Evening Cinema Screening: 2024 Festival Selection ​

Thursday 18 July 18:00-20:00
Digital Media & Performance Lab (DMPL)
​(Followed by Drinks reception in the Lobby)
Écouter la mer (Listen to the Sea)
5m15s, Canada, Directed by Jules Ronfard
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Roots, memories, childhood, youth of course. But what else? Film and autobiography in black and white. It is a musical, visual and auditory stroll through the town of Trouville in Normandy up to its pier.
Raindog
13m16s, United Kingdom, Directed by Euan Munro
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‘Raindog’ is a sci-fi drama that explores the prevailing debates around AI while showing the consequences that arise from the pursuit of knowledge. It follows two young programmers, each with contrasting personalities, and how they manage the problems that ensue after their once promising AI venture descends into turmoil. The film is shot in one static angle, placing the viewer in the perspective of the machine itself, as it watches the chaos unfold when the two young men try and cope with the realisation that their cryptic discovery is irreversible.
The Abyss
9m33s, United Kingdom, Directed by Virag Pazmany, C.A. Cooper
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‘The Abyss’ is a film that examines grief; it uses visual symbolism and evocative and immersive sound design that seeks to induce a trance-like state in the viewer reflecting that of the film’s protagonist. The film takes both a personal and universal perspective of grief that connects viewer, protagonist and creator. It takes an experimental approach to narrative that uses both abstract and mundane visuals to investigate reality, subconscious and the blurred line that connects the two together.
Top View of my Brain as a Crime Scene
12m35s, Germany, Directed by Luzia Vita Johow
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In a forest clearing sits a woman, did something horrible happen? All she knows is that the children are dead or gone. Authorities and allies scurry around the crime scene, some interrogating, some reassuring. Witness, victim and suspect combined, she wrestles with the feeling that she may be to blame. Shot on 16mm film ‘Top View of my Brain as a Crime Scene’ blends narrative fiction with the experimental while debating the role of childless-women in today´s society, and capturing the mystifying and vivid nature of dreams.
Casbah (with introduction from the filmmaker)
20m31s, United Kingdom, Directed by Andy Birtwistle
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Casbah is a metafictional essay film that attempts to reconstruct – from memory – an experimental film noir monster movie that was never made. Casbah reconstructs the unmade film from fragments of film and video shot by its director Andy Birtwistle over a period of 35 years. The unmade film at the heart of Casbah is a fiction built on unstable recollection, and cobbled together from a repurposed personal archive. Consequently, part of the film’s experimental qualities lies in its navigation of the unstable boundary between fiction and documentary. The film will be introduced by the director.
DVA
33m, Directed by Alexandra Karelin
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Dva (meaning ‘two’ in Russian) is set in Moscow as it experiences an inexplicable state of emergency. In search of the undisclosed explanation behind the emergency is a lonely man who simultaneously tries to find his missing dog. Eventually, he finds himself in a parallel world where the dead and the living are inseparable, but the word "death" is strictly prohibited. The film examines the idea that in any event, object and action there is always room for the unexplained – linking both to the questions posed by the Russian public in response to the war (and the government’s disregard of these questions), as well as the unwavering Russian faith in mystics.

Evening Cinema Screening: EFF Closing Event and 24/7 Competition Screening and Award

Friday 19 July 18:00-20:00
Digital Media & Performance Lab (DMPL)
​(Followed by Drinks reception in the Lobby)

The first part of this session will include a short presentation on Experimental Fiction Filmmaking by the event organisers, followed by a screening of two short Experimental Fiction Films.
 
The second part will include screening of the best films submitted to the 24/7 Experimental Fiction Filmmaking competition and the announcement of the winner and runner up of the award. 
At Dawn the Flowers Open the Gates of Paradise
13m26s, United Kingdom, Directed by Mela Hilleard
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Framed entirely in an iris this film follows Akiko who uses her access to people’s rooms as a housekeeper in a London hotel to photograph the remnants of people's stays – used bedsheets moulded by both sleep and sleeplessness. After she discovers the love of her life – Oskar who is married – she retreats to her photographs. Creating a cocoon from her images, an altar to lie on, she withdraws into her sanctuary. The next day, in place of her freed spirit, flies a white butterfly.
Eclipsis
15m, Mexico, Directed by Tania Hernández Velasco
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 ‘Danaus plexippus eclipsis’ is the scientific name of a newly discovered subspecies of monarch butterfly. A subspecies that possesses peculiar and extraordinary toxins in its scales. Toxins that cause powerful sensorial alterations in its unsuspecting predators. Combining documentary with experimental science fiction and the abstract; ’Eclipsis’ uses vivid microscopic footage and performance to ask the question: "what would happen to human beings if they came across the Eclipsis butterfly in the midst of our hurting world."

Cinema Screening 1

Thursday 18 July 10:15-11:20
Digital Media & Performance Lab (DMPL)
Earth
64min, Italy, Directed by Antonio Di Trapani, Marco De Angeli
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Earth is a film that is suspended between reality and narrative fiction, through a combination of archival material with both fictional and documentary scenes. It follows a ‘Starets’- an extraterrestrial angel of judgement, sent from a distant world to decide the fate of mankind, and its decision to abandon its mission and live on earth assuming the form of a human; meanwhile on his home planet, his counterparts decide to issue to earth a terrible condemnation. Assisted by a young woman, the Starets attempts to deliver earth from its damning fate.

