Catalogue 2024
Below, browse the 2024 Rencontres Internationales catalogue, or search the archives of the works presented since 2004. New video clips are routinely posted and the images and text are regularly updated.
Viera Cákanyová
Notes from Eremocene
Doc. expérimental | 0 | couleur | 78:0 | Slovaquie | 2023
Taking place in a future that does not yet exist, NOTES FROM EREMOCENE questions the ideal techno-optimistic model that lies ahead of us. From a curious, playful and critical standpoint, filmmaker Viera ?ákanyová explores the potential of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence in dealing with complex global problems we humans create – climate change and the crisis of representative democracy. Combining diaristic film footage with 3D scanner images, ?ákanyová poetically and forcefully stresses the inherent tension between the analogue and digital future of mankind.
Viera ?ákanyová (b. 1980) studied scriptwriting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and documentary filmmaking at FAMU in Prague. Her early feature documentaries won a number of awards, such as Best First/Second film at Visions du Réel and Best Documentary at German Documentary FF in Kassel. Her visual storytelling can be found in the films GOTTLAND (2014) or SLOVAKIA 2.0 (2014). FREM (2019) and WHITE ON WHITE (2020) are currently her most successful films. Her feature debut FREM had its world premiere at the Ji.hlava IDFF 2019 followed by its international premiere at the Berlinale 2020, and won the Award for Best Debut at the ELBE DOCK festival. The film was screened at more than two dozen important international film festivals around the world. Her subsequent film WHITE ON WHITE won the main prize at the Ji.hlava IDFF in 2020. It also won the GreenDox Award at Dokufest in Kosovo, the Czech Competition at One World in Prague and was selected for the main competitions at the prestigious Sheffield DocFest and ZagrebDox.
Julie Chaffort
Pour la peau
Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 68:0 | France | 2024
“Pour la peau” is a very sensual film. The whole film is a love poem. A love poem to life. It's an ode to the animal, but also to the craftsman who works in the shadows to make his object. Julie Chaffort highlights man's relationship with animals, with their skins, and the delicacy they share with each other. It's a film that plays with the codes of cinema. It's not a documentary, but some of the images are. Sometimes the editing is clip-like, but it's not either. The soundtrack was composed by the Cabadzi duo. The film is edited like a slam, changing register and rhythm according to the characters, locations, songs, music and animals.
Julie Chaffort, born in 1982, lives and works in Bordeaux, France. Working in the fields of cinema and contemporary art, Julie Chaffort is particularly interested in the vastness and emptiness of natural territories, their deserted and abandoned aspect; her films and videos are inhabited by a certain slowness, inviting us to listen and contemplate, but also playing on the registers of the absurd, the fall, the surprise and the shift. For Julie Chaffort, cinema is a dominant, natural medium, which she chose early on to develop, at the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts where she studied, then with Roy Andersson whom she assisted, and with Werner Herzog whose seminar she followed at his Rogue Film School in New York. In 2013, she exhibited at the Centre International d'Art et du Paysage de Vassivière Hot-Dog, a medium-length film she had made there the same year during a residency. The following year, she presented her first solo exhibition Jour Blanc at Montreal's Centre Clark, featuring video and sound installations created in situ. In residence at Pollen in Monflanquin 2015, she made the medium-length film La barque silencieuse; this film, “as facetious as it is moving, as puzzling as it is respectful of everything that offers itself to be seen and heard” for Jean-Pierre Rehm, was selected in 2016 in French competition and first film at FID Marseille. It was also screened at the Jeune création 66ème édition exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin and won two independent awards, with two exhibitions in 2016, one at Progress Gallery, Entre chiens et loups, and the other at Galerie du Pavillon in Pantin, Les cowboys. Julie Chaffort has also won numerous other prizes, associated with exhibitions: the 2015 “Talents Contemporains” prize from the François Schneider Foundation for the work Montagnes Noires with an exhibition in 2017, the 2016 “Mezzanine Sud” prize from the Frac Midi-Pyrénées associated with the CIC Sud-Ouest with an exhibition in 2016-2017 at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, and the 2016 Bullukian prize for which Julie Chaffort created Somnambules for an exhibition at the Bullukian Foundation in Lyon. In 2018, Hunt was shown at La Poudrière in Bayonne, and in the same year, she won the Prix Mécènes du Sud Montpellier/Sète. Most recently, she took part in the second edition of the biennial Movimenta festival in Bayonne, and in the residency for the Paysages en Mouvement exhibition (Médoc).
