilache, BIEFF 2020)

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: ANTON BIALAS was born in Paris FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Jury Special Mention - Go Short de Nimègue in 1990 to a Swedish mother and a German father. He studied cinema 2020 / Prix Est Ensemble - Festival Côté Court de Pantin 2020 / at the Sorbonne Paris III. In 2018 he directed a medium-length film Experimental Lynx Award 2020 - New Films Festival / Berlinale 2020 INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION IV COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL entitled « Behind Our Eyes » selected at FID Marseille 2018 (Georges / Concorto 2020 / Lille 2020 / Signes de Nuit 2020 de Beauregard Prize / High School Students’Prize / Special Mention of the French Institute of Criticism) and shown in numerous international festivals such as Visions du Réel in Nyon, Short side of Pantin (Grand WORLD SALES: Prix), Message to Man in Saint-Petersburg. His latest film, completed in APACHESFILMS E: [email protected] 2020, is titled At the Entrance of the Night. W: www.apachesfilms.fr 44

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] BAB SEBTA 19', 2019, France, Morocco DIRECTOR: RANDA MAROUFI

SCRIPTWRITER: Randa Maroufi CINEMATOGRAPHY: Luca Coassin EDITING: Ismael Joffroy Chandoutis, Randa Maroufi SOUND: Mohamed Bounouar, Léonore Mercier PRODUCER: Sophie Penson, Said Hamich PRODUCTION COMPANY: Barney Production

RANDA MAROUFI DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: BAB SEBTA consists of a series of reconstructed situations based on observations made on the border of Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on Moroccan soil providing the scene for an FILM PRESENTATION: The film uses an impressive cinematographic intense trafficking of manufactured goods, sold at discounted prices. Every technique. An experiment that brings Dogville (2003 d. Lars Von Trier) to day, thousands of people work there. In this film, my will is to transcribe mind, and that makes use of Brechtian means to lead us onto a political this particular tension felt on this small territory separating Africa from and documentary track through its usage of convention. The spectator Europe but also a more general state of the world. I wanted to raise the witnesses people caught in the system of customs, who perform and are question of the passage between continents from the perspective of subjected to repetitive and mechanical actions, the latter being broken everyday life. every once in a while by the voice-over which communicates experiences (Randa Maroufi) that come from one side or the other of the authority/submission dynamic that takes shape between the border guards and the civilians. BAB SEPTA is an allegory of a 3rd class customs, where human rights are undermined under the pretext of an economically-driven sense of CURATOR’S STATEMENT: …an astonishing tour de force that is a much- security. needed political statement [and a] film that questions the ideology of borders and toxic immigration rhetoric through complex and exceptionally (Emil Vasilache, BIEFF 2020) choreographed tracking shots.”

(Winterthur Film Festival)

FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Special Mention - Dokufest 2020 / Grand

Prix - Tampere 2020 / Rotterdam 2020 / Clermont-Ferrand 2020 / FID FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL Marseille 2019 / Glasgow 2020 / Hamburg 2020 / Hong Kong 2020 / DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: RANDA MAROUFI, born in 1987

Valladolid 2019 / Winterthur 2019 in Casablanca, Morocco, a Fine Arts graduate at Tetouan (Morocco), \\ Angers (France), and Le Fresnoy (France). Randa Maroufi belongs to this generation that grew up in an era dominated by images. She collects WORLD SALES: them with as much eagerness as suspicion, and ceaselessly questions SHORT/CUTS their veracity. She prefers to put her ambiguous fictions in the service Elise Notseck - Festivals & Sales Agent of reality, and the field of her experimentation encompasses the T: +33 6 15 27 80 35 | E: [email protected] W: www.shortcuts.pro occupation of public space and gender issues, of which she highlights the founding mechanisms through her praxis. 45

AN ACT OF VIOLENCE PRESENTATION INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION V

The films included in this program Gravitating around Walter Benjamin’s raise questions regarding the morality observation, which states that “the of violence, addressing in their question would remain open, whether explorations the ontological origins violence as a principle could be a of violence and the idea of criminal moral means even to just ends”, these responsibility, among other key topics. films use the possibilities of the filmic medium in order to deconstruct to the point of atomization the acts of violence and, even more so, their unavoidable consequences, forcing at times the capacities for multiperspectivism of the cinematic apparatus in order to understand the incomprehensible.

(Oana Ghera, BIEFF 2020) BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL \\

47 IT WASN’T THE RIGHT MOUNTAIN, MOHAMMAD 29', 2019, France DIRECTOR: MILI PECHERER

SCRIPTWRITER: Mili Pecherer

AN ACT OF VIOLENCE AN ACT 3D MODELLING: Mili Pecherer, Alexis Hallaert COMPUTER PROGRAMMING: Alexis Hallaert EDITING: Mili Pecherer, Jean Hubert SOUND: Arno Ledoux MUSIC: Eliav Varda PRODUCER: Natalia Trebik PRODUCTION COMPANY: Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: The story of IT WASN’T THE RIGHT MOUNTAIN, MOHAMMAD was born out of two significant events: one is ancient and the other is recent. The ancient one happened approximately MILI PECHERER 3,800 years ago, when God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. It was probably one of the biggest leaps of faith anyone has ever known. I, however, found the catharsis quite puzzling. Just as Abraham was about to FILM PRESENTATION: We never get to know who Mohammad is, nor sacrifice his son on the mount of Moriah, he was interrupted by the angel which mountain was the right one. What we do know is what happens on of the Lord, and saw a “ram caught in a thicket by his horns”. Abraham the wrong mountain: the crossing of paths between Mili, who tries to live sacrificed the ram instead of his son. But I wondered - Who was this ram? an honest life by looking after her flock of rams, implacably threatened How did he get caught up in that situation? In my films, I’ve always taken by a harsh, indifferent world, and Abraham, who is to be told by God the approach of describing the world as I see it, through my own eyes. at the last moment to sacrifice a ram instead of his own son. The first Therefore I decided that the only way to be loyal to a certain truth, without installment of a larger project, the film lays its foundations: to approach imposing it on anybody, would be to imagine what could have happened to the intimate by starting from the Bible, to nourish the relationship to me, back then, when God tested everyone’s faith on the mount of Moriah.” oneself and to the world by going back to the story of Creation. (Mili Pecherer) (FIDMarseille)

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: MILI PECHERER was born in the

FESTIVALS/AWARDS: StudioCollector Award 2019 / Berlinale Shorts Holy Land in 1988. She has made films with Napoleon Bonaparte, God, a 2020 / Annecy 2020 / FIDMarseille 2020 / Cervino Cine Mountain hemorrhoid, a donkey, and rams which have been screened and awarded INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION V COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL 2020 / Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival 2020 / Split 2020 in festivals such as the Berlinale, Annecy, FIDMarseille, etc. She is a graduate of Bezalel, the Jerusalem Academy of Art, and Le Fresnoy - National Studio of Contemporary Arts in Tourcoing, where she won the WORLD SALES: StudioCollector 2019 award. She currently lives in Marseille. LE FRESNOY STUDIO NATIONAL DES ARTS CONTEMPORAINS Natalia Trebik T: +33 3 20 28 38 64 | E: [email protected] 48 W: www.lefresnoy.net

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] ACTION, ALMOST UNABLE TO THINK 11', 2018, China DIRECTOR: MAO HAONAN

SCRIPTWRITER: MAO HAONAN CINEMATOGRAPHY: MAO HAONAN PRODUCER: MAO HAONAN

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: The origin of this film is the real story of

MAO HAONAN a soldier being killed by a bomb while greeting a civilian. The film tries to recapture that moment of contradiction and vulnerability using the techniques of 3D video, computer rendering simulators, photos, and FILM PRESENTATION: How can we translate the aftermath of an act of graphics to express the filmmaker’s personal understanding of the violence, and how can we embody one’s consciousness during moments subjectivity of this reality. of extreme suffering? MAO HAONAN creates an alternative, artificial (Mao Haonan) world that will shortcircuit your motherboard. A universe both moist and electric, simultaneously dark and lit up by neon lights and flames. HAONAN is interested in a micro-sociology of the senses, in which spaces, textures, and sounds tell of a story that seems too small to CURATORS STATEMENT: A visually ingenious portrayal of a life story and grasp. inner world of a soldier killed in an explosion is told through hypnotically visualized allegorical scenes and objects during an imaginary encounter (Emil Vasilache, BIEFF 2020) of views by a scientist searching for a relation to reality, a filmmaker reflecting on a role of time in art and a refugee stripped of the possibility to live in his hometown. FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Best Experiment Documentary Film - Ji.hlava 2019 / Rotterdam 2020 / Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2020 / Signs of the (Center for Documentary Film) Night 2020

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: MAO HAONAN (1990, China) holds a bachelor’s degree from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and a master’s WORLD SALES: FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL MAO HAONAN degree from School of Fine Arts De Nantes Saint-Nazaire. Haonan tries \\ E: [email protected] to express his view on the subjectivity of reality through techniques like 3D videos, computer rendering simulators, space installations, paintings, photos, etc. He currently lives and works in Shanghai, and has directed the following short films: UNCLAIMED LAND (2017), DREAM OF OLIVE (2018), ACTION, ALMOST UNABLE TO THINK (2018)

49

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] MY OWN LANDSCAPES 19', 2020, France DIRECTOR: ANTOINE CHAPON

CAST: Cyril Pointevineau-millin, Thendral Tiroumalechetty SCRIPTWRITER: Antoine Chapon

AN ACT OF VIOLENCE AN ACT ANIMATION: Antoine Chapon EDITING: Antoine Chapon SOUND: Antoine Chapon

ANTOINE CHAPON DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: After September 11, 2001, the United States invested in the creation of video games to recruit, train and treat soldiers. Today video games have an important part in war. Since 2013, the FILM PRESENTATION: Does the terror of war or the terror of another American army has regularly organized video game competitions to recruit man’s dead body become bearable when their realities are rendered on future soldiers. Similarly in the video game “America’s Army”, good players a computer? Does a weapon become less lethal? How about a veteran’s receive a contract by email. The transition from virtual to real is brutal. PTSD? To whom does it serve to simulate war theatres? Who identifies This is why some players have violent traumas when they discover the in these scenarios, ex-soldiers driven by the terrors of war, or future reality of war. In the era of virtual reality helmets and killer drone pilots, soldiers who fetishize this universe? These are some questions asked I would like to show images of a video game used by the American and by MY OWN LANDSCAPES. A post-war open world of the senses, a 3D French armies. The film is based on interviews with Cyril, a veteran who sanatorium for traumatized soldiers, a reconsideration of space and knows this video game very well and now uses it in his own way. The film perception in an alternative universe, this is what ANTOINE CHAPON’s opens up his world to us, which he makes every day. A world of alienation film proposes. and emancipation where nature is a second life.”

(Emil Vasilache, BIEFF 2020) (Antoine Chapon)

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: ANTOINE CHAPON (1990) is an artist FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Best Short Film - Visions du Réel 2020 / Best Short Documentary Film - Kortfilmfestivalen 2020 / Palm Springs and filmmaker based in Paris. He studied at the School of Fine Art in 2020 / Centre Pompidou Museum, Nouvelles écritures, Paris 2020 / Nantes, the University of Philosophy in Nantes and the École des Hautes FIFIB 2020 / La Ciotat 2020 / Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2020 Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His installations and videos focus on how simulation can be used to control the human or the non-human. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including ”Open Codes: INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION V COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL The World as a Field of Data” at the ZKM Museum | Karlsruhe (Germany)

WORLD SALES: STUDIO ANTOINE CHAPON T: +33622306497 E: [email protected] 50

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] EXPLAINING THE LAW TO KWAME 23', 2018, Israel DIRECTOR: ROEE ROSEN

CAST: Hani Furstenberg SCRIPTWRITER: Roee Rosen CINEMATOGRAPHY: David Rodoy EDITING: Max Lomberg PRODUCER: Roee Rosen

CURATOR'S STATEMENT: Roee Rosen likes to push boundaries, to blur ROEE ROSEN the laws of genres, and is not one to shy away from a scandal. This time, the device is more austere. Before an audience of hardly attentive young adults, a lecturer specialized in children’s rights does a presentation on the FILM PRESENTATION: The topic of the lecture that is central to the issue of the age of criminal responsibility, as decreed for Israelian citizens film – the story of a 12 year-old Palestinian girl being sentenced to serve on the one hand, and for Palestinian citizens on the other hand. Wonderful over four months in an adult prison for carrying a knife – is real, but the Hani Furstenberg, shines with the fire of comical fierceness, delivers a lecturer (brilliantly performed by Hani Furstenberg) and her content are monologue and a performance that move from political reflections to the not. Israeli multimedia artist Roee Rosen conjures an academic address history of Israelian law, and then to autobiographical revelations on the that begins normally but soon devolves into erotic musings, self-doubts, state of her female body and her erotic fantasies. Through this analysis of and a riot of metaphors. the law, infected little by little, by carnal exasperation, it is a discourse of (Adrian Martin - Viennale) political criticism that develops, at the same time as its inadequacy and its dissolution. A beautiful classic piece, EXPLAINING... is the perfect example of how Roee Rosen always manages to exert tension even on the most twisted elements. FESTIVALS/AWARDS: CNAP Award, Flash award - Fidmarseille 2020/ Viennale 2020 (FID Marseille)

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: ROEE ROSEN (b. 1963) is an Israeli- WORLD SALES: American artist, filmmaker, and writer. He is known for his multilayered Roee Rosen E: [email protected] and provocative work which often challenges the divides between FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL W: roeerosen.com history and the present, documentary and fiction, politics, and erotics. \\ Rosen is currently working on a feature-length film entitled Kafka For Kids. Rosen is a professor at Ha’Midrasha Art College, and at the Bezalel Art Academy, both in Israel.

