Screening

Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin

Where we are (Audi) | Childhood (Audi) | Exile (Audi) | Surreal (Audi)

Sun, Jun 18, 2017

1–7 pm

Free admission

Further information on www.art-action.org

Screening Sessions in the Auditorium (Audi) and Vortragssaal (Vtr)

Vivian Ostrovsky addresses this film tribute to Chantal Akerman, summarizing forty years of friendship. Kwang-Ju Son revisits the feature length film “Characters” that she produced in 2011, through a non-narrative performance, reflecting on the very conditions of existence and identity of the characters in a world of fiction. On the island and global city of Taiwan, Liang-Hsuan Chen films the day of a woman fluctuating between her beliefs and desires. Over the passage of time, different generations merge, paving the way for a new approach to the spaces and temporality of the city. Diogo Costa Amarante follows a child who becomes aware of mortality, like a moving still life.

In a working class suburb of Dublin, Pawel Ziemilski films a young boy and the wild horse that he has trained. Askhat Kuchinchirekov follows the journey of a man and his son who dreams of seeing the great lake. Alexandra Gulea and Nicu Ilfoveanu reinterpret the story of Pinocchio, initially happy to be a man, then lamenting his condition after seeing stuffed animals staring at him. Konstantina Kotzamani bases a film on his dreams: a leopard will be kept with the goats, wolves will live with lambs and the young boy will lead them.

Naeem Mohaiemen explores the tragic utopia of the Revolutionary Left Party in the 70s, snapped by a Magnum photographer in 1982, where Bengali fighters seem to have joined the struggle of the PLO in Lebanon. Mohammad Shawky Hassan recreates an exile map, from images taken in the United States and absurd and indecipherable snippets of patriotic Egyptian conversation. Akosua Adoma Owusu directs an epistolary film. A young man in the United States writes to his mother in Ghana, he strives to reconcile his love for her with his desire for men. Keina Espiñeira films men on the coast waiting to travel to Europe. This beach is in a state of limbo, without spatial or temporal reference. Myths from the colonial past come up against the present, where memory lives on. Liina Siib experiments with one of the first spherical astrolabes representing the solar system and the movement of celestial bodies with the sun in the middle. The stars seem to be in motion, as equally as the two people seem to be moved by the instrument. Ben Rivers examines the landscape of the volcanic archipelago of Vanuatu before it is destroyed by cyclone Pam. In a faltering voice, a woman reads a poem by Henri Michaux about a distant country. These images become the ghostly vestige of an irreparably damaged ecosystem.

Johannes Krell and Florian Fischer film a limestone quarry, from extraction to dispersion in the forest, to combat acid rain. This cycle resembles a Mobius strip, surrounding nature with white dust and demonstrates humankind’s ambivalent relationship with nature. Patrick Topitschnig presents a cinematic tableau underground in a former salt mine, once an air-raid shelter and now an amusement park. By filming objects, Matti Harju hones in on the end of the world. Janis Rafa produces a slow tracking shot following a traffic accident, simultaneously carving and choreographing an anticipated and derisory death. Calum Walter films the streets of Chicago at night. The nightlife within the time and space is permeated with a strange premonition. With Manuel Palma we follow someone walking in the forest. The nature and the atmosphere silently reflect a hidden story. Tommaso Donati films a man and a woman on the fringes of society. In search of long gone freedom, they try to stay awake.