Chanasorn Chaikitiporn
Here We Are
Doc. expérimental | digital | couleur | 19:0 | Thaïlande | 2023
A housekeeper receives a film made by her daughter. Combining found footage of Thailand during the Cold War with present-day images of Bangkok, the film reminds her of anecdotes she heard from the woman she works for and it triggers a re-telling of her own story of coming to the capital. HERE WE ARE seeks to portray the present by reflecting on the past, how the legacy of colonization has survived and been normalized nowadays. - ("19th Forum Expanded: Distant Connections", 74th Berlinale).
Chanasorn Chaikitiporn is a filmmaker and moving image artist whose interest lies in exploration and interrogation of socio-political histories of Thailand. His works examine questions on culture, political thought, identity and personal historical memory through the lens of semi-coloniality. In combining fiction film and documentary film genre, he investigates on archival, found footages and declassified documents. Chanasorn is a member of ELSE, a moving image screening series based in Bangkok, Thailand.
Kent Chan
Future Tropics
Fiction | digital | couleur | 33:22 | Singapour | 2024
In a future global tropics of eternal summer, a woman named Vicki realises she’s been receiving messages from her past life. Perspectives and narratives change as the film moves between different times and spaces, piecing together the herstory of the New and Old Tropics.
Kent Chan (1984, Singapore) is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in Netherlands and Singapore. His practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema that form a triumvirate of practices porous in form, content and context. He holds particular interest in the tropical imaginary, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence. His works have taken the form of moving-image, text, performances, and exhibitions. He is an upcoming resident at Art Explora and a former resident of Gasworks, Jan van Eyck Academie, Pivô Research, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and Medialab Matadero. He has held solo and two-person presentations at Gasworks, Kunstinstituut Melly, Bonnefanten Museum, National University Singapore Museum, and de Appel. His works and films have been exhibited in institutions and festivals including Tate Modern, Liverpool Biennial, Videobrasil, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Times Museum, EYE Film Museum, Onassis Stegi, and Bienalsur. He is the 2023 winner of the Paulo Cunha e Silva Award and Impart Art Prize, and 2021 winner of Foundwork Artist Prize. His works are collected by the Kadist Foundation, the Rijkscollectie, Netherlands, Bonnefanten Museum, and Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig.
Adrien Charmot
La maison d'en face
Doc. expérimental | 16mm | noir et blanc | 40:0 | France | 2024
I return to a small hamlet in the countryside, where a community of nuns welcomes orphaned or abused children. Among them is my childhood friend Jean-Pierre. In the midst of daily life, working the land, eating together and caring for each other, I put into practice my desire to make films.
Adrien Charmot studied cinema at the University of Paris 8 and then at Créadoc. His graduation film L'Innocence was selected and won awards at a number of festivals (Festival Jean Rouch, Traces de vie, Rencontres Internationales Henri Langlois, etc.). He then directed Les Oiseaux de passage, produced by L'Atelier documentaire. He also set up L'Oeil lucide, an association that supports documentary filmmaking in south-west France. He was filmmaker-in-residence for four years at FEMA, Festival La Rochelle Cinéma, and supervises residencies at Ty Films in Brittany.
Hsin-yu Chen
BIPM
Film expérimental | super8 | couleur et n&b | 2:34 | Taiwan, France | 2023
On one roll of Super 8 film, 15m (50ft) = 2.5 minutes, at 24 frames per second. I walked 15 meters over 2.5 minutes of an entire roll of Super 8 film outside the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM), where the international system of units, including standardized time and length, was developed and defined. The forced synchronicity premised on the structural materiality of film interrogates the notion of measurement, standardization, adaptation, and embodied experience.
