Programme 4

BLOCKHOUSE (2016–2019)
Director: Andy Amadi Okoroafor
Japan
Experimental | 15 min
Japanese with English subtitles

Part of a five-part series, BLOCKHOUSE is a story of loneliness and solitude in the modern world as expressed through dance. In the context of the extremely high suicide rate in Japan, often attributed to loneliness, this film follows a dancer who chooses to break the chains of her self-imposed solitude and, in a celebration of life, fulfil her dream of dancing in the street.

ABOVE US ONLY SKY(2019)
Director: Arthur Kleinjan
The Netherlands
Experimental | 29 min
English

A layered allegory of individual and collective memory, the film begins with an investigation into a plane crash in communist Czechoslovakia, which only one woman survives. This event becomes the point of entry into a dense web of seemingly unrelated events, and viewers become unsuspecting witnesses to political defiance and reprisals. The past informs the present, and natural, political and technological disasters are followed by remarkable tales of survival.

Permission to Land (2017)
Director: Ieva Saudargaitė Douaihi
Lebanon
Experimental | 17 min
Arabic and Lithuanian with English subtitles

Shot in various locations that used to serve as landing strips or airports, this film explores Lebanon’s forgotten aeronautical history while soaring through a parallel narrative in a foreign tongue with a protagonist who is looking for a place to land.

Passerine in Time (2018)
Director: Laurids Andersen Sonne
Denmark
Experimental | 8 min
No dialogue

Passerine in Time exists in a space where two creatures and two distinct worlds collide; it is a study of the gestural encounter between the hand of man and the birds that land in it. The film investigates haptic encounters between man and bird in which the hand symbolises man’s desire for knowledge of something other as it repeatedly captures, inspects, measures, bands and logs migratory birds before they are returned to the wild.

Hijacked (2017)
Director: Shambhavi Kaul
United States of America
Experimental | 15 min
No spoken dialogue, English subtitles

Airplane space is inhabited by characters for whom ‘escape’, one of the promises of airplane technology, proves elusive.