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DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] MAALBEEK 15', 2020, France DIRECTOR: ISMAËL JOFFROY CHANDOUTIS

SCRIPTWRITER: Perrine Prost & Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, Pierre De Wurstemberger AN ACT OF VIOLENCE AN ACT ANIMATION: Maël Delorme, Léon Denise, William Houel & Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis EDITING: Maël Delorme, Marianna Romano & Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis SOUND: Martin Delzescaux, Lucas Masson MUSIC: Sergio Baietta CURATOR’S STATEMENT: MAALBEEK enters the fragmentary memory PRODUCER: Pauline Seigland, Lionel Massol, Maxence Voiseux of Sabine, a woman seriously injured in the 2016 Brussels metro PRODUCTION COMPANY: FILMS GRAND HUIT, LES FILMS A VIF attacks and suffering from amnesia. The search for the missing image gradually leads her to the spectral scenes of the images, metaphors for the sensation of foggy memory. The director tries to reinvent cinema by dissecting the image beyond the visible. In his creations, which take ISMAËL JOFFROY CHANDOUTIS the form of testimonies of our society exposed to the beginnings of a new technological humanity, the plastic universe, close to the “valley of the strange”, questions our interiority and its possible future in a world FILM PRESENTATION: ISMAËL JOFFROY CHANDOUTIS returns to governed by the flow of images.” BIEFF with another profound film, which puts forward the proposition of possibly recovering one’s memory through images. MAALBEEK brings (Julie Chaizemartin, Art Press 2020) together mediums that are both different and chaotic, asking them to reconstruct a terrible event: a bomb attack on the subway. Sabine is one of the people who survive the attack and her memory is dressed DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: Born in France in 1988, ISMAËL in pixels, in found footage, and defragmented reconstructions of the JOFFROY CHANDOUTIS has studied editing at INSAS in Belgium, and spaces she was in, but that she can’t seem to remember. The issue with filmmaking at Sint-Lukas Art School (Belgium) and at Le Fresnoy in the image-document becomes clear at the moment when Sabine doesn’t France. His directorial debut was ONDES NOIRES (2018) which has been seem to recognize that past as her own, and these recordings become shown in many international festivals, such as the IDFA, the Clermont- simple carcasses for an inexistent and traumatic past. Ferrand Short Film Festival, where he won Prix Festivals Connexion Auvergne Rhône Alpes, or Regensburg Short Film Festival, where he (Emil Vasilache - BIEFF 2020) won the Grand Prix and the Youth Jury Prize. He explores a cinema beyond the boundaries of genres. His films question memory, virtual, INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION V COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL technology, and the intermediate spaces between the worlds and FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Semaine de la Critique Official Selection, between the words. Cannes 2020

WORLD SALES: SQUARE EYES Wouter Jansen T: +31622076717 | E: [email protected] 52 W: www.squareeyesfilm.com

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] THE UNDERTAKER 13', 2019, USA / Netherlands DIRECTOR: YAEL BARTANA

SCRIPTWRITER: Yael Bartana CINEMATOGRAPHY: Itai Neeman ART DIRECTION: Schmuel Ben Shalom.. EDITING: Yael Bartana SOUND: Daniel Meir PRODUCER: Naama Pyritz PRODUCTION COMPANY: My-i Productions

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: THE UNDERTAKER follows an obscure figure YAEL BARTANA as she is leading her swarm of armed followers in a ceremonial march on the way to perform a mass burial ritual. Carrying a variety of weapons from different historical contexts, the choreographed group strides FILM PRESENTATION: The topic of the lecture that is central to the through numerous locations, eventually being guided by their leader to the film – the story of a 12 year-old Palestinian girl being sentenced to serve burial site in which they dispose of the weapons they possess. Rather than over four months in an adult prison for carrying a knife – is real, but the a memorial to the dead, the group creates a human monument for the lecturer (brilliantly performed by Hani Furstenberg) and her content are living, linked up with ghosts of the past. Addressing notions of militarism, not. Israeli multimedia artist Roee Rosen conjures an academic address nationhood, belonging, and memory, THE UNDERTAKER blurs the lines that begins normally but soon devolves into erotic musings, self-doubts, between fact and fiction and calls attention to the function of weapons in and a riot of metaphors. the perpetuation of our systems of violence, repression, and displacement. (Adrian Martin - Viennale) (Yael Bartana)

FESTIVALS/AWARDS: CNAP Award, Flash award - Fidmarseille 2020/ DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: YAEL BARTANA’s films, installations, Viennale 2020 and photographs explore the imagery of identity and the politics of memory. Her starting point is the national consciousness propagated by her native country, Israel. Central to the work are ceremonies, public

WORLD SALES: rituals, and social diversions that are intended to reaffirm the collective Yael Bartana identity of the nation-state. In her Israeli projects, Bartana dealt with the E: [email protected] impact of war, military rituals, and a sense of threat on every-day life. FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL W: www.yaelbartana.com Between 2006 and 2011, she has been working in Poland, creating the \\ trilogy 'And Europe Will Be Stunned', a project on the history of Polish- Jewish relations and its influence on the contemporary Polish identity.

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DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected]

SUBLIME BODIES

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION VI PRESENTATION

In SUBLIME BODIES, the body is both Sublime Bodies also searches for the object and subject: both a lexical unit contrast between the here of the in a cinematic vocabulary that aims at body and the there of the screen or representation, but also as a starting the Other, raising the question of the point of a subjective reflection external perception of surrounding on concepts such as embodiment, bodies, but also the question of the identity, sexuality, and senses. unique understanding that can be derived from the combination of The films easily interchange between proximal senses and distanced senses, an interior and exterior perspective, of the turning plate between active setting a tension between the act of and passive sensing. seeing (and, implicitly, the visual and auditory knowledge of the body) with (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) the lived body’s subjectivities, with the empirical ways of knowing it from within. BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL \\

55 AMARYLLIS – A STUDY 7', 2020, UK DIRECTOR: JAYNE PARKER

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jayne Parker SUBLIME BODIES EDITING: Jayne Parker PRODUCER: Jayne Parker

JAYNE PARKER CURATOR'S STATEMENT: Finally, for pure sensual pleasure – and more botanical richness – we need to talk about JAYNE PARKER’S AMARYLLIS, FILM PRESENTATION: At first glance, nothing happens in AMARYLLIS. a wondrous 16mm that floods us with the joy of red. In studying the But look again. A poetic and gentle study of amaryllis flowers, JAYNE amaryllis flower, named for the passionate girl of Greek myth, Parker PARKER's film demands more attention than we are often willing to give gives us such brilliant, heart-stopping reds that I was reminded of cinema’s to the screen. This little ode to color on 16mm film is not a calophilic greatest uses of pigment, from the Kinemacolor pictures of the 1910s to exercise, but a whole cinematic translation of people's fascination the saturated Technicolor of Allan Dwan’s SLIGHTY SCARLET. I have to say: with plants, their pigments, millimeter movements, reactions to light. I don’t get Rothko, I don’t really get Delacroix, but for me, blazing color on PARKER takes what we are used to seeing in the background and brings film is the best thing there is. it to the forefront, actually arousing a paradox – the realization of an (Lesley Chow, Bright Lights Film Journal) "anti-film" through deep cinematic practices.

(Călin Boto, BIEFF 2020) DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: JAYNE PARKER is a British artist and film-maker. She studied sculpture at Canterbury College of Art and Experimental Media at the Slade, where she is now Head of Graduate FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Oberhausen International Short Film Festival 2020 Fine Art Media. Her films have been shown in art galleries and museums in the UK and internationally, as well as at cinemas and film festivals, music festivals and on television. In 2003 she was the recipient of the

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION VI COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL 1871 Fellowship hosted by the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford and the San Francisco Art Institute, researching the relationship between music and film.

WORLD SALES: LUX T: +44 (0)20 3141 2960 | E: [email protected] 56 W: lux.org.uk ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER – THE ART OF BODYBUILDING 8', 1977-2019, Netherlands, USA Director: BABETH M. VANLOO

CAST: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Raymond Mondini SCRIPTWRITER: Babeth M. VanLoo CINEMATOGRAPHY: Simon Edery, Babeth M. VanLoo EDITING: Babeth M. VanLoo PRODUCER: Babeth M. VanLoo PRODUCTION COMPANY: Film Art Amsterdam

BABETH M. VANLOO CURATORS STATEMENT: I was sitting out in the audience, and I saw you and Franco and that really turned me on tremendously… ». Almost fifty FILM PRESENTATION: ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER - THE ART OF years have passed and yet no one could blame Raymond Mondini, neither BODYBUILDING consists of unprocessed, original 16mm material for this nor for mentioning Leni Riefenstahl. Because, in the end, what which the director herself shot during the Mr. Olympia Bodybuilding Schwarzenegger was doing could be seen as continuously mise-en-scène- contest in the 1970s. VANLOO filmed Arnold Schwarzenegger, then ing. Not someone else, an alien beauty, but his own body, for him and Mister Universe, around 1975/1976. In her art installation “Sculpting us to adore it. BABETH M. VANLOO uses on- and offstage material with the Body” she presented him as a living work of art: some of the Schwarzenegger in order to make us accomplices of the savvy-yet-juicy poses were reminiscent of Rodin’s “The Thinker”. This art installation Mondini. Hand in hand, the two species of the bodybuilder’s on-camera is unfortunately lost, but the original recordings have been used appearances, the show and the interview, eventually lead to one firm idea for a new cut. In this new film we see footage of an interview with – performativity never stops for our pin-up Schwarzenegger, there’s always Arnold Schwarzenegger by Raymond Mondini, recorded just after the at least one voyeur left; himself. Mr Olympia competition in 1976, combined with footage from the (Călin Boto, BIEFF 2020) competition itself.

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: BABETH M. VANLOO (1948, FESTIVALS/AWARDS: International Film festival Rotterdam 2020 / Netherlands) studied painting and design in Aachen and performance

IndieLisboa 202 0/ Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg 2020 and sculpture under the supervision of Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf. She FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL also holds a master's degree in film from San Francisco Art Institute. \\ VanLoo has made a number of short films about other artists, including Andy Warhol and Beuys, both of whom she has collaborated with. Her WORLD SALES: films often deal with art, social engagement and spirituality. In 2000, EYE EXPERIMENTAL T: +31(0)205891446 she founded the first Buddhist television broadcasting channel in the E: [email protected] Western world and she is the director of the International Buddhist Film W: www.international.eyefilm.nl Festival. 57 PASSAGE 13', 2020, Germany DIRECTOR: ANN OREN

CAST: Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau SUBLIME BODIES SCRIPTWRITER: Ann Oren CINEMATOGRAPHY: Juan Sarmiento G. EDITING: Ann Oren SOUND: Manuela Schininá MUSIC: Manuela Schininá PRODUCER: Ann Oren

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: A foley artist’s job is to enhance the illusion

ANN OREN of reality in a film using sound. In my film, the foley artist uses his body to create sounds for a looping horse in passage - a dressage term for a slowed down trot. Through his meticulous sound reenactments, a human-

FILM PRESENTATION: ANN OREN creates a choreography from the animal passage comes to light. Up until the 90’s, foley artists were not professional routine of a foley artist, played by Simon(e) Jaikiriuma even regularly credited in films. PASSAGE was made with love to all the Paetau, who works on the sounds of an equestrian training sequence. backstage magicians who make cinema what it is.” The intensive work of the artist gets a bit goofy, but not too much. (ANN OREN) However, the farce is waiting around the corner – more and more sensual, the artist dissolves their identity into that of the horse. Now they are performing for the camera, in sync with the training sequences DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: ANN OREN’s films and video that OREN continues to insert. You can't think of the ideational installations explore the performative quality of everyday life. She implications while this queer, non-binary and naughty centaur is on investigates collective desire with characters who exist in the liminal screen. You’re charmed. Only after does decryption begin. space between performers and audience, winking at legends from the history of literature, theater and cinema. Her work’s presentations (Călin Boto, BIEFF 2020) include The Moscow Biennial for Young Art, The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), The Tel-Aviv Museum, Anthology Film Archives (NY), Rotterdam International Film Festival, Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, BFI FESTIVALS/AWARDS: International Short Film Festival Oberhausen London, Dok Leipzig and Locarno Film Festival. Born 1979 in Tel-Aviv, 2020/ BFI London Film Festival 2020/ Hamburg Short Film Festival Ann studied Film (BA) and Fine Arts (MA) at The School of Visual Arts,

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION VI COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL 2020/ Kasseler Dokfest 2020 NY. She lives/works in Berlin and Tel-Aviv.

WORLD SALES: E: [email protected]

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DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] A DEMONSTRATION 24', 2020, Netherlands, Germany DIRECTOR: BENY WAGNER, SASHA LITVINTSEVA

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Beny Wagner, Sasha Litvintseva EDITING: Beny Wagner, Sasha Litvintseva SOUND: Beny Wagner, Sasha Litvintseva MUSIC: Beny Wagner, Andrew Bernstein, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani PRODUCER: Daan Milius, Hans van Hezik, Guillaume Cailleau PRODUCTION COMPANY: Video Power, CaSk Films CURATOR'S STATEMENT: Creating a taxonomy and classifying the world has been the big project of modern Western science, and it still informs current modes of knowledge today. SASHA LITVINTSEVA and BENY WAGNER SASHA LITVINTSEVA BENY WAGNER explore this paradigm and navigate the closed, highly structured and almost claustrophobic spaces of anatomical theatres, archives, libraries and natural science museums, all of them designed to FILM PRESENTATION: A DEMONSTRATION lyrically unravels a produce, harbour and disseminate scientific knowledge. Their elaborate fascinating moment in early modern European science, in which images of these places of wisdom and scientific progress are alternated naturalists hastened a project that extends to the present day – that with and dissolve into images of seemingly impenetrable forests, gardens of cataloging the natural world. The taxonomies of people, plants, with sculptures of mystical monsters, animals and majestic clouds to create animals, rocks were born, and everything that couldn’t find its place in a visual and conceptual dialectic between culture and nature. The whole these scientific Procrustes’ beds fell under the umbrella of monsters. is accompanied by a selected musical soundtrack that urges the viewer to LITVINTSEVA and WAGNER are looking for visual remains of these keep their eyes and mind open. taxonomies in performance halls, museums, libraries, but also in nature, (Maria Morata, Berlinale Shorts blog) a world full of small details from which the narratives and forms of monsters were built. We are challenged to resurrect ways of looking and thinking that are far away from us now, but that we can still access. DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: SASHA LITVINTSEVA (Murmansk, (Călin Boto, BIEFF 2020) Russia, 1989) is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and researcher, whose work is situated on the uncertain thresholds of the perceptible and the communicable, organism and environment, entropy and quantification. FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Berlinale Shorts 2020/ Moscow Experimental Her work has been exhibited worldwide. Sasha is a lecturer in Film Film Festival 2020/ Vancouver 2020/ Vilnius 2020 Theory and Practice at Queen Mary University of London and holds a FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL

Ph.D. in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths. \\

BENY WAGNER (Berlin, Germany, 1985) is an artist, filmmaker, and WORLD SALES: writer. Working in moving image, text, installation, and lectures, he VIDEO POWER constructs non-linear narratives that investigate the ever-shifting Claudia Sánchez Jiménez boundaries of the human body. He has presented his work in festivals, T: 0031621802691 | E: [email protected] W: www.videopower.eu exhibitions, and conferences internationally. He is currently a senior lecturer at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. 59

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected], [email protected] EADEM CUTIS: THE SAME SKIN 6', 2019, Germany DIRECTOR: NINA HOPF

CAST: John Hopf (voice) SUBLIME BODIES ANIMATION: Nina Hopf SOUND: Alejandro Weyler PRODUCER: Nina Hopf

NINA HOPF

FILM PRESENTATION: I just want to be seen as who I am!”, says John. He refers to his mixed feelings regarding his trans identity, for John sees himself as a man. NINA, his twin sister, makes a body symphony of John’s in her queer festival darling EADEM CUTIS: THE SAME SKIN. While CURATOR'S STATEMENT: NINA HOPF accommodates two dialogues he’s being interviewed by his sister, he paints the screen – fingerprints, in her film. The first, the auditory one, takes place between herself and lips, indefinite bits of shapes on a screen which for too many decades her twin brother, John Hopf, who talks about his transition. But she’s not demanded definite forms and shapes. part of the second one. For this dialogue is between the index signs that (Călin Boto, BIEFF 2020) John's body has left traces of over time. An inner dialogue, after all, that HOPF tries to translate playfully by animating these signs in the abstract – the viewer could not tell if the child in the first home movie is a girl or a boy. And how stupid it is that we are trying to figure it out! Then the FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Sundance 2020 / Queer Lisboa 2020 / Wicked fingerprints, index signs without any gender or sex detectable at first sight. Queer: The Boston LGBT Film Festival 2020 Details in ink, that are just as inaccurate. But the abstract lasts until the director decides to give it a shape, a name, to align all these details in a body – John Hopf, man.