Cinema Screening 2

Thursday 18 July 11:30-13:15
Digital Media & Performance Lab (DMPL)
I want to shatter the greenhouse 
20m, Romania, Directed by Teona Galgoțiu
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Sarah is confronted with the first alerting symptoms of a disease that gradually, in its final stages, turns the body of the victim into a plant. A disease she inherited from her father, who, in the later stages of the illness, lies in a hospital bed. She is in want of change, and ultimately, confrontation of the violent memories of childhood that plague her mind. So she visits her bedridden father and tells him all the things that, up until this point, she couldn’t.
Mothersister
30m, Argentina, Directed by Leandro E. Cerdá
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In this absurdist and surreal film, a father and son’s mundane lives are disrupted when an oppressive and bizarre woman who calls herself ‘Mothersister [of someone important]', moves into their home. She is aggressive, tyrannical and expresses her emotions through the everchanging shape of her round, goggle-like glasses. She seeks to control the aspects of their lives under the belief in that everything she thinks is fact. Things are only complicated when the son is visited by his girlfriend.
Monte Kali
23m51s, Germany, Directed by Jozefien Van der Aelst
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Caked in pale dust and trapped in the silence of the deep earth are the miners or Monte Kali, confined indefinitely to the darkness after the collapse of Monte Kali’s core. With the removal of the visual and audible distractions of the above ground world, they sit dwelling on the haunting images and memories dragged from the recesses of their minds, images unreconcilable even through prayer. Monte Kali deals with the relationship between humans and nature, even when it is nature that had condemned them to death.
Black Hole Legion
12m6s, Greenland, Directed by Jonathan Omer Mizrahi, Ariel Sereni Brown
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‘Black Hole legion’ is a visual poem narrated and written by a group of young women who discuss the concerns of a new Greenlandic generation, such as suicide rates, unemployment and depression, which threaten to jeopardize their future. The subject of the poem is reflected in the film's post-apocalyptic setting, where four cybergoth teens are fighting water contamination and depression on the foothills of the Uummannag mountain. We follow their journey as they try to navigate a fragile reality where national, communal, environmental, and mental stability is at risk.
Color Zoo
17m36s, South Korea, Directed by Eun OH
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Housed in a dystopian and bizarre zoo are wild animals with human masks, unpredictable and tormented, never able to return home. Some sit having conversation over lunch, others frantically pound against the walls of their confinement. The Colour Zoo is plunged into chaos when its wild animals break free of their mirrored neon cages and walk amongst their human counterparts. Color Zoo is a reflection of life in the media arc where isolation, confusion and surplus of value is all too common.

Cinema Screening 3

Thursday 18 July 14:00-15:30
Digital Media & Performance Lab (DMPL)
Western Silence
46m22s, United Kingdom, Alex Lichtenfels
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Western Silence is a piece of devised filmmaking, filmed by a group of artists and filmmakers over a week long workshop at the McLaughlin Natural Reserve in Northern California. The film thematically mirrors the structure of the devising process, by exploring how the performer/filmmakers deal with, and deal with being part of, the material environments that they work within. Specifically, the film examines the links between the personal trauma of lost memory, and the geological trauma of environments destroyed by wildfires linked to climate change.
Looking for Letine
15m20s, United Kingdom, Directed by Paul Tarragó
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In response to being unable to find the grave of Letine (the leader of a 19th century acrobatic cycling troupe), Paul Tarragó makes ‘Looking for Letine’ an equal parts experimental animation, stylised domestic drama, and autobiography, that reflects on mortality, filmmaking, and magic. The film is a collage of celluloid, video and beautifully crafted animations, that delves into the lives of both the film's subject as well as its creator.
Pietranera
16m49s, France, Directed by Arthur Vermorel, Victor Lauzely
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At springtime, a young woman arrives at a seaside house. As she wanders through the rooms, halls and streets around her, a presence manifests itself within the quiet serenity. The memory of an old story emerges out from behind the tranquil veil of a peaceful French town. Told between the blurred perspectives of two women, and between the past and the present, the only constant is the place itself, the viewer is left to draw conclusions from the film’s abstract narrative.
All the Faces I Love Look Alike
14m42s, Brazil, Directed by Davi Mello, Deborah Perrotta
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Using a combination between digital and super 8 footage ‘All the Faces I Love Look Alike’ shows the fractured and fragmented memories of childhood that follow us through adulthood and beyond, never leaving our side, never to be pieced together. A young woman walks around her home, divulging those broken memories of her childhood as we see the relics of her past, piled on desks, hanging on walls, and wrapped away in bubble wrap, slowly aging like the fading footage of the super 8 film.

Cinema Screening 4

Friday 19 July 15:30-17:15
Digital Media & Performance Lab (DMPL)
HOME (with introduction from the filmmaker)
95m, United Kingdom/Poland, Directed by Mela Hilleard 
Please note that this film contains a documentary depiction of death. 
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