Friday, 6th December

8 - 11 PM
Secret screening! *35mm print

Come watch a 35mm print of popular 90s Bollywood film!

Saturday, 7th December

12 - 12.50 PM
Wondrous Kiental | Christina Zurbrügg, Michael Hudecek *feature

A little village in the Swiss Alps: Kiental. Lenin held a secret meeting there and it served Friedrich Dürrenmatt as inspiration for his play “The Visit”. In the fifties the mysteriously unknown Mr. Landtwing filmed there. The singer and filmmaker Christina Zurbrügg was born in Kiental and tells us with poetry and humour about memories and reality, past and present. A found footage remix.

2.30 - 3.30 PM
I see a moon while looking at the sun *short film programme

Liminal spaces, transitioning from emulsion to emulsion. A collection of short films that traverse through many landscapes — both personal and surreal, of dreams and of realities, of fableists and painters. 

Films:

Minevissam (I am writing) | Niki Kohandel

Minevissam maps the journeys of various characters, whose pasts continue to echo through other times and places. As they search for better words and worlds, a poet, a painter and an owl attempt to translate their tales for and with each other

Horizons | Charlie Marois

Filmed frame by frame, the landscape is deconstructed in a way that makes us lose our sense of reality and continuity. The horizon line becomes our only reference point to create a new motif that is both irrational and contemplative.

The Dissolution of the Landscape | Anne-Marie Bouchard

Through visual metaphors, the film offers an incursion into an inner landscape, a dive into subconscious, a mix of childhood memories and recurrent dreams, between surrealism and automatism.

Aka 赤 | Abinadi Meza

Aka 赤 (Japanese for “red”) is made from 33 meters of handmade 16mm film and shinkansen (bullet train) recordings. The intention is to construct a film as a space for primordial feeling, complex time, immersion, and one’s own living body.

The Initiation Well | Chris Kennedy

The Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal is a huge estate that has two wells for performing initiation ceremonies built into the ground. This film takes us into one of them. Sound design by Samuel La France.

Butterfly Manoeuvres | Gor Margaryan

Butterfly Manoeuvres is an experimental essay film based on old, private film footage of fighter planes. The film documents the preparations and training for war, recorded as historical evidence. An artful fusion of images and sounds creates a unique cinematic experience. It is interesting to note that the soundtrack does not always correspond exactly with the visual impressions. This deliberate discrepancy between image and sound was chosen to create new associations and perspectives. A central motif of the film is the contrast between the destructive fighter planes and the fragile, seemingly lost images of butterflies. This juxtaposition symbolises the transience and irreversible destruction caused by war. Butterfly Manoeuvres is therefore not only a documentary record, but also a profound reflection on war, loss and the fleeting beauty of life.

4 - 4.30 PM
sea foam palace *short film programme

Inside a home of textured walls, we are breathing between carvings and dancing between layers — a collection of short films and music videos that go beyond a medium; rooted in practice and play.

Films:

Abgad Hawaz | Robin Riad

Learn how to pronounce the Arabic alphabet in 28 easy steps! (Direct animation, laser-printing, and synthetic/animated sound)

Más cables que personas | Camila Dron

Más cables que personas plunges into the interior of the human body, through the combination of various animation techniques and supports. Computer-generated images of the body are repeated over cyanotypes and disintegrate at the mercy of artificial intelligence under a motto: being deliberately unreal is a sign of honesty.

Glitter for Girls | Federica Foglia

Glitter for Girls is a handmade tattoo film that utilizes a camera-less, direct-on-film animation approach to collage multiple layers of water tattoos (commonly used by children). Foglia, known for her tactile work on celluloid, this time intervenes on the 16mm polyester base of recycled film scraps and treats the water based tattoos as film emulsion – creating an abstract animation inspired by the playful legacy of Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren.