(Călin Boto, BIEFF 2020) INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION VI COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: NINA HOPF is a German media-artist and student at the Bauhaus-University Weimar. She is mainly focused on printmaking, drawing and animation. Her work primarily deals with processes from her immediate environment and therefore it mostly has a biographical or documental character.

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DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: E: [email protected] THE SEISMIC FORM 15', 2020, Austria DIRECTOR: ANTOINETTE ZWIRCHMAYR

CAST: Johannes Gerhart, Eryca Green SCRIPTWRITER: Antoinette Zwirchmayr, Jean Baudrillard (original text) CINEMATOGRAPHY: Antoinette Zwirchmayr EDITING: Antoinette Zwirchmayr SOUND: Matthias Peyker MUSIC: Matthias Peyker

CURATOR'S STATEMENT: ANTOINETTE ZWIRCHMAYR creates enigmatic and evocative films which leave out as much as they show. In her poetry ANTOINETTE ZWIRCHMAYR and practice, the tactile and analogue film image is almost spiritually linked to the physical materiality of the world. Her latest work looks at geological and seismic conditions as a metaphor for a physical scale FILM PRESENTATION: ZWIRCHMAYR does not fight theory with theory. that transcends that of human beings. 'The Seismic Form' is based on Starting from a text written by Jean Baudrillard, the director makes a text by Jean Baudrillard, edited down to a few sentences in line with small case studies, surreal or performative vignettes that revolve around ZWIRCHMAYR's elliptical and suggestive aesthetics, and read out in three seismic movements and ruins, the topics covered in the essay. A man different languages with selective subtitles. The French theoretician poses nude by the sea. Earlier, he was completely covered with gravel. combines the interest in the phenomena of nature with a cultural narrative Two empty bodies haunt a historic building. Frozen time, suspended and a critique of civilisation. A historical timeline of fractures and new time, an alternative reality, resurrections - the director's response to all beginnings, which starts in Pompeii and continues at a museum. No matter this is, of course, the act of filming, which also concludes her film. how conceptually tight it may seem, Zwirchmayer's vision is free of dogma (Călin Boto, BIEFF 2020) and structures other than those she imposes on herself. Her latest work is probably her most beautiful to date.

(CPH:DOX 2020) FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Oberhausen 2020 / CPH:DOX 2020 / IndieLisboa 2020 DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: ANTOINETTE ZWIRCHMAYR was born in 1989 in Salzburg, Austria and studied at the Academy of Fine

Arts Vienna. Her work consists of concise juxtapositions that reveal FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL WORLD SALES:

sensitive relationships between human beings, objects and nature. Her \\ LIGHT CONE lyrical visual compositions show vulnerable surfaces separating the inner T : +33 1 46 59 01 53 E: [email protected] from the outer, where she examines stereotypical ideas of physique and W: www.lightcone.org/en identity. The reduced formal aesthetic that she employs is marked by a critical ambivalence and directs the viewer’s attention to details that are correlated in the transient and physical quality of analog film. She has exhibited work at Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival and Austrian Film Museum, among others. 61 PROGRESSIVE TOUCH 13', 2020, Austria, Netherlands, USA DIRECTOR: MICHAEL PORTNOY

CAST: Tizo All, Ilona Bankiraj, Marc Philipp Gabriel, Juan

SUBLIME BODIES Felipe Amaya González, Astrid Panaken SCRIPTWRITER: Michael Portnoy CINEMATOGRAPHY: Darja Pilz EDITING: Camila Mercadal MUSIC: Stefan Meier, Michael Portnoy PRODUCER: Esther Niemeier, Julia Simpson PRODUCTION COMPANY: Steirischer Herbst, Stichting Beeldende Kunst Middelburg De Vleeshal

CURATOR'S STATEMENT: PROGRESSIVE TOUCH spares us almost nothing in the genital and oral departments, the universal mime of body MICHAEL PORTNOY parts, extrusions and insertions. Brilliantly choreographed, stage-lit and soundtracked, PORTNOY (could ever an artist have been better named for this work?) has the dream that young lovers might use these hilarious, sexy FILM PRESENTATION: Can you fuck to an irregular beat? PROGRESSIVE and joyful vignettes as instructional videos. TOUCH depicts three moody, absurdist love scenes in which the goal is (Adrian Searle, The Guardian) to “improve” sex by complicating its rhythm and choreography. Sex as dance as comedy. Enacted by three real-life couples, the dancers' every explicit move is synchronized to the propulsive, unpredictable score DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: MICHAEL PORTNOY (b. 1971, which borrows elements from progressive rock, trap, and math metal. Washington, DC, USA) is a New York-based artist. Coming from a background in dance and stand-up comedy, his performance-based work employs a variety of media: from participatory installations to sculpture, FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Best Short Film – Pornfilmfestival Berlin painting, writing, theater, video, and curation. Portnoy is largely 2020 / Rotterdam 2020 / Queer Lisboa 2020/ Honorable Mention concerned with manipulating language and behavior as a tool for world- - Norwegian Kortfilmfestivalen / Best International Short - Leiden bending – either in his "Relational Stalinist" game structures in which Shorts confusion, complication, and ambiguity are used to stretch participants' speech and movement; or his quest to "improve" existing breeds of art through re-engineering. He has presented internationally in museums, art galleries, theatres, and music halls, including recently the Centre INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION VI COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL WORLD SALES: Pompidou, Paris, France (2015); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the MICHAEL PORTNOY Netherlands (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2013); KW Institute E: [email protected] for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2013); The Kitchen, New York, USA (2013) and dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, Germany (2012).

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DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] 63 \\ BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL

A STATE OF GRACE

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION VII PRESENTATION

A STATE OF GRACE focuses on raise at the same time the ultimate experiences and sensations that are question: where do we go from here? closely connected to what Max Blecher In these images we can, at times, described as “immediate unreality” – find the precondition of revealability be it the case of accelerationist visions (Offenbarkeit) that is necessary that intentionally exacerbate the most grounds for revelation (Offenbarung), radically futuristic tendencies of the but also the opposite, to paraphrase present or moments of hyper-reality Derrida: an epiphany that also lies as a in which the fiber of reality itself testimony for its circumstances. seemingly comes undone. (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) These are images that, at times, unveil a space in which ritual and mythology regain their original significance, against the backdrop of an ever harder to decipher everyday life, BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL \\

65 MARY, MARY, SO CONTRARY 15', 2019, Singapore DIRECTOR: NELSON YEO

SCRIPTWRITER: Nelson Yeo

A STATE OF GRACE A STATE CINEMATOGRAPHY: Nelson Yeo EDITING: Nelson Yeo SOUND: Teo Wei Yong PRODUCER: Si En Tan PRODUCTION COMPANY: Widewall Studio

NELSON YEO

FILM PRESENTATION: Inspired by one of the fundamental myths of CURATOR'S STATEMENT: Nelson Yeo proves his masterly command Taoism, Zhuangzi's dream, MARY, MARY, SO CONTRARY splices found of intertextuality in Mary Mary, So Contrary: be it the multiple literary footage imagery from various decades and genres of cinema to tell the references present in the film's script, which traverse entire millennia of story of Ma Li, a young woman who spirals into depression after being history and refer to extremely diverse cultures, be it the multiple cinematic forced into an arranged marriage, which is signaled by a reoccurring genres and techniques that it touches upon - ranging from Golden Age dream with a lamb. Her attempt at escaping her tragic destiny has the cinema all the way to 3D animation. But the story of Ma Li and her opposite effect, however: it opens the gates to a new and dreamlike Looking-Glass universe is so much more than a collage of images, melodies, reality, in which everything and nothing is a dream at the same time. and narratives - it is the expression of a vision in which any given fact or gesture, no matter how small, has an infinite echo in countless other (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) places. When all of these realities collide, concepts such as identity and memory become unstable - Ma Li turns into Mary, into Zhuangzi, into Hero, into Eurydice, into Carmen, into replicant Rachel of Blade Runner, and FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2019 so on. The purgatory which her soul enters into is equally a purgatory of / Hamburg Short Film Festival 2020 / Honorable Mention - New infinite meaning. Directors/New Films Festival Portugal 2020 / Singapore International Film Festival 2019 / Uppsala Short Film Festival 2020 (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020)

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: NELSON YEO is a Singaporean INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION VII COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL WORLD SALES: filmmaker. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Digital LIGHTS ON Flavio Armone Filmmaking from Nanyang Technological University in 2011. He is E: [email protected] an alumn of programmes such as Berlinale Talents Tokyo (2014) and W: www.lightsonfilm.org Locarno Filmmakers Academy (2018) and is currently working on his debut feature film.

66 THE LITTLE SOUL 9', 2019, Poland DIRECTOR: BARBARA RUPIK

SCRIPTWRITER: Barbara Rupik ANIMATION: Barbara Rupik EDITING: Barbara Rupik SOUND: Barbara Rupik MUSIC: Maurycy Raczyński PRODUCTION COMPANY: Polish National Film School In Łódź

BARBARA RUPIK DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: The Little Soul is some kind of an animated assemblage: combining object, painting, and clay animation. The world it presents brings to mind a living painting, decaying in its own matter. FILM PRESENTATION: Starting from a leitmotif present in medieval The main inspiration for the plot was a medieval painting by Giovanni religious paintings, BARBARA RUPIK’s picturesque animation shows Canavesio which the death by suicide of Judas Iscariot. In it, we see a little the journey of a soul after the death of its host, as it traverses a hellish humanlike creature being extracted from a hanging body by a demon, purgatory that lies at the intersection between Hieronymous Bosch and through a big gash in the stomach. Medieval religious art depicts the Edvard Munch. Highly textured and visceral, THE LITTLE SOUL begs the miniature being as a soul. This bodily image of the soul follows the popular question: are death and decay truly the final endpoint of everything, beliefs of the Middle Ages. or does a whole new universe lie beyond them? And if so, how is that (Barbara Rupik) universe like, and what are its rules?

(Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020)

CURATOR'S STATEMENT: Ipostaze ce străbat istoriei artei în lung și în lat își găsesc un ecou infernal în abordarea aparte a BARBAREI RUPIK: FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Cannes Cinéfondation 2019 / Clermont- de mitologicul fluviu Styx și Steaua din Betleem, la martiriul Sfântului Ferrand 2020 / Animated Shorts Grand Jury Award, CreativeFuture Sebastian și însăși laitmotivul central al filmului. Deși este o viziune Innovation Award - Slamdance 2020 / Sarajevo Film Festival 2019 / Warsaw Film Festival 2019 / Annecy 2019 / Poitiers 2019 / Melbourne înspăimântătoare, The Little Soul explorează dedesubturile sinistre ale 2019 / OFF - Odense International Film Festival 2020/ Vilnius 2020 / simbolurilor artei europene și le privește neabătut, în toată groaza lor; Florida Film Festival 2019 / CINANIMA Portugal 2019 / Premiers Plans dar cu toate acestea, chiar și în inima întunericului și a putrefacției, se Film Festival 2020 / Special Jury Award - Kiev „Molodist” Film Festival FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL 2020 înfiripează un mic semnal de afecțiune și de speranță, chiar și-așa, trecător. \\ (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020)

WORLD SALES: The Polish National Film School in Lodz DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: BARBARA RUPIK (b. 1992) is a Krzysztof Brzezowski graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. Currently she is T: + 48422755880 E: [email protected] studying Animated Film and Special Effects at the Polish National Film W: filmschool.lodz.pl School in Lodz 67

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] DESTINY DELUXE 30', 2019, Portugal DIRECTOR: DIOGO BALDAIA

CAST: João Pacola, Karen Tribess, Maura Carneiro

A STATE OF GRACE A STATE SCRIPTWRITERS: Diogo Baldaia, Maura Carneiro CINEMATOGRAPHY: Leonardo Simões EDITING: Diogo Baldaia, Maura Carneiro SOUND: Rafael Gonçalves Cardoso PRODUCERS: Tiago Hespanha, Luisa Homem, João Matos, Susana Nobre, Leonor Noivo, Pedro Pinho PRODUCTION COMPANY: Terratreme, Areosa

DIOGO BALDAIA

FILM PRESENTATION: In DESTINY DELUXE, a film crew is eaten alive by a greenscreen. But, unlike in The Purple Rose of Cairo, the protagonists do not enter another fictional filmic universe, but rather, their own lives CURATOR'S STATEMENT: DIOGO BALDAIA constructs a Bressonian become cinematic. An intimate look at the youth of contemporary Brazil. microcosm which is often traversed by strange, surrealistic moments, which send meta-cinematic hints all the way from Carlos Reygadas to (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) Martin Rejtman. DESTINY DELUXE begs the question - what would one's own life look like if it were "transformed" into cinema, and what codes and forms would be appropriate for each given story? FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Oberhausen 2020 / Curtas Vila do Conde 2019 (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) / Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg 2020 / Glasgow Short Film Festival 2020

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: DIOGO BALDAIA (b. 1992) is WORLD SALES: a Portuguese filmmaker born in Porto. He studied Directing and TERRATREME PEDRO PERALTA Cinematography at the ESTC in Lisbon and has a master’s degree in T: +351 21 241 57 54 Fine Arts (Video) at KASK (Ghent, Belgium). He works professionally

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION VII COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL E: [email protected] as an assistant director and editor and is a co-founder of the Areosa W: www.terratreme.pt production company. His second-to-last film, “Mirage My Bros” (2017) won the prize for Best Portuguese Shortfilm at Indielisboa ’17 and the prize for Best Film in the Fiction and Documentary Competition at VIS Vienna Shorts Film Festival. He is currently preparing his first feature film.