Hsin-Yu Chen is a filmmaker and artist currently based in Taipei, Taiwan. He works with experimental film, documentary, and moving image to explore the liminal space between seeing and being seen where subjectivity is implicated and constructed. Drawing on border landscapes, embodied knowledge, and the notion of measurement and categorization, he examines the intersection of the viewing body and the political subject. His work has been shown at MoCA Taipei; Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, Hong-gah Museum; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris; Proyector – Festival de Videoarte; Image Forum; Kassel Dokfest; 25 FPS; Arkipel - Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival; and in the Herzog de Silva Collection. He has participated in FIDCampus, Oberhausen Seminar, and residencies including RAIR Philadelphia and Cité Internationale des Arts.
Salah Chikh
Circumambulation
Vidéo | mp4 | couleur | 12:4 | France, Algérie | 2024
“Tawaf (a?-?awâf, ?????), la circumambulation, désigne les sept tours que les musulman.e.s effectuent autour de la Kaaba, lors du pèlerinage (hajj) à La Mecque“ wikipedia 2024 Dans cet œuvre vidéo j'explore les parallèles entre certaines pratiques spirituelles musulmanes (Hajj) et celto-bretonnes (les menhirs) en imageant des formes de dialogues non verbaux qui peut y avoir entre certaines communautés dans leurs "terre d'origines" dans les pays du Sud avec leurs diasporas en Occident et une forme de rattachement à certains éléments sensoriels en contexte migratoire qui peuvent invoquer une sensation de familiarité et de "déjà vu". Asetta (Le métier à tisser en Tamazight) y est comme une allégorie à l'accumulation des couches d'expériences dans les corps diasporiques et migrants. Cette vidéo a été tournée en collaboration avec ma mère, en partie au M'Zab (Sahara, Algérie) et sur l'île d'Ouessant (Bretagne, France).
Salah Chikh est un artiste né et grandie à Ghardaïa (Algérie) et actuellement basée à Marseille. En ce moment entrain de préparer son DNSEP (Diplôme national supérieur d'expression plastique) en Écriture expérimentale à l'Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes, et auparavant diplômée en master en Biodiversité et Evolution de la faculté des sciences à Montpellier et, avant, de l'université d'Oran (Algérie). Son parcours académique et personnel imprègne sa pratique artistique en explorant les questions liées aux déplacements et la place des corps dans les différents espaces géopolitiques et géographiques, il s'attarde particulièrement sur les espaces physiques "périphériques" de l'occident. Ses créations empreintes différents médiums qui vont de la vidéo et l'écriture en passant par la performance.
Chris Chan Fui Chong
Heaven Hell (1ch)
Film expérimental | mov | couleur et n&b | 11:18 | Malaisie, Japon | 2024
A collaboration with and a commission by NPO Koganecho Area Management Center as part of Chong’s residency at the Koganecho Bazaar, which is located in the former red-light district of Koganecho, Yokohama, Japan. Koganecho was the conceptual reference for ‘hell’ in Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low. However, because of the district’s notoriety, shooting on location became far too dangerous for the cast and crew. HEAVEN HELL looks to restage the past and present representations of the red-light district by shooting the slum scene on the same street that Kurosawa had initially intended but was unable to do so. Chong referred to the film scenes that Kurosawa shot in the studio in order to re-create the eerie and hyper-theatrical mood of the infamous street in both the traditional and contemporary periods; recruiting local youth in the now gentrified neighbourhood of Koganecho. HEAVEN HELL takes the point of view of the kidnapper/villain, using his entire dialogue in the film compressed into a single moment through the slums, past and present, expressing the toll it has taken on him and the class he was relegated to.
CHRIS CHONG CHAN FUI is a filmmaker and artist who works between Southeast Asia and Canada. From digital and analog moving images to fabricated and organic objects, Chong works to reveal unfamiliar narratives. His work layers the social and natural sciences with transnational circuits of globalization and manufactured cultures and landscapes. With a rigorous research methodology and a formalist aesthetic, he uses structure and constraints as a creative path toward expressive innovation. Chong has exhibited at such venues as the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Palais de Tokyo, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, and the Gwangju Biennale, while premiering films at the Cannes Film Festival's Directors’ Fortnight, BFI London, and TIFF’s Wavelengths, where he won back-to-back awards for Best Canadian Short Film. He is a Smithsonian Institute fellow (National Museum of Natural History), a Ford Foundation fellow, and a Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Arts Fellow. Chong holds an MFA (film) from York University and is an Assistant Professor (film) at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts on the unceded territories of the S?wx?wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), s?l?ilw??ta?? (Tsleil-Waututh) and x?m??k??y??m (Musqueam) Nations.