Brass Band Weds Cyanotype | Siddharth Kaneria

Brass Band Weds Cyanotype is a quiet homage to the vibrant tradition of Indian brass bands, where the pulse of triumphant trumpets, deep tubas, and rhythmic percussion becomes the heartbeat of an Indian wedding. These bands, once part of colonial regiments, have evolved into something deeply rooted in our collective memory, blending the old and the new, the familiar and the unexpected.

In this film, the music of the brass band finds an unexpected companion in the Cyanotype process that gently weaves its way into each frame. Hand-printed, these images carry the delicate, ephemeral quality of something crafted with care, where each shade of blue whispers a story of past and present, tied together by the enduring melodies of the band. The music, with all its declarations of life and love, transforms moments of chaos into something akin to joy. In every blaring note, in every rhythmic beat, there is a thread of resilience and festivity that refuses to fade. 

Riding Day | Michael Alexander Morris

The music video for Black Taffy’s Riding Day is a loving nod to British experimental filmmaker Malcom Le Grice’s 1970 film Berlin Horse; an iconic work of structural/materialist filmmaking that featured a soundtrack by Brian Eno. Like that film, this film is an exploration of the material qualities of celluloid film in ways that are analogous to gestures in electronic music. Just as Black Taffy has sampled and reworked the soundtrack for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to create a new musical composition, this film samples and reworks images from its sequel Tears of the Kingdom, translating the interactive game world into a physical form. Similar to the way Eno’s tape loops fall in and out of sync with one another, the images here are made into loops that superimpose positive on top of negative and allow them to drift away from each other.

Man of Aral | Helena Gouveia Monteiro

Man of Aral is an experimental film created from satellite images of the disappearing sea of Aral in Central Asia, showing the gradual decrease in water levels and the drastic transformation of the landscape as a result of human activity. A digital time lapse sequence was created from these images, transferred onto 16mm film, and chemically manipulated by hand with colour tints and toners, which affected the images visually and materially, creating a unique — both digital and analog, both mechanically and manually composed — hybrid visual object. As a staged tale of a sea with no water, Man of Aral presents the erosion of the landscape and of the film material itself as competing human and geological timelines through distant views of a rapidly yet almost invisibly changing territory; a key event of unprecedented scale.

Scum Show | MaLo Sutra Fish, Marie-Laure Cros

The music video for OSEES’ Scum Show – this film was shot at Le Trianon in Paris, during OSEES’ show on June 29th 2022, on Tri-x Super 8 film. The reels were hand processed at the Collective Lab L’Etna, and animated and coloured by hand. Long live Punk Spirit!

why i never became a driver  | Yuula Benivolski

Three women engage with the medical system to confront an uncontrollable “other” self.

“Early one morning, I regained consciousness in a hospital bed as the sun was coming up. I was sixteen. The first thing I noticed was the breaking news on television: princess Diana had just died in a car accident. Two hours prior, my friends and I hitchhiked home from a party and got picked up by a Toyota hatchback. The driver was drunk but we were desperate. At the end of a twisted mountain road he crashed into the wall of my town’s cemetery. As I watched updates on Diana from my hospital bed, images of her smashed up car slowly crept into my mind and imprinted as my own.”

5 - 6 PM
Saudade *short film programme
Experimental films from Brazil, curated by Raju Roychowdhury.

Curator’s Note:

For a long time I thought that absence is a lack.
And yes I lamented, ignorantly, the lack.
Now I don’t regret it.
There is no lack in absence.
Absence is a being within me.
And I feel the terra, so close, snuggled in my arms,
that I laugh and dance and invent happy exclamations,
because the truancy, this assimilated absence,
no one steals it from me anymore.

Talking about “Saudade” poses a challenge especially considering its powerful meaning and significance. Probably, it is one of those Brazilian-Portuguese words that are arduous to explain. Though akin to nostalgia, melancholy, a complex pithy sentiment of missing, loneliness, love, hope, suffering, pain, and so on, it is the object of intense research in the Lusophone world. The complexity and ambiguous sentiment that “Saudade” invokes take place in the intersection of a paradoxical feeling that has been explored vastly over literature, music, philosophy, and cinema, not only as a key idea of the “Alma Brasileiro” but also as an essential way to understand human relationships; a condition over temporality. Assuming the complex foundation of Brazilian cultural process “Saudade” shall be one of the most important cultural interventions, that I claim to territorialize in this curatorial work following it as a cultural trace existing as a social visual entity, with powerful mechanisms of temporal preservation in the process of daring experimentation in analog cinema.