68 NEW ACID 14'18”, 2019, France / Switzerland DIRECTOR: BASIM MAGDY

SCRIPTWRITER: Basim Magdy CINEMATOGRAPHY: Basim Magdy SPECIAL EFFECTS: Danielle Küchler Flores EDITING: Basim Magdy SOUND: Basim Magdy PRODUCER: Basim Magdy

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: Several animals chat via text messages. Between their mundane exchanges of words void of life, conflict and BASIM MAGDY rivalry emerge. Their mirrored physical appearance hints to entrapment inside a reality T.V. show, one where uncertainty and doubt prevail. Social media-induced insecurities and escapism become evidence that at least FILM PRESENTATION: A zoo în which all animals have joined the some of them are not bots. They question selfishness, self-love and self- chat. Between resplendent 16mm shorts, messages from a collective destruction as the “ugly ones” arrive wearing their “cheesy sunglasses”. Is super-id seep into the cracks: from „wanna go back to ur place?” and tradition an alter ego of racism? What about nostalgia and nationalism? Twitteresque humor, to existentialist and quasi-apocalyptic messages. Have they become what they always despised? Human? A giraffe finally Creating tension between images of the natural world with the understands why this has been hell all along. surrealist automatism of text algorithms which, at times, seem to be (Basim Magdy) sentient, BASIM MAGDY fuses together two worlds that are polar opposites, thus obtaining a strange new world, in which the aberrations of online digital are laid bare in front of us.

(Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) CURATOR'S STATEMENT: As children, all of us have probably asked ourselves how the world would be if animals could speak. However, in contrast to Walt Disney's kind utopias, BASIM MAGDY imagines the worst- case scenario: a world in which animals communicate precisely as we do, FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Locarno Film Festival 2019 / International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020 / Vancouver International Film Festival 2019 nowadays, in fragmented sentences bathed in cynical humor which reveal, at their worst, a profound crisis of meaning. If this is what text algorithms regurgitate after being fed databases of our own communications, what

does that say about us? And, at the same time, how can we still approach FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: BASIM MAGDY (b. 1977) is an artist the concept of personification in our current world? \\ of Egyptian origin based in Basel, Switzerland. An alumnus of the Fine (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) Arts Faculty of the Helwan University of Cairo, he has shown his works in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, at prestigious institutions such as MoMA, the Royal Academy of London and Kunsthalle WORLD SALES: Berlin. Winner of the "Artist of the Year 2016" Award of the Deutsche Basim Magdy Bank and of the Abraaj Art Prize, BASIM MAGDY has directed a total of T: +41 78 909 91 37 E: [email protected] 13 films, which have been awarded in festivals such as CPH:DOX and W: www.basimmagdy.com Curtas Vila do Conde. 69

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] SUN DOG 21', 2020, Belgium, Russia DIRECTOR: DORIAN JESPERS

CAST: Alexander Pronkin, Tatiana Smirnova, Andrey Sychyov, Katarzyna Wiesiołek, Lisa Fitier, Daria Orlova, Natalia Haikara, , A STATE OF GRACE A STATE Deni Pitsaev SCRIPTWRITER: Dorian Jespers CINEMATOGRAPHY: Arnaud Alberola, Dorian Jespers EDITING: Omar Guzman SOUND DESIGN: Thomas Becka PRODUCTION DESIGN: Zara van den Bergh MUSIC: Felix Casaer PRODUCER: Hilde D’haeyere (KASK) PRODUCTION COMPANY: KASK, Scum Pictures, Campana Films, ATAKA51 CURATOR'S STATEMENT: Is it a scene from atomic winter or just another evening in deep Russia? Dorian Jespers has a unique way of infusing

DORIAN JESPERS immediate reality with a profound sense of uncanny, one that is all the more ingenious as seen from an Eastern perspective which can decode the archetypes and topoi which appear in SUN DOG - and into which

FILM PRESENTATION: SUN DOG starts out from the macro image the filmmaker throws a magisterial wrench with his slowed-down and of a Russia, which one can't fully tell if it's apocalyptic or realistic, deliberate cinematography and his masterful use of mise-en-scene. and the zooms in onto the oftentimes Lynchian micro of a couple of (Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) lives crammed into a couple of shabby high-rise apartments. JESPERS constructs a universe seemingly frozen in an eternal nocturnal blizzard, inhabited by gopniks and babushkas who live their lives in slow-motion, DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: DORIAN JESPERS (1993) is a where it's never really clear if the moment of disaster is about to Belgian filmmaker. He studied cinematography at INSAS and directing happen, or if it's already long gone. at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Gent, an education that focuses

(Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) strongly on the development of a filmmaker’s personal language. This is reflected in his experimental fantasy MA film, SUN DOG. A project for which Jespers graduated with the highest distinction, received the Horlait-Dapsens prize and was offered the Wildcard by the Flemish Ammodo Award for Best Short Film & EFA FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Audiovisual Funds. The film premiered in the Tiger Short Competition of Nomination - Ammodo Tiger Shorts Competition, Rotterdam 2020 / INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION VII COMPETITION \\ INTERNATIONAL Vienna Short Film Award - Vienna Shorts 2020 / Short Waves Festival, International Rotterdam Film Festival. Poland 2020 / Kino Pavasaris Vilnius IFF 2020 / Go Short ISFF, the Netherlands 2020 / DokuFest, Kosovo 2020 / Short Waves Festival, Poland 2020 / Moscow International Experimental Film Festival 2020 WORLD SALES: / Black Canvas, Mexico 2020 / Thessaloniki International Short FF SQUARE EYES 2020 / Hamburg Short Film Festival 2020 Wouter Jansen T: +31 622076717 | E: [email protected] W: www.squareeyesfilm.com 70 CULTES 15'30”, 2018, France DIRECTOR: (LA) HORDE (Marine Brutti, Arthur Harel, Jonathan Debrouwer)

CAST: Benjamin Bertrand, Achraf Bouzefour, Delphine Rafferty, Daphné Biiga Nwanak, Sophie Ammann CINEMATOGRAPHY: Alexandre Lamarque EDITING: Edouard Mailaender PRODUCERS: Nerimen Hadrami, Elsa Rakotoson PRODUCTION COMPANY: Hirvi

(LA) HORDE DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: In this film, we wanted to capture the concrete manifestation of worship (in French the word “culte” can either mean “iconic” or “cult” as in worship) which is translated into ritualized practices FILM PRESENTATION: CULTES compares the mystic rituals of early and performances, mass jubilation and a consumerist mass. In a world civilizations with the mass experience of contemporary music festivals dominated by the fetish of commodity, is it still possible to have a spiritual - and even though it does concede that the latter creates a harrowing experience in these consumerist sanctuaries? Does the individual succeed in amount of waste, they invite a sort of ritualistic behavior that is creating its own subversive experience? essentially similar to the antique traditions that summoned spiritual (LA HORDE) awakenings and transcendence. Rhythmical and hypnotic, LA(HORDE) s film begs us to consider the moments in which we collectively give ourselves to „higher” powers.

(Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) CURATOR'S STATEMENT: LA(HORDE) manages to extricate festival images from the clutches of kitsch and pseudo-hippie advertising, which has seized this type of imagery and finds in it the seeds of a genuinely transcendental experience, in which the mass of concertgoers is akin to a FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Clermont-Ferrand 2020 / Cinedans Amsterdam ritualistic congregation. But even though their initial baptism doesn't spare 2019 / Best Direction – Zinetika Barcelona 2019 nature of the sheer consumerist and hedonistic pollution that is accrued by mass gatherings, there is something in these images that begs one to think about the ways in which humans seek collective spiritual experiences,

especially in the midst of a pandemic that has rendered them impossible. FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL WORLD SALES: TETRO

(Flavia Dima, BIEFF 2020) \\ MATTHIEU DEBBAY T: (+43-1) 526 09 90 15 E: [email protected] W: www.tetro.fr DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: LA(HORDE) is a French collective from Paris consisting of three artists: Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, and Arthur Harel. The collective develop their practice through stage productions, filmmaking, and installations consisting of video, choreography, and performance. 71

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] W: www.collectiflahorde.com

GOLDEN SHORTS: BEST FILMS IN MAJOR FESTIVALS

It has been a tradition for the Pardino d’Oro at Locarno International Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, the Tiger Short Film Film Festival to stay connected to Award at the International Film the most meaningful European film Festival Rotterdam, Berlinale's Golden events, and this year is no exception. Bear for Best Short Film, the Principal We are honoured to present yet again Prize of the International Short Film our Golden Shorts program dedicated Festival Oberhausen, and the Special to pieces of outstanding cinema that Jury Prize Clermont-Ferrand. won the most prestigious awards in 2019 and 2020 such as The Orizzonti Prize at the Venice Film Festival, BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL \\

73 FREEZE FRAME 5', 2019, Belgium, Germany DIRECTOR: SOETKIN VERSTEGEN

SCRIPTWRITER: Soetkin Verstegen ANIMATION: Soetkin Verstegen \\ GOLDEN SHORTS SOUND: Andrea Martignoni, Michal Krajczok PRODUCTION: Soetkin Verstegen, with the support of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Saari Residency - Kone Foundation, Atelier 105 residency - Light Cone

SOETKIN VERSTEGEN

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: The figures are taken from an actual practice, FILM PRESENTATION: FREEZE FRAME: the most absurd technique since the ice harvest. When you look at this practice and strip it of its use, you the invention of the moving image. Through an elaborate process of get a surreal, poetic ritual. Figures cutting the floor from under their feet, duplicating the same image over and over again, it creates the illusion dragging home a beauty they know will disappear. On one hand you could of stillness. In this stop-motion film, identical figures try to perform the look at them as factory workers, but to me they choose to drag their cubes. hopeless task of preserving blocks of ice, like archivists. The repetitive To me they are film archivists, battling the decay of the fragile celluloid movements reanimate the animals captured inside the blocks. image. The repetitions and movements of their actions have something interesting and beautiful in itself, like dancers.

(SOETKIN VERSTEGEN, Schloss Post)

FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Special Jury Prize Lab - Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2020 / Jury Distinction - Annecy International Animated Film Festival 2020 / Grand Prix - Monstra DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: Born in 1982, Belgium. VERSTEGEN Animation Festival, Portugal 2020 / Chris Frayne Award for Best studied audiovisual arts and scriptwriting at Sint-Lukas Brussel, Belgium, Animated Film - Ann Arbor Film Festival, USA 2020 LUCA School of Arts, alongside Cultural Studies at University of Leuven, Belgium, and Stop-motion Animation at the Bristol School of Animation of the University of the West of England, UK. While living in Portugal,

WORLD SALES: Berlin and Belgium, she worked as a freelance animator, puppet maker LIGHT CONE and set builder on stop-motion productions for television and film. In

\\ BEST FILMS IN MAJOR FESTIVALS Toril Simonsen - Head of International Relations, short and 2015 she received the Anidox:Residency, a one year program for the documentary films production of hybrid animated documentary films, at The Animation T: +33146590153 Workshop of VIA University in Denmark. Her short MR. SAND (2016), was E: [email protected] W : www.lightcone.org selected for over sixty film festivals, and received several awards. Her latest work is the short FREEZE FRAME (2019), which was presented at Clermont-Ferrand ISFF 2020 and took home the Special Jury Prize (Lab Competition). 74

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] W: www.soetkin.com T 14', 2019, USA DIRECTOR: KEISHA RAE WITHERSPOON

SCRIPTWRITER: Keisha Rae Witherspoon CINEMATOGRAPHY: Terence Price II ART DIRECTION: Zusel Escriba EDITING: Jon David Kane, Stefani Saintonge MUSIC: thinkthatswilson PRODUCER: Monica Sorelle, Faren Humes, Jason Fitzroy Jeffers CO-PRODUCER: Robert Colom PRODUCTION COMPANY: Third Horizon

KEISHA RAE WITHERSPOON DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: I remember quite lucidly the moment I came up with the concept for T. I was in conversation with a friend about the ways in which displaced people, particularly African Americans, have FILM PRESENTATION: A film crew follows three grieving participants had to piece together ritual from the remains. There was and is so much of Miami's annual T Ball, where folks assemble to model t-shirts and cultural loss, both forced and withered by time, during the bondage of innovative costumes designed in honor of their dead. black folks. And with the hyper-violence that plagues underserved cities across the States, I found that applies very much so to ritual around death. “When you do things with your hands, it heals you in places lower than where you cry from,” she says and makes a costume out of crisp bags (Keisha Rae Witherspoon, Berlinale Shorts interview) for her late son. Because he loved crisps. T is a film and a ball and a ceremony for the ones that have been lost and those who have lost someone. It is a manifestation of grief, anger and the spiritual power of CURATOR'S STATEMENT: Cinema holds the possibility to reach beyond creativity. (Berlinale) the physical human experience. This film is a chapel of remembrance in a politically troubled country. This fluid mosaic of images is both heartbreaking and full of hope. FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Golden Bear for Best Short Film - Berlinale (Berlinale jury statement 2020 - Golden Bear for Best Short Film) 2020 / Sundance Film Festival 2020 / Audience Award Best Narrative Short, Jury Honorary Mention for Breakthrough in Filmmaking - New Orleans Film Festival 2019 / Knight Made in MIA Award - Miami Film Festival 2020/ Narrative Short Grit - Indie Grits Film Festival 2020 DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: Born in Miami, USA in 1980, the FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL

Jamaican-American filmmaker has a BA in creative writing with a minor \\ in African American studies. Her work, which is driven by interests in science, speculative fiction and fantasy, documents the unseen and WORLD SALES: unheralded nuances of diasporic peoples. She is creative director of THIRD HORIZON T: +1 786 8775248 Third Horizon, a Caribbean creative collective based in Miami which E: [email protected]. holds the annual Third Horizon Film Festival. W: www.thirdhorizonmedia.com 75 BITTERSWEET 14', 2019, India DIRECTOR: SOHRAB HURA