Oleg Chorny
Kyiv in the Days of War
Documentaire | 4k | couleur | 3:9 | Ukraine | 2022
On the 24th of February 2022 Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the beginning of April the first massive attack of Russian troops was repulsed, but Kyiv is still suffering by air strikes. There are traces of war on the streets of the city. Defensive structures are ready, because the enemy could attempt to occupy the capital of Ukraine again. Despite this the residents of Kyiv are trying to maintain habits of peaceful life, but the war continues.
Born in 1963. Graduated from the film director’s department of the State Institute of Theatre and cinema in 1985. Worked at the Olexander Dovzhenko State Film Studio in Kyiv, various governmental and non-governmental film and video studios. Shot a number of feature shorts, documentaries, ecological and promo films and musical video clips. He is member of the Ukrainian Filmmakers Union. His short feature movies and documentaries participated at the programs at the Ukrainian and international festivals. In 1996 Oleg Chorny and Gennady Khmaruk (w.b. 1972) has founded the non-profit creative unit “SAMPLED PICTURES”. A number of videos created by “SAMPLED PICTURES” were presented at the various film and video festivals, exhibitions and club screenings.
Saddie Choua
The Chouas #Episode 5 Am I the Only One Who Is Like Me?
Vidéo | mov | couleur et n&b | 48:0 | Belgique | 2018
The Chouas #Episode5 Am I the only one who is like me? (’45) The Chouas started from an old photograph of Saddie Choua’s father and his four brothers. Three of them emigrated to Belgium. One turned back. Two stayed in Morocco. Who made the best choice? The Chouas are an ongoing lifework in episodes, an artwork in which the alienation of the immigrant families in Europe, the self-portraits in the Diaspora, the specters of the homeland are explored in multiple narrative threads and media. It will e.g. refer to soap series and other popular formats and will invite the viewer to discover the structures of stereotypical image-formation, dominant codes and partial histories. Am I The Only One Who Is Like Me? is the fifth episode of The Chouas, through which Saddie Choua depicts her own family, expertly mixing autobiography with fiction and personal and political considerations. With this fifth episode, made up of archive images, film extracts and television sequences, the artist prolongs her interrogation of self, hierarchical systems, the desire to dominate, and power games. Saddie Choua connects her Belgian grandfather with The Bluest Eye, a novel by Toni Morrison. The video reflects her political criticism of inequality. That inequality is rooted in our culture and our economics, whether it is about the situation in a Citroën factory or in the arts. We are governed by people who do not love us. Audre Lorde has said that anger is a force and from it can be drawn knowledge. It is not this anger that disrupts collaboration between ethnicities, between genders, between social classes but rather the refusal to listen to it. Saddie Choua translates this anger into a visual format.
Am I the only one who is like me? This is a question characteristic of Saddie Choua’s life and work. It problematizes the position of the solitary I that is also never disconnected from the other. The power order that conditions the solitary “I”, is another central subject. Where does this otherness sit in the hierarchy of power? Where is her oppression and exploitation concealed or exoticed? Saddie Choua asks us to think about how we consume images and dialogues about the other and how they affect our self-image and historical consciousness. How can we intervene in the images that write our history and conceal social struggle? She uses meta-documentary tactics, collage, own (material, re-appropriation of popular intercultural formats and autiobiographical elements to put racism, discrimination against women and class and her cats in the spotlight. It is her way of undermining the (visual) language of our media and sharpening the critical and political gaze of her audience. Saddie Choua's work questions the relationship between maker and image. “How to speak and depict differently from a subalternal position, or is it just the concept of ‘the other’ that confines me in dominant images and narratives?” Saddie Choua lives and works in Brussels, Ostend and Lychnaftia. She is a doctoral researcher at RITCS Brussels and a lecturer at Sint Lucas Antwerp and RITCS. She is part of the artist collective ROBIN. She is one of the laureates of the Belgian Art Prize 2020 that was cancelled by the organization because the artists asked to go in dialogue concerning the ethics of the prize.