The program will feature short films shot both in 16mm and super 8, by filmmakers ranging from north eastern state of Recife to the southern state of Santa Catarina, and encompasses a variety of cinematic techniques and emotions that gives rise to the proliferation of an exceedingly local dispositif in the parlance of Brazilian experimental  cinema.

Films:

A Chegada do Trem Fantasma a Estação da Serra Borborema | Amin Stepple, Paulo Cunha, Ivan Cordeiro

In 1981, in Olinda, in the Northeast of Brazil, Amin Stepple Hiluey (1950-2019) started the production of a short film in super-8 called “The Arrival of the Ghost Train at Serra da Borborema Station”. It would be a tribute to the actresses of old cinema with whom the director fell in love, when he saw them as a teenager on the screens of his hometown, Campina Grande. Unfortunately the film was not completed at the time. Almost 40 years later, after a mysterious dream in which Stepple recounted them scene by scene how the film should have been, Paulo Cunha and Ivan Cordeiro, two of his old friends, decide to go back to the original images — which Ivan himself had photographed — and “complete” the project, as told in the dream. They called the work a “transcreation”. It is a legitimate, affective and anarchic super-8, just like the ones that were made in the Northeast of Brazil during the military dictatorship.

Bleach Farm | 2024 | Ligia M. Teixeira and Francisco B. Gusso

Film processed with eco-developer made from field sunflowers, painted and dyed manually, with sodium hypochlorite applied to the film.

Aqui Onde Tudo Acaba | 2023 | Claudia Cardenas, Juce Filho

“Here Where Everything Ends” — an experimental, poetic short film that moves between documentary and fiction. It is, in particular, a sharing of knowledge carried out in Aldeia Bugio, at all stages of 16mm filming, botanical development and sound capture in a collective way. It seeks to reactivate the memory of the origins of the Laklãnõ/Xokleng people.

Foxtrot | 2021 | Moira Lacowicz

“You know what Kant said? That if everything went ok at the middle, It will also be alright at the end, depending over the idea made at the beginning. And then – as illustration –  went on dancing, a foxtrot.” Produced with found-footage in 16mm format, “Foxtrot” is a visual plasticity exercise that deals with bad luck processes.

O dente do dragão | 2022 | Rafaelle Parrode

After killing the dragon, Cadmus released the blue curse, spreading like dust into the city. The second-biggest nuclear accident in the world happened in Goiânia, capital of Goiás, Brazil. In September 1987, two scrap collectors looking through an abandoned clinic (Goiânia Radiotherapy Institute) found an old radiotherapy device. Moved by curiosity with the machine, they took it to a junkyard, where they disassembled it and extracted a capsule containing a blue powder that glowed in the dark. From that night onwards, the radiation spread unseen throughout the city, contaminating more than a hundred people, leaving deep marks and traumas. From a collage of contaminated images, radioactive ghosts emerge, embedded in the history of that place.

7.30 - 8.30 PM
Visiting Artist Spotlight: 
Your Eyes Are Spectral Machines | Luis Macias *film and performance

Your eyes are spectral machines is a selection of films in which Luis Macias investigates the concept of what he calls spectral cinema. Exploring each of the different components of the film spectrum: the process and structure as a challenge, the photochemical transformation in the laboratory of created and/or appropriate images, editing/manipulation and re-photography through the optical/contact printer, and the projection as an event. These are parts of a filmic form organised in closed structures allowing intermediate spaces that force/activate improvisation.

The properties of the image and its forms and the modification/alteration of the mechanical structure of the projector are combined in new proposals for the exercise of a human eye that explores the images of nature and/or how it is revealed to us.