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Sohrab Hura EDITING: Sohrab Hura \\ GOLDEN SHORTS SOUND: Sohrab Hura MUSIC: Sohrab Hura PRODUCER: Sohrab Hur

CURATOR'S STATEMENT: Both unflinching and loving, SOHRAB HURA's BITTERSWEET is a rumination of familial relationships and domestic spaces, exploring the bonds between himself and his mother, and his SOHRAB HURA mother and her beloved dog. HURA uses his grainy flash photography to empathetically depict intimate and banal moments in the life of his mother…while showing the audience the power of a mother and son bond, FILM PRESENTATION: In BITTERSWEET, the director focuses on and the healing powers of an animal's love. intimate family life, particularly the relationship between his mother (Oberhausen jury statement 2020) who was diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia and her dog, Elsa. What began as a way to escape his family situation turned into a method of confronting the realities at home. Photographed and filmed over DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: While the core of SOHRAB HURA’s a period of ten years, it is a search for meaning and closure with Hura work lies in photographs, he tries to break that form regularly and questioning and discovering the banalities of everyday life at home. extend it into film, text and sound. In 2010 he made PATI, a ten minute short film, which is an assemblage of photographs, collected sounds, film footage, as well as text and his voiceover to give a glimpse of life FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Principal Prize by the International Jury – in a village in Central India. Continuing his experiments with this half Oberhausen 2020 / 2nd Prize from the Jury of the Ministry of Culture moving form, he has made THE LOST HEAD & THE BIRD (2017) and and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia – Oberhausen 2020/ Image BITTERSWEET (2019). He is currently finishing the production of his Forum Film Festival, Tokyo / Vancouver International Film Festival 2020 / Uppsala International Short Film Festiva 2020 / Internationale film THE COAST (2020). Under his self publishing imprint Ugly Dog, Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2020 / L’Alternativa, Barcelona 2020 / Cork Sohrab Hura has published 5 books and in 2019 he won the Paris Photo International Film Festival 2020 / Message to Man IFF, St.Petersburg Aperture -Photobook Of The Year Award for his book The Coast. His 2020 / Gimli Film Festival, Canada 2020 / Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival, Toronto 2020 film THE LOST HEAD AND THE BIRD won the NRW Award, as well as the special mention in the International Competition at the International

\\ BEST FILMS IN MAJOR FESTIVALS Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2018, and went on to win the Videonale Award at Kunstmuseum, Bonn in 2019. His film BITTERSWEET was WORLD SALES: awarded the Principal Award by the International Competition Jury of SOHRAB HURA the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2020. He lives and E: [email protected] works in New Delhi.

76

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] COMMUNICATING VESSELS 35', 2019, Canada DIRECTOR: ANNIE MACDONELL, MAÏDER FORTUNE DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: In 2015, ANNIE and I produced a reading/ performance about our schooling years spent in Le Fresnoy, a sort of sharp mural painting coming back to the paradox of this luxurious studying place PERFORMERS: Madelyne Beckles, Deragh Campbell, Fiona Reid at the heart of the rough town of Roubaix. This time, we felt like extending SCREENPLAY: Annie MacDonell, Mäider Fortune this autobiographical and collaborative adventure by taking as fieldwork CINEMATOGRAPHY: Iris Ng, Claire Harvey, Annie MacDonell, our present time, namely what no longer belonged to the students but had Maider Fortune become a part of the teachers’, mothers’ and artists’ experience by the age EDITING: Annie MacDonell, Mäider Fortune of forty. It seemed to us that this age offered an especially rich temporal SOUND: Julia Wittman, Polina Teif position, an unprecedented connection/circulation between past, present PRODUCER: Maïder Fortuné, Annie MacDonell and future. Many other kinds of circulation were added to it: the one about the stories ANNIE and I have been handing over to the next generation for years; the one about films and works we were fascinated by, and continued to be so; the one about our exchanges with students in our respective ANNIE MACDONELL MAÏDER FORTUNE schools but also the one about the film image and the voice, words and sounds… At that time, the one image bringing the communicating vessels together appeared. FILM PRESENTATION: Based on the works by Dennis Oppenheim, Lygia Clark and Joan Jonas, the film recounts the experience of (Maïder Fortuné, FID Marseille interview) an experimental film teacher with a female student, interested in performing for the camera. A sweet voice describes and analyzes DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: MÄIDER FORTUNE studied literature the result of the exercises, going through a critical history of the and theatre before entering Le Fresnoy, where she developed a beginnings of video performance. Everything becomes more complex performance-related practice of the technological image. With its great when the gestures themselves become a sophisticated metaphor for formal rigor, Fortuné’s work commands all the viewer’s attention for interpersonal relationships, the teaching of the arts, parenting, alterity a genuine experience of the image and its processes. Recently, her and the very act of seeing and …of being. practice turned to more narrative preoccupations. Lecture performances (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa) and films deeply rooted in writing are the mediums she processes to open up new narrative strategies. Her work has been exhibited în galleries, museums, and at festivals in numerous countries.

FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Ammodo Tiger Award - Rotterdam Film ANNIE MACDONELL is a visual artist. Her practice begins from the Festival 2020 / Main Award - Moscow International Experimental Film photographic impulse to frame and capture, and is concerned with Festival 2020 / Indie Lisboa Festival, 2020 / F.I.D Festival International BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL de Documentaire de Marseille, 2020 / Black Canvas International Film the production and circulation of images in the present moment. Her

Festival, Mexico 2020 work includes film, installation, sculpture, performance and writing in \\ addition to photography and was presented internationally. In 2019, her films have screened at TIFF Toronto and the Viennale. In 2012 she was short-listed for the AGO AMIA prize for photography, and she was long WORLD SALES: listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2012, 2015 and 2016. She received a [email protected] BFA from Ryerson University in 2000, followed by graduate studies at Le Fresnoy. She is a founding member of Emilia Amalia, a feminist research and writing group. She is an assistant professor at Ryerson University 77 and lives in Toronto with her family.

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected]

BERLINALE SPOTLIGHT: FORUM EXPANDED

Since 2014, the Berlinale Forum worlds in which our dependence on Expanded – the showcase for electronic devices leads to a systemic experimental cinema, film- and video collapse when these devices are installations, talks and performances destroyed by solar rays. They think that takes place in the context of the about the personhood of algorithms Berlin International Film Festival – and and the datafication of migration. And its organizing institution, Arsenal – they speculate about the possibility of Institute for Film and Video Art – have re-animation and immortality through had a steady presence at BIEFF. Each an artificial intelligence's interest in year, the Berlinale Forum Expanded humanity's past atrocities. Together, Spotlight program provides a glimpse they project uncertain futures in order into the most recent Forum Expanded to confront a past and present of edition, combining select works from inequalities, violence and struggle. the program into new constellations. Presentation by Ulrich Ziemons,

This year's spotlight brings together curator of Berlinale Spotlight: Forum FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL four films that speculate about Expanded \\ futures in which the entanglements of technology and humanity have become ever more intricate. They present

79 POROSITY VALLEY 2: TRICKSTERS’ PLOT 24', 2019, South Korea DIRECTOR: AYOUNG KIM

CAST: Yasameen Al-Qaifi, Ahmed Mohammed Askar, Yousef Abdullah Al-Rahmi SCRIPTWRITER: Ayoung Kim \\ BERLINALE SPOTLIGHT CINEMATOGRAPHY: Seokjun Lee EDITING: Ayoung Kim, Jihyun Min, Yong Jeong

MUSIC: CIFIKA CURATOR'S STATEMENT: AYOUNG KIM’s strengths as artist lie in her SOUND: Seunghwan Jeon unique approach to her art, which is as dogged as detective work in her PRODUCER: Heejung Oh exhaustive gathering, reinterpreting, reproducing, and recontextualizing of information. To complete a single work, she willingly takes on an

AYOUNG KIM arduous research process lasting several years. Yet her archival research is not intended to reaffirm or reinforce some existing collective memory shared among us. It violates and deconstructs, functioning as material for a

FILM PRESENTATION: At the end of POROSITY VALLEY, PORTABLE trenchant perspective that critically reexamines historical perspectives. HOLES (2017), Petra has merged with its own clone and been (Eunhee Kim - Curator, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, transported into a dimension that transcends time and space. It awakens Korea) to find itself dropped on the shoreline of an island known as “Crypto Valley.” The island is home to numerous minerals/data fragments that are now adrift, having lost their homes for different reasons. It is a land DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: AYOUNG KIM was born in 1979 in of boundaries, neither “here” nor “there” – an island, in other words. Seoul, South Korea, where she currently lives and works. Interested in Petra once again experiences a migration review, facing authorities who the notions of crossings, transmissions, transnationals, transpositions, regard migrants as equivalent to aliens or viruses. Failing its review, and reversibility, she seeks possible integrations, articulations, and Petra gets confined to the “Smart Grid” that serves as an alien detention collisions of things in between time, space, structure, and syntax. In center, but after encountering a visual/auditory hallucination there, doing so, Kim adopts the devices of storytelling, narrativity, and rhetoric it escapes, following a beckoning voice to the island’s center. There, to evoke unfamiliar forms of reading, listening, and thinking of the within the caverns, it encounters the Mother Rock, a data center or conditions of the world by focusing on unlikely encounters of ideas. The ancient cloud and transcendent presence that has existed in this place outcomes take the forms of video, voice, sonic fiction, image, diagram,

FORUM EXPANDED for eons…. and text, and are exposed as exhibition, performance, theater project, and publication. Recently, Kim has been endeavoring to graft and collide \\ the fictional and the historical together through distorting reality.

FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Berlinale Forum Expanded 2020 / Korea Artist Prize - Finalist, Korea National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art 2019 / Grand Prize - Best Film for Korean SF Film - Chuncheon WORLD SALES: SF Film Festival, Korea 2020 / Sharjah Film Platform, UAE 2020 / San SEESAW PICTURES Diego Asian Film Festival 2020 / Jeonju International Film Festival Sarah Kang 2020 / Seoul International Women’s Film Festival, Korea 2020 / E: [email protected] Pyeongchang International Peace Film Festival, Korea 2020 / Diaspora T: +82 10 4494 1128 80 Film Festival, Korea 2020 W: Seesawpictures.kr

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] THE PHANTOM MENACE 36', 2019, UK DIRECTOR: GRAEME ARNFIELD

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: English artist Graeme Arnfield said that this film was made as part of an investigation process about cosmic radiation, GRAEME ARNFIELD to see how far could someone go with this kind of “tentacles” and the forms technology will influence in the bodies and social media: “A kind of particular thing that was interesting to me at the time was the way it only can be FILM PRESENTATION: Welcome to the age of cosmic radiation! In 2021 noticed in this kind of effort, in this kind of exit, with radiation it can only be the Sun fell to its lowest point of activity since the birth of science. noticed when the damage is already done, or something’s crashed, in this Compiling stories from the recent past of interaction with cosmic invisible highly charged force. So it’s about kind of always about the way radiation at ever descending altitudes, “The Phantom Menace” is a the structure crashes can be managed and also produced in the film. One techno driven stroboscopic climate fiction film written in conversation of those initial starting points was an interview with a technician at a super with various Amazon warehouse workers. Initially inspired by the computer laboratory of sorts who said that it wasn’t a job to kind of stop proposed plans for the U.S government to install their fragile predictive cosmic radiation from crashing this computers, but to manage and produce supercomputers deep underground in order to protect them from the crashes themselves and then kind of imagining and talking about this these upcoming ancient alien invaders, the film uses once costly low- idea of massive body of labor whose job is to investigate this data, trying to resolution scientific visualizations produced on these supercomputers to see if it’s been affected by this kind of possible physics and ideas. speculate on the role of image labour in the subterranean near future. Planes crashing, computers malfunctioning and elections going haywire (Graeme Arnfield cited by Mónica Delgado, Desistfilm) - these were just the prequel to the future.

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: GRAEME ARNFIELD (b. 1991, UK) is FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Berlinale Forum Expanded 2020 / Rencontres an artist filmmaker & curator living in London, raised in Cheshire, UK. Internationales Paris/Berlin 2020 / Courtisane, Ghent 2020 / European Producing sensory essay films from viscerally embodied networked Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück 2020 / Moscow Experimental Film imagery his films use methods of investigative storytelling to explore Festival 2020 / Hamburg International Short Film Festival 2020 / Videoex Festival, Zurich 2020 / Sharjah Film Platform, Sharjah 2020 / issues of circulation, spectatorship and history. Research topics have BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL Antimatter, Canada 2020 / London Short Film Festival 2021 included: the politics of digital networks, the distribution of ecological

matter such as peat and asbestos and the adaptive circulation of \\ global and local histories. His work has been screened in different film festivals around the world. Arnfield’s filmography includes the short WORLD SALES: and medium-length films DEAD DOGS (2020), THE PHANTOM MENACE GRAEME ARNFIELD (2019), PEDIGREE (2018), SHOUTING AT THE GROUND (2017), ASBESTOS E: [email protected] (2016; MADE IN COLLABORATION WITH SASHA LITVINTSEVA), COLOSSAL CAVE (2016), SITTING IN DARKNESS (2015). He graduated with a Masters in Experimental Cinema at Kingston University. 81

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] A I O U 30', 2019, USA DIRECTOR: ADAM KHALIL, BAYLEY SWEITZER, ANTON VIDOKLE

CAST: Jim Fletcher (Artificial Intelligence) SCRIPTWRITER: Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer, Anton Vidokle CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jake Magee \\ BERLINALE SPOTLIGHT EDITING: Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer, Anton Vidokl

SOUND DESIGN: Eli Cohn ADAM KHALIL SOUND: Dylan Hurley PRODUCTION DESIGN: Naomi Ferber COSTUMES: Coco Campbell

MAKE-UP: Naomi Raddatz BAYLEY SWEITZER CASTING: Geraldine Baron, Salome Oggenfuss PRODUCER: Rezarta Seferi PRODUCTION COMPANY: Rezarta Seferi

ANTON VIDOKLE

FILM PRESENTATION: The distant future. An orbital facility of DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: ADAM KHALIL (Ojibway), born in unknown origin. Here, the debt of taking a life will finally be repaid... 1988 in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, USA, is a filmmaker and artist who through resurrection. The victims of military violence across time are lives and works in Brooklyn. His practice attempts to subvert traditional systematically brought back to life and guided through the all-too- forms of ethnography through humor, relation, and transgression. familiar facility. As a staff of identical ushers draws back layers of Khalil’s work has been exhibited at art institutions and museums and confusion and pain, the freshly resurrected gradually become aware of screened at film festivals internationally. Khalil received his BA from the reality of their corporeal reinsertion: perhaps the world of the living Bard College. is not a world at all; to be alive in this place may merely be an exhibit. We, the resurrected, overwhelmed by a literal second life, will of course BAYLEY SWEITZER, born in 1989 in Boston, USA, is a filmmaker and discover our one inevitable destination: a place to sit, have a drink, and camera assistant based in Brooklyn. His practice revolves around a talk it out dynamic, high-mobility engagement with the margins, as well as taking FORUM EXPANDED an earnest look at the chronomorphic qualities of narrative, specifically

\\ \\ the camera’s ability to consolidate dimensions. His work has been shown at art institutions and museums worldwide. Bayley is a member of the FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Berlinale Forum Expanded 2020 International Cinematographers Guild, IATSE Local 600.

