Programme 15
it would not be possible to leave planet earth unless gravity existed (2017)
Director: Driant Zeneli
Albania
Experimental | 14 min
No dialogue
Mario and Metallurgik: a rendezvous between utopia and dystopia.
Mario has always had a passion for flying and building aeroplanes. Metallurgik is the location of an abandoned factory in Albania, where 12,000 people used to work during the 1970s.
Today Mario is the master of assembling flying machines and dreams of reaching outer space. Metallurgjik, on the other hand, is now empty—proof of the failure of Albanian communism to build an ideal society.
A Passage (2019)
Directors: Rouzbeh Akhbari and Felix Kalmenson
Armenia/Iran
Experimental | 18 min
Russian with English subtitles
A Passage tackles the political economy and social ecology of border infrastructures in Southern Armenia. Looking at how processes of rapid militarisation and neoliberalism have restructured the borders, this film focuses on two significant events that illustrate the dominant political shifts in the region: the recent erasure of the historic Yerevan-Baku Railway and the upcoming construction of an industrial Free Economic Zone (FEZ) to replace it.
Sufism (2018)
Director: Younes Ben Hajria
Tunisia
Experimental | 20 min
Arabic with English and French subtitles
The dance of the body embraces the dance of the machine…
The film starts as a didactic documentary on the technique of wool processing, from sheep shearing and the unravelling of the collected wool to the threshing, carding and spinning operations that follow. After the inaugural sequence, the pure documentary turns into an aesthetic vision that transfigures manufacturing devices through a series of visual effects and a change in register.