Films:

Spectral Landscape *expanded cinema performance with multiple 35mm slide projectors

An intermittent, subtle and violent performance with several modified slide projectors that explores the image of nature and how it is revealed to us.

The Kiss

A video-cinematographic project composed by 24 formats and where the structure builds and destroys the image itself through its inner process.

The eyes empty and the pupils burning of rage and desire *16mm dual projection

The film begins with the absence of an image that is its own destruction and builds a particular organic universe that is slowly emerging from a relation of excitement and love between the emulsion and the projector.

Luis Macias is an artist, filmmaker and image composer. His pieces deal with the formal and spectral properties of the moving image, through the exploration of the cinematographic device itself and the photochemical nature of the medium. Focused on experimental and procedural practices of analog image, his works in Super 8, 16mm, 35mm and video formats are composed for projection, performance or installation. He is the co-founder and an active member of Crater-Lab, an independent laboratory for analog cinema, and alternates his art work with specialised teaching in experimental cinema and the exploration of analog formats.

Sunday, 8th December

12 - 1 PM
something like a letter *short film programme

Films as records and archives, as notes to self, somewhere between what you see and what you feel, something like a letter.

Films:

Monotokens | Shruti Chamaria

Monotokens is a photo-performance series that impishly explores architecture of transformation, the provocation of historical practices, and the embodiment of joy. The work captures recreated scenes, personal encounters, as well as a space to be private in public through the restored photoautomats (chemically operated photo booths) located across Berlin. Using the mundane half-length curtain to create a boundary between exterior and interior and its scenographic functions in various cultural contexts.

Conceived as a framework to disrupt the act of: Waiting
– Staging – Existing – Collecting. The first gesture of ‘Waiting’, which reflects the experience of time, of the unexpected moment. The second path of ‘Staging’, referring to subtle interactions capable of shaping up events, memories and identities. The third movement of ‘Existing’, the beginning or end of a spectacle. And the last activity is ‘Collecting’, a record of a unique social experiment. In addition to these layers it is also interesting to look at the phenomenon and relevance of analogue technologies in a digitalised present by investigating the materiality and praxis associated with old-fashioned photo booths in Berlin. Each machine generates a black and white pictorial strip (distinct in quality). Thus, producing a gift or a token that evoke different tones and meanings.

164 San Antonio Abad | Yuula Benivolski

In March the streets of Mexico City are covered in purple Jacaranda flowers. We live in Obrera—it means “Worker” in Spanish—it is a working class neighbourhood.

Walking home one night, I follow the trail of purple flowers on the ground until I come face to face with a large bronze statue of a seamstress, locked behind the fence of an apartment building courtyard. At home, I look up the address. Manuel José Othón, corner of San Antonio Abad. Compressed, low resolution photos are captioned: “40 people celebrate mass in the vacant lot of the collapsed Topeka garment factory where 300 seamstresses died during the 1985 earthquake.” And then: “Bronze monument at site of collapsed building.”

Crushed Between Ocean and Sky | Ella Morton

An unexpected event on a tall ship headed for Antarctica incites passengers to reflect on life, death, adventure and irony against the vast ocean backdrop. Crushed Between Ocean and Sky speaks to the transcendence of exploring new places, the power of nature and life’s brutal tendency to catch us off guard.

Swells | Kaiwen Ren

Swells 景恒游记  joined three habitats by water – Xi-Guan, Guangzhou; You-Yang, Chongqing; Mono Lake, California – which were transformed or refurbished into tourist attractions. While the long distances in between persist, yearning musings of being unbounded and reunion still ripple through landscapes as pseudo travelogues.

Kauaʻi ʻōʻō | Samy Benammar

In 2000, the International Union for Conservation of Nature declared the Oʻō of Kauai officially extinct. All that remains of this endemic bird of the eponymous Hawaiian island is a recording of its song by ornithologist David Boynton.

a film with sound (take three) | Josh Weissbach

A father and daughter make a new movie after the daughter requests to make a film with sound after making a silent one the previous year.

your loving mother | Cristina Zar

A woman reflects on motherhood and how the arrival of a child would transform her life.