ANTON VIDOKLE, born in 1965 in Moscow, Russia, is an artist and editor of e-flux journal. He lives in New York and Berlin. His work has been exhibited internationally at museums, art institutions, biennale and screened at film festivals. 82

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] CITIZENS OF THE COSMOS 30', 2019, USA, Japan, Ukraine DIRECTOR: ANTON VIDOKLE

CAST: Rie Sakai, Akiyoshi Nita, Takaaki Negi SCRIPTWRITER: Anton Vidokle CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ayman Nahle EDITING: Adam Khalil, Meggie Schneider MUSIC: Alva Noto SOUND: Eli Cohn PRODUCER: Koichiro Osaka, Mariko Mikami, Lyuba Knorozok

PRODUCTION COMPANY: Asakusa (Tokio, Japan), Mariko Mikami CRITIC’S OPINION: Filmed in Kiev and Tokyo, the film quite physically (Tokio, Japan), Lyuba Knorozok (Kiew, Ukraine) connects Eastern and Western philosophical traditions of Cosmism. The fantastical quality of the film is channeled through elaborate choreographed ANTON VIDOKLE movements, sound, and interactions between humans and their surroundings (or objects). Some of the key tenets of Cosmism, notably its approach to death and reconnecting with deceased ancestors, are luminously and even FILM PRESENTATION: CITIZENS OF THE COSMOS is based on the playfully performed, as in a scene in which a few people listen to tombstones manifesto of Biocosmism, written by Alexander Svyatogor in 1922. in a cemetery with stethoscopes. One of the particularly memorable final Shot on locations in Tokyo and Kyiv, in collaboration with a group of scenes depicts a Japanese funeral bone-picking ceremony taking place amateur actors, volunteers, and extras, the film presents an imagined inside the Soviet-era Kiev Crematorium. The eerie, slightly orchestrated community voicing the historical desires of Russian Cosmism – actions of the group of bone-pickers embody deeply human sensibilities that immortality, resurrection of the dead, and interplanetarism – all set in undergird traditions and ideals, which resonate beyond borders and cultures. everyday life in contemporary Japan. Using urban shrines, cemeteries, Although the film is steeped in the aura of Russian Cosmism, its sensitive a crematorium, tatami rooms, a bamboo forest, an industrial gas plant, exploration of the movement’s wider impact opens up space for imagination, and city streets as an open air stage, the film gradually narrates the text interpretation and reinterpretation. of the biocosmist manifesto while presenting a sequence of dream-like (Henrt Heng Lu, ArtAsiaPacific) tableaus, featuring rejuvenation through blood transfusion, funerary processions and demonstrations, the Danse Macabre, the cremation bone picking ceremony, attempts to communicate with the dead using DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: ANTON VIDOKLE, born in 1965 stethoscopes, and a theremin orchestra recital, among other scenes. in Moscow, Russia, is an artist and editor of e-flux journal. He lives in Set to an original music score composed by Alva Noto, CITIZENS OF THE

New York and Berlin. His work has been exhibited internationally at FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL COSMOS is an experiment in defamiliarization: a speculative test of the museums, art institutions, and biennials and screened at film festivals. \\ universality implicit in Cosmism’s premise when projected outside of the His filmography includes SALTO DE AGUA (2002), NUEVO (2003), sphere of Russian language, geography, tradition, and culture. GUIDING LIGHT (2010), NEW YORK CONVERSATIONS (2010), TWO SUNS (2012), 2084: A SCIENCE FICTION SHOW/EPISODE 1 (2014), THIS IS COSMOS (2014), A MUSEUM OF IMMORTALITY (2015), THE COMMUNIST FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Berlinale Forum Expanded 2020 REVOLUTION WAS CAUSED BY THE SUN (2015). IMMORTALITY FOR ALL: A FILM TRILOGY ON RUSSIAN COSMISM, (2017). A I O U (2019), and CITIZENS OF THE COSMOS (2019). 83

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected]

BIEFF - A DECADE OF CINEMATIC INNOVATION

We celebrate the tenth edition of of both alterity and similarity, BIEFF BIEFF not just simply because it's a grew in its ten years on existence self-memorialistic reflex, but also to not only on the basis of the cutting- mark a turning point in the festival's edge avant-garde cinema that it existence: one in which the festival's showcased, but also by questioning new curatorial team is carving our various topics that were closely its own path while observing the related its contemporaneous contexts. directions in which the festival We cherish the legacy of these ten has grown along its history. From editions and so we revisit some of the the thought of a possible end of iconic titles that have been awarded at cinema to an elevated sense of it, to our festival across time. experiemntal adventures through the looking glass and the embracement BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL \\

85 MOUNTAIN IN SHADOW 14', 2012, Spain DIRECTOR: LOIS PATIÑO

SCRIPTWRITER: Lois Patiño CINEMATOGRAPHY: Lois Patiño \\ BEFF SHOWCASE EDITING: Lois Patiño SOUND: Miguel Calvo "Maiki", Erik T. Jensen DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: The idea is the relationship of immensity/ PRODUCER: Lois Patiño insignificance between man and the landscape. This play with the perception of the scales, where the vastness of the mountain ends mixing LOIS PATIÑOt with the vision of a microscope, will go forward with the development of the film. This treatment also allows the spectator to view the landscape as a tactile experience: emphasizing the snow’s texture and confusing its FILM PRESENTATION: A contemplative experience, the spellbinding matter and the spatial dimensions, the viewer experiences the landscape’s MOUNTAIN IN SHADOW offers a poetic view on the relationship image as something tangible, a tactile vision. The film adopts the point between the immensity of the landscape and the insignificance of of view of the mountain: a slow, distant, uninvolved observation. Starting the human being, through a hypnotic ballet of night-time skiers on from the white snow, the image of the film becomes increasingly darker, a snowy slope. Starting from the white of the snow, the image turns transforming the space into something unreal, dreamlike and spectral. increasingly darker and more stylized, almost black-and-white, as LOIS This makes its appearance more like that of an artificially illuminated PATIÑO gradually shifts from mere representation of the mountain scale-model, where skiers are merely points in the distance, sliding in a to a fascinating display of spectral, dreamlike spaces, transporting hypnotic movement. Flattening the image turns it into a vertical canvas, the viewer from the physical level to a metaphysical one. Treating where patches of light and shadow paint the fabric in a balance between the landscape as a tactile experience, by emphasizing texture and figuration and abstraction. The telephoto lens allowed me to remove undermining spatial relations and materiality, the director creates a the depth of the space, and the dark contrast transforms the space into visually breath-taking choreography of the sublime. something unreal - a ghostly space with moving spectral figures.”

(Lois Patiño)

FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Best Cinematography Award – Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival 2013 / Prize of the Jury of DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: LOIS PATIÑO (b. 1983, Spain) the Ministry for Family, Children Youth, Culture and Sport of North Rhine-Westphalia – Oberhausen International Short Film Festival combined his Psychology studies with cinema studies at TAI School and 2013 / Special Jury Prize of the Lab Competition - Clermont-Ferrand New York Film Academy. He attended video creation courses under 2014 / Honorary Mention – FIDOCS Chile 2013 / San Sebastián Film the guidance of Katherin Sieverding in the UdK of Berlin, and different A DECADE OF CINEMATIC INNOVATION INNOVATION CINEMATIC OF DECADE A Festival 2013 / BAFICI Argentina 2013 / São Paulo Film Festival 2013 / Curtas Vila do Conde Film Festival 2013 / Rome International Film workshops with artist and filmmakers such as Pedro Costa, José Luis \\ Festival 2012 Guerín or Daniel Canogar. Patiño’s works have been shown in art centres such as Centre Pompidou or Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and in international festivals such as Locarno, BAFICI, Oberhausen, Roma or Vila do Conde. At the 66th edition of the Locarno Film Festival he WORLD SALES: received the prize for the best emerging director with his first feature LOIS PATIÑO E: [email protected] COSTA DA MORTE. His second feature film RED MOON TIDE premiered W: www.loispatino.com at the Berlinale - Forum in 2020, and was screened at the MoMA (NY) in 86 the New Directors/New FIlms Festival.

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] W: www.loispatino.com THE PARK 14’, France, 2015 DIRECTOR: RANDA MAROUFI

CAST: Young folk of Yasmina Park (Rayan, Walid Achouikh, Abdellah Adnan, Reda Afandi, Nora Aitlkadi, Nisrine Barakat, Achraf Beckoury, DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: Desire to question different points of view and Abdellah Belkaid) to multiply the possibilities: politically charged moments, danger frozen SCRIPTWRITER: Randa Maroufi in time, instants before acting out... between immediacy and illusion, CINEMATOGRAPHY: Luca Coassin audience observes "something about to happen" and is invited to accept an EDITING: Randa Maroufi experience of duration.

PRODUCER: Alain Fleischer (Randa Maroufi)

RANDA MAROUFIT CURATOR'S STATEMENT: Actions frozen in gestures of exchange, expectation and aggression are played out following a score conducted FILM PRESENTATION: Oftentimes, greener pastures veil arid realities, by the artist who, in the manner of Eric Baudelaire, uses composition to diverting awareness and placating concern. In the case of Casablanca’s explore reality. But this reality is also virtual, for these scenes come in part Arab League Park, RANDA MAROUFI sweeps us past its green idyll and from a repertoire of violent self-representations found on the Internet. The lets us loose ‘on the wrong side of its fence.’ Instead of touristic leisure, artist reprises their vocabulary. Violence, she tells us, is a language, and its our floating POV captures derelict carousels among wild vegetation and interpretation is a matter of context. (...) A strange vitality emanates from rubbish-strewn walking paths. This is the stomping ground of Morocco's the gentle immobility of the silent travelling shot that drifts through the urban youth, heard through fractured voice-overs as they perform in scenes acted out by the local inhabitants. Like the roughness of the vegetal front of digital cameras for the approval of social media. Materializing and urban architecture of the abandoned park, these existences are not this presence-as-posture through still-lifes of bodies in mid-action, THE festive, yet they celebrate life’s endurance, a vital energy that is hidden yet PARK offers a (privileged) virtual flânerie in a space where youthful tenacious. abandon and societal fears converge. (Inès Bouaillon) (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016)

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: RANDA MAROUFI (born in 1987 in Casablanca, Morocco, a Fine Arts graduate at Tetouan (Morocco), FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Award for Best Visual Concept - Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival 2016 / Special Mention Angers (France) and Le Fresnoy (France)) belongs to this generation that - International Film Festival Rotterdam 2016 / Prix de l’ADAGP – grew up in an era dominated by images. She collects them with as much Exhibition Panorama17, France 2015 / New Directors/New Films, eagerness as suspicion, and ceaselessly questions their veracity. She FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL New York 2016 / Clermont-Ferrand International Film Festival 2016 prefers to put her ambiguous fictions in the service of reality, and the

/ IndieLisboa 2016 / Festival International du Film sur l'Art, Montreal \\ 2016 / 25fps Film Festival, Croatia 2015 / Winterthur International Short field of her experimentation encompasses the occupation of public space Film Festival 2015 / Med Film Festival, Rome 2015 / Cairo International and gender issues, of which she highlights the founding mechanisms. Film Festival, Egypt 2015 / Poitiers Film Festival, France 2015. Her work goes through photography, installation, performance, sound and film, has been presented at major contemporary art event and film festivals such as The Marrakech Biennale, International Film Festival WORLD SALES: LE FRESNOY Rotterdam. She is currently living and working in Paris, France. Her filmography includes BAB SEBTA (2019), STAND-BY OFFICE (2017), THE Natalia Trebik - Head of Distribution and Festivals 87 T: +03 20 28 38 64 | E: [email protected] | W: www.lefresnoy.net GREAT SAFAE (2014), and DEAR DAD (2013).

