Ion is a seemingly normal guy whose life goes by without a hitch. A phone call; a meeting with a friend; small, unimportant everyday situations. One day he gets into a car with two other people. They cross the border between Spain and France. The next morning, their lives will change forever.
In Razor Blades, Paul SHARITS consciously challenges our eyes, ears and minds to withstand a barrage of high powered and often contradictory stimuli. In a careful juxtaposition and fusion of these elements on different parts of our being, usually occurring simultaneously, we feel at times hypnotised and re-educated by some potent and mysterious force.
Lois Patiño dissects the movement of a fire, analyses its fleeting ephemeral forms, and transforms them with sound to enrich the meaning of the images. The Image Burns begins as a reflection on our perception and becomes an intense interaction between the parts, between the images and the spectator. We look at the fire and the fire looks back at us.
A spirit becomes one with the world.
An attempt to conjure pictorially, from the mind, an image that isn't referential: "...I'd like to give something back, not a picture of a flower, but some flower that couldn't exist except on film." - S.B.
"This is taking a Super 8mm camera around with me wherever I go and I'm very interested in windows at this time of travel, and I'm trying to make a variety of different statements about the concept of window." - S.B.
In a hypothetical intergalactic journey we could not recognize any constellation, the mapping of the celestial sphere is nothing but a vice of the gaze. The proximity close to any star we would identify others, visible only from this new perspective: the sighting. To the keen eye, pixels are stars and everything is possessed.
Huyghe's film installation captures a moment of reproduction between insects over 30 million years old. The title resonates with current scientific experiments into the de-extinction of prehistoric species.
Köner uses sequences of images from webcams as raw material. People and their vehicles appear acoustically, but not visually. The shift from day to night and the influence of the weather gives motion to the segments. He condenses a total of 3,000 individual web images taken from the Internet into one scene. Despite the cinematic motion of the image, it seems like a still photo.
Documentary about a slaughterhouse in Quito, where hundreds of people and entire families work everyday. The smell of the place is warm and penetrating, the noise is intense, everything is red. Would that much effort and death have an ulterior purpose?
Against the backdrop of an unfathomable megalopolis, in a story that follows the associative qualities of a dream logic, the protagonists quote from concepts of neo-liberal elitism, and a mix of religious delusions and hallucinations of the apocalypse. The film begins in a sacral space, where Randi, a figure that references Ayn Rand, transforms a parapsychological medium into two digital clouds and sends them on a journey through a megalopolis in full growth. There they materialize as two bodies, which go by the names of Mr. Freedom and Ms. Independence.
A short tale about nature and isolation. Narrated by Andrei Tarkovsky. Shot on 16mm Fomapan R in spring 2020.
Stochastics investigates the possibility of making a primitive film, using a flea market Rolleiflex from the fifties, shooting on 120 (6 X 6) black and white film on which each roll takes twelve pictures.
"The work Everytown deals with futuristic models from science, literature and film at the beginning of the 20th century. The focus lies on the social structures and their respective dramatisation, especially by means of new models of architecture. How do the futuristic prophecies that were made about the future back then correlate with today's present? By analysis of movies, drawings and sketches, Larcher tried to transfer certain characteristics, like architecture, political systems, public transport and energy generation into the present." - Claudia Larcher
"A sequence shot explores from attic to celler a large residence that, for the time being, is emptied out of its inhabitants. Their habits are betrayed by a multitude of details, as so many clues left for us to find, scrutinize, interpret or mark with our own groundless fears, fears that keep growing as we descend into ordinary hell. Our eyes cannot really grasp the cleverly mixed fixed and moving pictures, and this technical uncertainty is the very source of our anxiety: is it a mere villa we’re looking at, a crime scene, or a mausoleum of Austrian daily life? The entire gamut of a parochial idyll in the provinces is laid bare in Claudia Larcher's video animation, in the form of photos and moving images assembled into a seemingly endless pan shot. The audio track drones in the background, awaking something uncomfortable and sinister." - Thomas Miessgang
"The video "Between the ocean" is a juxtaposition of interior and exterior spaces in Japan that are somehow connected. The material for this video montage was recorded in Japan in fall 2013 in Tokyo, Fukushima and Tohoku regions." - Claudia Larcher
In 1983, yacht sailor Will Parker leads an American crew financed by millionaire Morgan Weld to defeat during the America's Cup race against an Australian crew. Determined to get the prize back, Will convinces Morgan to finance an experimental boat designed by his ex-girlfriend Kate's new beau, Joe Heisler. When the boat is completed, the Americans head to Australia to reclaim the cup.
A windy night at the seashore.
Set in Florida and inspired by Harmony Korine’s homonymous book, Leo Gabin’s film consists of a collage of YouTube videos, mostly self-made, which depicts negative yet realistic aspects of the lost American dream. Moreover, it interprets contemporary social and political reality similarly to how Korine’s novel collects allegedly documentary fragments of American culture.
"I came across an old industrial film by Siemens on computer and their language. To better appreciate the film I first of all cut off the sound, I then took out the colours and reduced the speed. Slowly the very substance of the film emerged and I began to see the deep meditation that was hidden in the film. Finally I made a black and white copy of the material and let the images pulsate in a general breathing rhythm." —Jürgen Reble