Immortals | Mark Durand

Immortals is an experimental documentary short film shot in 8mm that explores the introspection of an artist, Bettina Szabo. The film delves into her relationship with her sense of belonging, her body, her imagination, and nature. Sometimes one must lose oneself to find oneself better, and burn everything down to start anew on a solid foundation.

3.30 - 5 PM
Le Voyage Indien | Philippe Cote *feature

In this film, shots from two voyages unfold in parallel. First, 8mm images made at the beginning of the seventies by an unknown traveler: this 20-minute film was found at a flea market. A handwritten text described an itinerary, while the boxes indicated the years 1973 and 1975. These shots, left as they are, punctuate super8 images filmed by Cote during two trips to India, in 2008 and 2010, organised in the sequence with respect to the itinerary followed. The soundtrack comes from the ambient sounds recorded on location as well as from online sharing sites, while the “found footage” has been left silent. It is a film of snapshots revealed and developed by a gaze, taken in a geography dreamed up by the author: not a travel journal but a travel film: a voyage to the interior of a signifier, a desire of a poetics of image and sound.

This film is screened in collaboration with with Light Cone, Paris. 

Philippe Cote made around thirty films, between 1998 and 2016, that have been screened in festivals as well as various places in France and abroad. He was an active member of the coop l’ETNA, an artisanal laboratory founded in 1997. This filmmaker, both radical and sensitive, has mainly worked on the subjects of body, matter, light and color through various techniques, from film without camera to artisanal re-filming and film-painting. His cinema has been more focused on a poetic approach to documentary film from 2006 onward.

6 - 7.30 PM
It ends with a kiss :* short film programme

A tender roundup of some new homegrown films on film! – from the Harkat lab, the festival’s workshops, this year’s ek-minute competition films, and straight 8 2024 india entries!

Films:

Harkat Lab 2024

Basho House | Matt McWilliams

It Comes in Waves | Nefertiti Chakrabarti

Albert & the Flower | Krish Makhija

Eulogy for you & me | Keyuri Bhogale

चिपचिप | Simar Gill & Oishee Nandy

Ek-Minute Competition 2024

fish out of water | Arunima Chowdhury

Murg-e-Mumbai | Harsh Sangani & Aishwarya Prabhala

A Moment of Silence | Khushboo Jain

Aapko kya lagta hai | Gorkey Patwal

Gambit Queens | Sidra Fariah

straight 8 2024 x India

impressions on bombay | Alaia Singh

wildflowers | Mallika Kavadi & Riya Jain

sink or swim | Rahul Hota

a pure love spell | Ramola

sexwax | Sarabhi Ravichandran

my head is 2big for me | Naman Saraiya & Priya Panchwadkar

the handmaid of gold | Joseph Marvin Oliver & Suryansh Deo Srivastava

the ocean at night | Parikshit and Satyajit

written in the palms | Mikhail Shah

⋆ WORKSHOPS ⋆

5th - 6th December | 10 AM - 3 PM
Cyanotype Animation Workshop

Characterised by its signature blue, cyanotype is one of the oldest photographic printing processes. It is a camera-less technique that involves exposing a coated surface of iron salts to UV light, with various objects placed over.

During this 2-day workshop, participants will learn all the basics of working with cyanotype on paper, and eventually scan and transform their works into a moving image. By the end, each participant will have made a short clip that will be part of a larger film made collectively and screened at the festival. 

Register

7th - 8th December | 10 AM - 5 PM
Moving Stills - a workshop by Luis Macias

Devised and facilitated by visiting artist and filmmaker Luis Macias, this workshop aims to explore different tools and possibilities around using multiple photographic slide projectors. It regards the projector as a tool and the slide as a non-static image.

Participants will learn how to shoot, develop and intervene black and white 35mm reversal film slides, and also explore creative ways of live projection with multiple carousel slide projectors, exploring different modifications, both internal and external.

Details and registration