Programme 18
Lacuna (2017)
Director: Marcia Beatriz Granero
Brazil
Experimental ǀ 10 min
No dialogue
Jaque Jolene investigates a cultural space where there was once a pharmaceutical industry, taking with her medicinal plant juices and germinated seeds.
Cement X (2018)
Director: Lene Vollhardt
Germany
Experimental | 15 min
No dialogue
Cement X is a trans-futuristic dystopian desire. It is an ideological hope and lavish embrace of complicity with the disavowed craving for soft oppression. This complicity is a temporal reservoir that is allegedly covered in a resistant mode of existence, cooperating in a single pragmatic technique of denial: self-care.
Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (2017)
Director: Ayoung Kim
Australia
Experimental ǀ 21 min
English
As speculative fiction, Porosity Valley, Portable Holes unfolds narratives that encompass imaginary subterranean geologies as live things, including a quasi-mythical entity named Petra Genetrix, which encounters practical problems while trying to migrate to a different rocky platform. The stories penetrate, push and pull through the porous spaces within underlying geological structures.
Glitch Noir - Datasifter Prelude (2015)
Director: Cody Healey-Conelly
United States of America
Experimental | 3 min
English
Glitch Noir is an animated story set in a vague paranoid future where warfare has been automated, thereby providing plausible deniability to the multinational corporations that finance and profit from weapon sales. The nameless protagonist sifts through the cracks and crevices of the global stream to find the missing son of a client.
All About Animals: Director’s Panel Pilot Presentation (2017)
Director: Cody Ziglar
United States of America
Narrative ǀ 11 min
English
All About Animals is a show revealing truths about animals the government doesn't want you to know. Presented here for the first time and available in varied formats from high quality VHS to digital. Enjoy the crisp 4:3 picture in all its glory! Stick around for the panel featuring the directors of the series.
More Love, More Joy, More Mortgage (2018)
Directors: Chinar Shah, Leslie Johnson, Smriti Mehra
United Kingdom
Experimental ǀ 4 min
English
More Joy, More Love, More Mortgage was made with royalty-free stock footage from websites such as http://www.shutterstock.com and www.stock.adobe.com, and the soundtrack song was produced by an application that converts text into music. This video is a meditation on the kind of ‘stock footage’ the real estate market tries to sell every day.
I’m ± Here (2018)
Director: Nadim Choufi
United Arab Emirates
Experimental ǀ 5 min
Arabic with English subtitles
Based on over 500 chat archives from dating applications, I'm ± Here explores how intimacy in multiple Arab countries functions through (in)visibility and a sustained love language. As moving images allude to suggested meeting spots, all discoverable from surveillance cameras, users are operating simultaneously on a platform of connectivity and surveillance.
Fables 1 (2018)
Director: Wong Ping
Hong Kong
Experimental ǀ 13 min
Mandarin with English subtitles
Contemporary fables are staged in a pop-like, bright-coloured imaginary. The characters are inspired by animals and nature, but they interact like humans, tackling the social and psychological problems of our contemporary age. Issues of appearance, love, social media interactions and modern-day phobias clutch at the protagonists’ lives, shaping their faith.
Maula Jutt (2015)
Director: Haider Ali Jan
Pakistan
Narrative | 4 min
Punjabi with English subtitles
Maula Jutt references images from the eponymous film series of the late 1970s and 1980s to communicate the symbolic power of images on the collective psyche and their effect on experience and memory. Focusing on vigilante justice against authority and changing gender roles, the film series strongly influenced audience perspectives on war and romantic relationships in Pakistan.
The Units of the World According to Semicolon (2011)
Director: YoungEun Kim
South Korea
Experimental ǀ 26 min
Korean with English subtitles
This film presents 12 punctuation marks, including the colon [:], quotation marks [“ ”], the hyphen [-], the ellipsis […], the arrow [→] and parentheses [(…)]. These marks have specific functions in sentences, but they are silent. In this film, they are given ‘voices’ to represent their respective characters, with the semicolon [;] as narrator.
Fade Out (2017)
Director: Abdelrahman Alama
Egypt
Experimental | 9 min
English
Unobserved relationships exist between sounds, colours, nature, animals and human voices. This film examines these relationships, using symbolism and the words of the ‘father of the atomic bomb’. Witnessing the detonation of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he recalled words from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’
Nanaira (2018)
Director: Meera Al Qassimi
United Kingdom
Experimental | 20 min
Shona
A waterfall, symbol of a great release of emotion. A woman’s emotions rise as she stands watching from the outside in. She vigorously washes her paintbrush in a glass of water, leading up to a watercolour meditation. She cleanses and flows.
Nylon (2016)
Director: Ahmed Mohsen Mansour
Saudi Arabia
Experimental| 2 min
English
Prevention policy is one approach to limiting individuals’ freedoms or restricting them from expressing themselves, especially during a period of time that is temporary or finite.
The Man in the Bushes (2017)
Directors: Vasilios Papaioannu and Emma Piper-Burket
United States of America
Experimental | 6 min
English
A filmmaker follows a man as he searches for clues to understand the father he never knew. Armed with a stack of photographs, a street address and the knowledge that the man's father was an astronaut, the two explore their surroundings to unravel the mysteries of living on planet Earth.