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] W: www.randamaroufi.com BUFFALO JUGGALOS 30’, 2014, USA DIRECTOR: SCOTT CUMMINGS

CAST: Robert Hunt (aka Bobbo), Paul Fucking Mack, Sandy, Kaitlin Wentland (aka Titz), William “Noki” Galpine (aka Koz),

\\ BEFF SHOWCASE Ryan Hanson (aka Shaggz) CINEMATOGRAPHY: Nandan Rao EDITING: Scott Cummings DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: I’ve given up explaining that BUFFALO JUGGALOS isn’t a documentary. I come from a narrative background but SOUND: Gene Park I should make clear that Buffalo Juggalos is not really a narrative film MUSIC: Locrian either. Three years ago I decided Buffalo Juggalos would be a 30-minute PRODUCER: Molly Gandour, Eliza Hittman, Shrihari Sathe film, shot on video, composed of thirty shots, each one minute long. The Supported by The Jerome Foundation and sponsored by film would be a series of scenes featuring real Juggalos. There would be no Fractured Atlas interviews or music; if there was dialogue, it would have absolutely nothing to do with being a Juggalo. Even though there are narrative elements

SCOTT CUMMINGS throughout, they have been subjugated by the film’s form. I guess I could call the film "a formal fictional experimental portrait of real people". My hope is that through the film the myth of the Juggalo deepens and they FILM PRESENTATION: If Magritte’s Treachery of Images ‘n’est pas become more mysterious, more other and more confrontational. That une pipe,’ in SCOTT CUMMINGS’ own words, “BUFFALO JUGGALOS is when you are confronted by the film you are confronting that face in war not a documentary.” At first, it even starts off as a stylized portraiture paint. That you actually live the Dark Carnival for thirty minutes and come of America’s Juggalo community, the fan base devoted to the rapcore out not knowing what you’ve just seen. group Insane Clown Posse (and its affiliate label bands). Hidden behind (Scott Cummings) their ritualistic makeup, a procession of Juggalos stare into the camera with passive nonchalance as they are framed in commonplace suburban settings. Yet with each still-life tableaux, the comfort of suburbia is DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: SCOTT CUMMINGS is a Buffalo-born, unsettled as the Juggalo ethos manifests itself, plunging us into its New York based filmmaker. In 2014, he was named one of Filmmaker surreal psyche. By the end, we’re left seduced and abandoned by Magazine’s 2014 25 New Faces of Independent Film. He received his Cummings’ celebration of sub-cultural Americana, a visceral life-force BA in Russian Studies and English from SUNY Buffalo, where he was whose life philosophy is No Fucks Given. introduced to Buffalo’s vibrant experimental film/video history.Upon graduating California Institute of the Arts, he professionally wrote (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016) scripts for adult film giant Vivid Video, until moving to New York to

A DECADE OF CINEMATIC INNOVATION INNOVATION CINEMATIC OF DECADE A work for the Criterion Collection. His work has screened at MOMA,

\\ FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Main Award - Bucharest International BAMcinemaFEST, Visions du Reel, CPH:DOX, Chicago Underground Experimental Film Festival 2016 / Grand Jury Prize, Live Action Short Film Festival, the Centre Georges Pompidou and more. His filmography - AFI Film Festival 2014 / Honourable mention - Chicago Underground includes ADVERSARY (2017), SPACEMONKEY (2012), STORM TIGER Film Festival 2014 / Best Experimental Film - Columbus International Film + Video Festival 2015 / Visions du Reel 2014 / CPH:DOX 2014 / MOUNTAIN (2008) and THE HESHER (2006). 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 WORLD SALES: Festival 2015 Scott Cummings 88 T: +1 661 714 0215 | E: [email protected]

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] DEPLOYMENTS 17', 2018, Netherlands DIRECTOR: STÉPHANIE LAGARDE

SCREENWRITER: Stéphanie Lagarde CINEMATOGRAPHY: Graham Kelly EDITING: Stéphanie Lagarde MUSIC: Stéphanie Lagarde and Francesco Cimino PRODUCER: Tim Rutten and Stéphanie Lagarde PRODUCTION COMPANY: Video Power

STÉPHANIE LAGARDE

CURATOR'S STATEMENT: What LAGARDE’s work makes clear is the FILM PRESENTATION: DEPLOYMENTS is about control and about tension between the rehearsed choreography of authoritarian order and power, a game of being seen and being invisible; of being present and emphatic civilian disorder. The movements of the police follow a pattern, being absent at the right moment. "We see picture puzzles of state like a dance performance, while the demonstrators seek to disrupt this control, showing simulation software for large-scale police operations and order to gain control of the streets. DEPLOYMENTS not only questions the fighter pilots’ finger exercises, the movement profile of a mass protest and social situation but also practices media critique. "I see you", whispers the the ornaments made by a flying squadron. Code words drop into the frame off-screen voice, alluding to surveillance in public space, but also to the from offscreen: orders and instructions with a poetic rhythm. The practices transparency of our own identity in the social media. LAGARDE’s computer and media of control – what are they based on? They follow algorithms animation represents a centuries-old fight between government authority and purposes, but are also beautifully designed and musical." and protesters. Not only in Paris today, demonstrations often lead to riots, excesses, and injuries. Are we the ones who actually control the game? Or (Lukas Stern, DOK Leipzig) are we just tokens in a surveillance system to which we must defer?

(Diana Storcks, Videonale) FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Main Award - Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival 2019 / First Award, International competition - Short Waves Festival, Poznàn, Poland 2019 / Limited DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: STÉPHANIE LAGARDE (b. 1982 Access 8 Festival for Moving Images, Sound & Performance, Tehran, Toulouse, Fance) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her works deal with Iran 2019 / EMAF, European Media Art Festival, Kunsthalle Osnabruck, Germany 2019 / Videonale.17, Refracted realities, Kunstmuseum strategies of occupation and the organization of space throughout

Bonn, Germany 2019 / DOKLeipzig, Next Masters competition, Leipzig, systems of objects, languages and human beings. Her works have been FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL Germany 2018 exhibited worldwide, in museums and art galleries in Germany, Austria, \\ Estonia, Australia, France, the Czech Republic among others. Her videos have been shown in festivals such as Videonale (Bonn), Transmediale WORLD SALES: (Berlin), EMAF (Osnabrück), DOKLeipzig, Kasseler Dokfest, IFFR VIDEO POWER Rosa Vrij (Dortmund), November Festival (London). T: 0031-621802691 | E: [email protected] W: www.videopower.eu 89

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] W: www.lagardestephanie.com FLORES 26', 2017, Portugal DIRECTOR: JORGE JÁCOME

CAST: André Andrade, Pedro Rosa, Gabriel Desplanque, Jorge Jácome

\\ BEFF SHOWCASE SCRIPTWRITER: Jorge Jácome, David Cabecinha CINEMATOGRAPHY: Marta Simões EDITING: Jorge Jácome SOUND: Marco Leão MUSIC: Terry Riley PRODUCER: João Figueiras PRODUCTION COMPANY: Blackmaria

JORGE JÁCOME

FILM PRESENTATION: After dragging us into a haunted post-clubbing CURATOR'S STATEMENT: In most cases, our actions result in detrimental landscape with his 'Fiesta Forever' last year, JORGE JÁCOME returns to impact on nature. FLORES posits the opposite, looking at a scenario where BIEFF with a different kind of -topia. The entire population of the Azores one species of flora is reclaiming territory from human encroachment. We archipelago has been supposedly forced to take refuge on the continent can see this in the lavender tone of the visuals (shades of Joseph Cornell’s because of an unmanageable outburst of the otherwise harmless Rose Hobart), wherein even the atmosphere has been taken over by the hydrangeas. The camera follows the only two young soldiers posted on hydrangeas. Considering our own, very real ecological errors, JÁCOME uses the island with exquisite shots set against the purple and blue backdrop speculative fiction to ask us how we intend to survive the Purple Reign.' of the floral invasion and explores their stories of nostalgia and sorrow (Michael Sicinski , Toronto International Film Festival) of displacement. There is also talk about harvesting and export and flower treatment, meaning that the banished humans might have been the cause of the unhealthy proliferation after all. DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: JORGE JÁCOME (b. 1988 in Portugal) completed his degree in cinema at Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Adina Marin, BIEFF 2018) in Lisbon and Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains France. His work seeks and investigates the relations between utopias, melancholy, disappearance and desire, and is based on a strongly FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Main Award - Bucharest International A DECADE OF CINEMATIC INNOVATION INNOVATION CINEMATIC OF DECADE A Experimental Film Festival 2018 / Grand Prix - 25 FPS International intuitive and sensorial process resulting in films made of narrative Experimental Film and Video Festival Croatia 2017 / Award of drifts, unexpected relationships and unusual encounters. His short films \\ the International Competition - International Short Film Festival have been shown at film festivals worldwide. Parallel to his work as a Winterthur Switzerland 2017 / Best Short Film Award - Verín International Short Film Festival Spain 2017 / CAMIRA Jury Award filmmaker he regularly collaborates in performing arts projects. - Curtocircuíto International Film Festival Spain 2017 / Nova New Talent Award - IndieLisboa International Independent Film Festival Portugal 2017 WORLD SALES: PORTUGAL FILM: PORTUGUESE FILM AGENCY Margarida Moz T: +351 213 466 172 | E: [email protected] 90 W: www.portugalfilm.org

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] RIVER RITES 12', 2011, SUA/Surinam DIRECTOR: BEN RUSSELL

SCRIPTWRITER: Ben Russell CINEMATOGRAPHY: Chris Fawcett CURATOR'S STATEMENT: On the banks of the River Suriname, Ben Russell EDITING: Ben Russell films people swimming, a fisherman drawing in his net, a young girl washing SOUND: Ben Russell clothes on a stone. Here, the unity of time seems to be a given: it is the PRODUCER: Ben Russell length of a single shot, a super-16 film reel. But by showing and reshowing PRODUCTION COMPANY: Dimeshow this segment, which he had made for a previous film and then left aside, the artist-filmmaker quite literally plunges us in. He successfully undoes the BEN RUSSELL chronology of these movements, which already had an air of strangeness about them due to the smoothness of the Steadicam. He deviates the course of the river itself. A fisherman’s net becomes a bride’s veil. A simple process, FILM PRESENTATION: “In a “master class of psychedelic ethnography”, already used by the Lumière brothers. But in this primitivism, RUSSELL RUSSELL takes his transcendent cinema to new heights with his finds what he calls the minor secrets of a Saramacca animist – and this fascinating RIVER RITES, which transforms an idyllic riverside scene of a riverbank is in fact a sacred place. RIVER RITES thus falls into the continuity group of Saramaccan Maroon children - playing and washing in the river - of his previous TRYPPS series: the flashing signs in Dubai, a procession of into a sort of sacred animist rite.” (New Zealand Film Festival) branches in Black and White TRYPP number 2… His twisting of the word trip “Mystery and beauty are created through a simple cinematic device. A materializes in this film as gestures that transform into ritual. Mindflayer’s river somewhere in Suriname: children and young adults run about in noise music heightens the sensation of losing one’s footing. Cinema makes the water. From this scene that has a mythical sense to it, the filmmaker possible the impossible, contradicting Heraclitus: in RIVER RITES, you do creates a dance, in which the grace of the people’s gestures becomes swim in the same river twice. pure energy and rhythm. A cinematographic play in the truest sense of (Cinema du Réel) the word, reminiscent of some of Maya Deren’s films. Or, in other words, how cinema becomes poetry, the human body a tireless tightrope walker, and some simple dance steps a philosophy of life.” (Senscritique) DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: BEN RUSSELL (1976) is an American artist, filmmaker and curator whose work lies at the intersection of ethnography and psychedelia Formal investigations of the historical and FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Grand Prize - Bucharest International conceptual relationships between early cinema, documentary practices, Experimental Film Festival 2013 / Venice International Film and structuralist filmmaking result in immersive experiences concerned Festival 2011 / Rotterdam International Film Festival 2012 / Best at once with ritual, communal spectatorship and the pursuit of a Documentary Short – Chicago Underground Film Festival 2012 / Intangible Heritage Award – Cinéma du Réel 2012 / Grand Prize 'psychedelic ethnography’. Russell was an exhibiting artist at documenta FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL - Media City Film Festival Ontario 2012 / CPH DOX International 14 (2017) and his work has been presented at the Centre Georges \\ Documentary Festival Copenhagen 2012 / Ann Arbor International Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Museum of Experimental Film Festival USA 2013 / Viennale 2013 / Special Modern Art Chicago, the Venice Film Festival and the Berlinale, among Mention – Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal 2012 others. He is a recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, a FIPRESCI International Critics Prize (IFFR 2010, Gijón 2017), and premiered two of his feature films at the Locarno Film Festival (2013, 2017). WORLD SALES: Curatorial projects include Magic Lantern (Providence, USA, 2005-2007), LIGHTCONE BenRussell (Chicago, USA, 2009-2011), and Hallucinations (Athens, T: +33146590153 | E: [email protected] 91 W: www.lightcone.org Greece, 2017). He is currently based in Marseille, France. OUT 35', 2010, Israel DIRECTOR: ROEE ROSEN

CAST: Ela Shapira, Yoana Gonen, Igor Krutogolov, Boris Martzinovsky

\\ BEFF SHOWCASE SCRIPTWRITER: Roee Rosen CINEMATOGRAPHY: Avner Shahaf EDITING: Max Lomberg SOUND: Binya Reches PRODUCER: Sharon Benraf DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: Similarly to rituals of exorcism in Jewish PRODUCER: Roee Rosen literatures (the Dybbuk) or in popular cinema (The Exorcist), the demon who speaks through the Sub, is and isn’t herself. These sentences are all ROEE ROSEN quotes of the present Israeli minister of foreign affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, known as one of the most extreme right wing politicians in Israel. His nationalist and racist ideology is literally demonized, but, at the same time, FILM PRESENTATION: Winner of the Grand Prize at Bucharest it is not presented as an external evil, but as inherent to the eroticized International Experimental Film Festival 2011 , OUT is a hybrid between body of young Israelis, thus problematizing the moralizing and comfortable a documentary, a horror story, an erotic show and a political reflection. disavowal of the native Russian Lieberman, and asserting that the director, OUT’s central part presents a domination/ submission thrashing the participants, and the viewers may be implicated by his worldview. OUT scene, set in a mundane living room. The scene is not acted but rather is thus a hybrid between a documentary (both of the present rhetoric of performed by two women whose real-life preferences entail BDSM. the Israeli right, and of its free-spirited sexual community), a fictional scene But in this session, the painful blows meted by the Dom cause the Sub harking to a genre of horror movies, an erotic scene and a political reflection. to spew out sentences, all of which are quotes from Israel’s minister of (Roee Rosen on OUT) foreign affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, known as one of the most extreme right-wing politicians in the country. DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: ROEE ROSEN (b. 1963) is an Israeli-American artist, filmmaker, writer and teacher. After studying philosophy and comparative literature at the Tel aviv University, he FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Grand Prize - Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival 2011 / Orizzonti award for Best medium received his BFa from the School of Visual arts, and his Mfa from length Film - Venice 2010/ ARTE Award - Oberhausen ISFF 2011/ New Hunter College, both in New York. He heads the advanced visual Vision Award - CPH: DOX Copenhagen 2011/ Tiger Awards Short Film arts program at Ha’midrasha art College, in Israel, and teaches at Competition - Rotterdam 2011/ Viennale IFF 2010/ Indielisboa IFF 2011 the Bezalel art academy in Jerusalem. Rosen’s paintings, films, and A DECADE OF CINEMATIC INNOVATION INNOVATION CINEMATIC OF DECADE A writings have become known for their historical, theological and

\\ psychological controversy. His filmography includes: HILARIOUS, OUT, THE DUST CHANNEL, as well as many other works that have been shown and awarded internationally. In 2018 an expansive one-person exhibition was held at Centre Pompidou, Paris, entitled Histoires dans le pénombre. Several one person exhibition of Rosen were held in 2019, among them in the Arts Project Centre, Dublin, and Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen. Rosen is currently working on a feature-length 92 film entitled KAFKA FOR KIDS. SUMMER 8’, 2016, France, Belgium DIRECTOR: RONNY TROCKER

CAST: Umaru Jibirin SCRIPTWRITER: Ronny Trocker CINEMATOGRAPHER: Artur Castro-Freire EDITOR: Ronny Trocker SOUND: Anouschka Trocker, Enrico Ascoli Autistic Daugthers / Seby Ciurcina MUSIC: DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: We’re consuming tons of images all day and, PRODUCER: Nicolas Schmerkin, Erik Lampert most of the time, we don’t even realize what we’re seeing. There are also PRODUCTION COMPANY: Autour de Minuit many images documenting the tragedy of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, Productions, Stempel Films but I think we’re not used to take our time to look at the photos anymore. So, what a film can offer is another way of observation; the audience is invited to RONNY TROCKER explore the photo by following the film and its duration.

(Ronny Trocker, Yellow Bread Magazine Interview) FILM PRESENTATION: A beach frozen in time, as if in a snapshot: people enjoying the sun, a child eating ice-cream, a father taking his picture. But in the frame another character appears. Laboriously making their way CURATOR'S STATEMENT: In SUMMER, RONNY TROCKER creates a out of the waters, a group of refugees crawl to the uncertain safety of hybrid, elastic time, which borrows from both the art of photography the beach, escaping from near-certain death. Premiered at the Berlinale as well as that of cinema. In this short, the idea of the snapshot (the 3D 2016 and inspired by a photograph by Juan Medina, SUMMER is an body models frozen in time) and that of duration (suggested through ingenious and sharp political commentary on the ongoing humanitarian the soundscape, materialized in the rhythmic movement of the waves) crisis. By mixing 3D modelling and 16mm footage, it contrasts stasis coexist. Together they become an eloquent discourse about the refugee and movement, moment and duration and reveals how liberating situation: although we are witnessing a singular moment, it is part of a having your struggles acknowledged is and, conversely, how limiting wider humanitarian crisis spanning decades. The act of seeing and being photographs are in telling the stories we so readily consume. seen is that which animates the protagonist’s body, the immigrant inching (Diana Mereoiu, BIEFF 2017) towards the beach from the sea. Once seen, he gains autonomy and can move freely. But when he is captured in a photograph, he freezes once more, imprisoned in the image created by the photographer, in the story

FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Award for Best Visual Concept - Bucharest that the picture, rather than he himself will say about him.

International Experimental Film Festival 2017 / Clermont-Ferrand FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL (Diana Mereoiu, BIEFF 2017) International Short Film Festival 2017 / Berlin International Film

Festival Shorts 2016 / Sarajevo Film Festival 2016 / Winterthur \\ International Short Film Festival 2016 / Hong Kong International Film Festival 2016 / Fantasia International Film Festival 2016 / Chicago DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: RONNY TROCKER was born and International Film Festival 2016 / VIS Vienna Independent Shorts grew up near Bolzano in the North of Italy. After studying cinema in 2016/ Milano Film Festival 2016 Argentina, he continued his studies at Le Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains France. Since then he has written and directed several short films, among which THE IMMACULATES (2013, Annecy WORLD SALES: AUTOUR DE MINUIT International Animation Film Festival). His first feature film, THE T: +33 142811728 | E: [email protected] EREMITES (2016) premiered in Venice's Orizzonti competition. 93 W: blog.autourdeminuit.com

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] THE WAVES 21', 2012, Portugal DIRECTOR: MIGUEL FONSECA

CAST: Alice Contreiras, Andreia Contreiras SCRIPTWRITER: Miguel Fonseca \\ BEFF SHOWCASE CINEMATOGRAPHY: Mário Castanheira EDITING: Sandro Aguilar SOUND: António Figueiredo DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: Beautiful, truly Portuguese seascapes swept PRODUCER: Luis Urbano, Sandro Aguilar before my eyes. Tied up in these images was my youth, my paradise lost. The vast sea, the beach, the people, all waiting, all dying gently, sadly, PRODUCTION COMPANY: O som e a fúria beautifully… Life and death were being recorded here as a whole: death as a part of life, a cosmic change, a transformation.

MIGUEL FONSECA (Miguel Fonseca)

FILM PRESENTATION: There is, in the latest FONSECA film, a kind of CURATOR'S STATEMENT: Setting a contemplative mood, THE WAVES melancholy one can find in the haunting harmonies of Fado. THE WAVES opens a new perspective on life, by exploring the organic relationship has a contemplative, almost esoteric dimension, which links humans and between man and nature and their „condition” in relation to each other. nature, life and death as two sides of the same reality. (Marie Bergeret, At a glance, Andreia’s illness and her need to carry around a machine to Formatcourt) help her breath would seem something dramatic. However, this is not Through an elliptical narrative, THE WAVES tells the story of two felt as such in this short, but rather as a natural part of the girl’s life, and, sisters caught in a strange mutually dependent relationship. The sparse implicitly, of the normal order of things. By alternating extreme wide shots storyline is set against the dramatic and beautifully photographed of the breathtaking landscape, in which the characters are but puny parts Portuguese coastline- a Portuguese 'paradise lost', rendered even of the frame, with close-ups, this movie demonstrates the subjectivity of more beautiful by the sense of frailty and loss at its very core. World the human perception of what is really „big” and „of importance”. Yet, premiered at Rotterdam IFF 2012 besides exploring this frailty of the human „condition”, the story also sensitively grasps the visceral connection between man and nature and their deep alikeness: they move in the same patterns and through the same FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Best Cinematography Award - Bucharest motions, the ripples of the waves are alike the rising and falling of Andreia’s International Experimental Film Festival 2012 / EFA Short Film chest as she breathes. The compelling visuals are complemented by the Award - Flanders International Film Festival Ghent 2012 / Jury Special

A DECADE OF CINEMATIC INNOVATION INNOVATION CINEMATIC OF DECADE A Mention - Edinburgh 2012 / Rotterdam IFF 2012 / São Paulo ISFF 2012 deeply senzorial soundtrack, making it more an experience than just a film. / Hamburg ISFF 2012 / Curtas Vila do Conde IFF 2012 / Buenos Aires

\\ (Diana Mereoiu, BIEFF 2012) BAFICI 2012

DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: MIGUEL FONSECA (b. 1973, Lisbon) studied philosophy in college. He debuted in 2008 with Alpha, his first WORLD SALES: AGENCIA - PORTUGUESE SHORT FILM AGENCY short film. Later on, he produced the experimental short film I know you T: +351 252646683 can hear me, which won in 2011 the ''Short Size O.V.N.I'' at Media 10-10 E: agencia[at]curtas[dot]pt | W: www.curtas.pt/agencia Short Film Festival of Namur, and, in 2018, he directed the short film 94 SARA F. 489 YEARS 11’, 2016, France DIRECTOR: HAYOUN KWON

SCRIPTWRITER: Hayoun Kwon SOUND: Sylvain Buffet MUSIC: Pierre Desprats PRODUCER: Balthazar Auxietre PRODUCTION COMPANY: Innerspace

HAYOUN KWON

CURATOR'S STATEMENT: Through this title, we enter into a universe of FILM PRESENTATION: A computer animated rendition of a South unreality in which the imaginary is immediately summoned. It’s this specific Korean soldier’s patrol along the country’s demilitarized border (DMZ) mental space that HAYOUN KWON works on, stages and reconstructs. In with North Korea, 489 YEARS, by HAYOUN KWON deals with the (im) this zone that is the product of human insanity, a world of fiction emerges: possibility of representing and experiencing the liminal space of borders it will remain an uninhabitable space in which nature has taken over. - as limits dividing more than simple geographies. Employing a gamer’s Today, almost sixty years later, the mines are covered with vegetation and FPS (first-person-perspective), with photo-realistic accuracy of CGI and wild animals have invaded the area. The soldiers that maneuver in that the vivid imagery of storytelling, the narrator walks us through his area are thus exposed to both military and natural risks. In the soldier’s routine path along the DMZ under the cloak of darkness and growing story recorded by the artist, he makes reference to an anecdote that tension at the unseen enemy. Until a moment of terror strikes him still, combines both dread and poetry. HAYOUN KWON materializes this story, becoming an instant of serendipity and wonder, of experiencing beauty as it faces 489 YEARS, through sculptures, a recorded story and digital in the least likely of places. images. Sensorial, perceptible and subjective memory are what interest her most. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2017) (Jérôme Diacre, galeriedohyanglee.com)

FESTIVALS/AWARDS: Main Award - Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival 2018 / Prize of the Ecumenical Jury - DIRECTOR’S BIO-FILMOGRAPHY: HAYOUN KWON is a multimedia Oberhausen International Short Film Festival 2016 / Clermont-Ferrand artist and documentary director from South Korea born in 1981. She International Short Film Festival 2017 / San Sebastian International graduated from Le Fresnoy – Studio national des Arts contemporains in FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL Film Festival 2016 / Message to Man Film Festival / Uppsala 2011 and she lives and works in France and in Korea. Her films Lack of

International Film Festival / Winterthur International Short Film \\ Festival / Berlin International Short Film Festival Evidence (2011) and Model Village (2014) have been awarded several times and shown at a number of film festivals including the Rotterdam International Film Festival. The reflection on identity and borders is WORLD SALES: central to her previous works. She has focused more specifically on the HAYOUN KWON construction of historical and individual memory and their ambivalent T: +33 (0)6 78 20 24 83 | E: [email protected] relationship to reality and fiction. Her filmography includes 489 Years (2016), Model Village (2014), Lack of Evidence (2011) and Walls (2010). 95

DIRECTOR’S CONTACT: E: [email protected] PANELS @ BIEFF 2020

In a year of ever growing social distancing, we strongly believe that cinema can bring communities closer and inspire change. Whereas the catchphrase of 2020 has been You're on mute, we invite our audiences to speak out loud about pressing contemporary social, political and cultural issues. Taking the films as a starting point, the 10th edition of Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival invites its audiences to participate in a series of six online panels that will address and reflect on the curatorial themes proposed in this year's selection.

This initiative aims to open up new perspectives, to educate and to promote the acceptance of diversity, the respect for otherness and freedom of expression and to create a space for self-reflection and future social transformation.

Designed to provide a propitious space be it a virtual one for engrossing debates around the proposed topics, the panels will bring together the authors of the films as well as guest experts in theme-related fields. There will be in-depth discussions based on and starting from the proposed films, and the audience is invited to engage in the conversation through Facebook, Youtube and on Filmchief, which is the official streaming platform of this special online edition.

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH \\

96 THE SPECTRE OF ON ETHICS, DYSTOPIA BIO-POLITICS AND THE RESURFACE OF FASCISM

Invited filmmakers: In the midst of a global pandemic and Søren Lind, Pedro Neves Marques, Luisa Mello worrying resurfacing of right wing discourses across the world, the specter Invited speaker: of dystopia seems to be upon us, rising Cristian Iftode questions about Moderator: the future of humanity and the dangers Matei Martin that may further appear from our ever accelerating scientific and technological progress, which we aim to address in the 25 November 2020, 19:00 hrs EET FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL \\ BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL context of the proposed debate.

The panel will be presented in relation to the competition program The Spectre of Dystopia.

97 PUBLIC EYE, ON PUBLIC PRIVATE I REPRESEN- TATIONS OF GENDER ROLES

Invited filmmakers: Is it what we do that makes us female or Vika Kirchenbauer, Jyoti Mistry, Gabrielle Stemmer male, or do we do certain things because we are female, respectively male? Embracing Invited speaker: Judith Butler famous delineation of Oana Băluță behaviour from gender, this panel aims Moderator: to open a conversation about the extent Iulia Popovici to which the public representations and constructed notions of sex and gender are responsible for restrictive social roles, as

\\ 26 November 2020, 19:00 hrs EET well as sexual and domestic abuse.

The debate will be presented in relation to the competition program Public Eye, Private I.

98 THE MAP IS NOT ON CONTEMPO- THE TERRITORY RARY REPRESEN- TATIONS OF MIGRATION AND DISPLACEMENT

Invited filmmakers: In a time when nationalism is on the rise in Europe, Anton Bialas, Beina Xu, Forensic Architecture the topics of forced displacement and economic (representative) migration are often misused in order to create a climate of anxiety and social division. How does Invited speakers: one deal with the reality of another human being? Gabriela Leu, Nisreen Rubaian Is it at all possible to escape the inner bubble of Moderator: our own minds in order to understand something Diana Meseșan we have no direct experience of? These are the questions the proposed panel aims to address,

while inviting the audience to explore the issues FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL \\ BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL 27 November 2020, 19.00 hrs EET of otherness and the limitations of empathy.

The panel will be presented in relation to the competition program The Map is not The Territory.

99 AN ACT OF ON THE VIOLENCE REPRESEN- TATIONS OF VIOLENCE

Invited filmmakers: Gravitating around Walter Benjamin’s Yael Bartana, Antoine Chapon, Ismaël Joffroy observation, which states that “the question Chandoutis would remain open, whether violence as a principle could be a moral means even Invited speaker: to just ends”, the proposed panel aims Bogdan Ghiu to raise questions regarding the morality Moderator: of violence, as well as the way public Iulia Popovici representations of violence may influence in their turn the propagation of violence and

\\ bring about further radicalisation. 28 November 2020, 17.00 hrs EET The panel will be presented in relation to the competition program An Act of Violence.

100 SUBLIME RECLAIMING BODIES SEXUALISED REPRESEN- TATIONS OF THE BODY

Invited filmmakers: Carefully distinguishing between what is Ann Oren, Michael Portnoy, Babeth M. VanLoo natural and what is normal (i.e. culturally constructed), the proposed panel will Invited speaker: question societal norms and prejudices Paul/a Duncă regarding sexuality, in an attempt Moderator: to reclaim the power of sexualised Călin Boto representations of the body from a queer perspective, thus giving way to the search for personal identity and freedom.

28 November 2020, 19.00 hrs EET FILM FESTIVAL EXPERIMENTAL \\ BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL The panel will be presented in relation to the competition program Sublime Bodies.

101 BERLINALE – HUMANS AND FORUM EXPANDED TECHNOLOGY IN SHOWCASE CONVERSATION

Invited filmmakers: As the intermix between humans and Ayoung Kim, Graeme Arnfield, Anton Vidokle technology is becoming increasingly complex, with phenomena becoming data Moderator: and algorithms, the promise of immortality Ulrich Ziemons encapsulated in AI, people relying more and (curator Berlinale Forum Expanded) more on digital devices and the question of inequality and violence persisting in spite of 29 November 2020, 19.00 hrs EET these, how do contemporary experimental filmmakers grasp our present and its

\\ possible futures? Based on this year's selection of Berlinale Forum expanded, the panel - which is moderated by curator Ulrich Ziemons - will touch upon the above topics.

102 MEDIA PARTNERS www.bieff.ro