Jasmina Cibic
Beacons
Doc. expérimental | 4k | couleur | 23:0 | Slovénie, Royaume-Uni | 2023
Beacons is a cinematographic journey portraying eight women who distil the archive of cultural workers from countries of the Non-Aligned Movement into a musical score. They translate and decipher words into sounds and choreography and meet within a proposition for an address recasting the unrealised promises of the past into a sonic address a rehearsal for our present. Filmed on isolated architectures steeped in nature that once served the awakening of transnational solidarity, the project aims to re-inscribe the missing female voice into the history of world-building.
Cibic represented Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennial with her project “For Our Economy and Culture”. She was the winner of the Film London Jarman Award (2021), the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image Award (2020) and has screened her films at the Whitechapel Gallery, London Film Festival, HKW Berlin, the Louvre, Dokfest Kassel and the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival among others. Cibic’s recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, The High Line New York, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, macLyon, Museum Sztuki Lódz, CCA Glasgow, Phi Foundation Montreal and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art Gateshead. Cibic’s work recently been presented at group exhibitions including IMMA Dublin, Biennale Jogja, Innsbruck Biennial, MAXXI Rome, Mac Belfast, MOMA New York, the Chicago Architectural Biennial and the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade.
Louis Braddock Clarke
Under Boom
Installation vidéo | 4k | couleur | 18:0 | Royaume-Uni, Pays-Bas | 2024
UNDER BOOM (2024) is a hallucinatory cinematic experience shaped through a combination of human-shaped sonic ecologies and deep time. Framed as a listening station and a geological hotspot to imagine society’s shifting sonic world, the work takes the audience through an anthropogenic cinema experience with infrasound, an inaudible bandwidth of 0–20 Hz filled with shockwaves caused by human activities. These include mining blasts, burning space debris, air strikes, atomic bangs, sonic booms, seismic guns, and the calving of ice sheets. The work stems from the discovery of a listening island in the mid-Atlantic, which due to its geo-positioning and low noise ratio is hyper-sensitive to long-wave sounds. From this island, the sonic ruptures of the Earth’s ever-changing global acoustics can be heard. UNDER BOOM is captured using stroboscopic techniques, where anthropogenic beats orchestrate the presence of visuals. Infrasonic events become markers of visibility, entangling frequency with video frame-rates in an act to dissolve ocularcentrism. The frictions of vibrating matter, shaking sonics, and flickering images highlight the physical renderings of human sounds on the Earth. Linking the intimacy and intensity of flicker cinema with an embodiment of climate allows for alternative modes of listening and climatic imaginary experiences. What if the Earth was dancing faster and faster every year?
Louis Braddock Clarke is an artist and researcher interpreting notions from domains of art, geography, physics, and esoteric philosophy. Listening and amplification as creative methods have become key approaches to their work relating to disrupted ecologies. Through fieldwork, filmmaking, sonic tuning, and amateur geology their projects seek to speculate on the future surfaces of the Earth. Braddock Clarke’s relationship with the geographical arts is embedded in their formative years in Cornwall, surrounded by radon moorlands, granite quoits, shifting isolines, pixies, tin mines, and trans-Atlantic cable systems. These entangled Earth energies have become paramount to their ongoing research methods relating to technologies and terrains.
Eva Claus
Lomme's Garden
Documentaire | 16mm | couleur | 10:0 | Belgique | 2024
Lomme´s garden is a film shot 16mm.
Born in Brussels in 1992, Eva Claus is an audio-visual artist working primarily with 16mm film. Her practice is driven by observations of un/expected encounters with landscapes and people, natural habitats, space, psyche, circularity and means of film itself. Claus uses an intuitive method of filmmaking and her films exhibit a contemplative form of watching. Claus was educated at the Friedl Kubelka School for independent film in Vienna, Austria and she obtained her MFA in photography at the Royal Academy of Arts in Ghent. Her films have been shown at festivals such as Light Field San Francisco, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Vienna Shorts, Indie Lisboa, Short Waves, Go Short, Rencontre International Paris / Berlin, Istanbul International Film Festival, amongst others. She won the Public film prize at the 22nd Dresdner Schmalfilmtage, Germany. Was nominated for the Lichter Art Award and the Prix Médiatine. Parallel to her artistic practice she works as a film restoration assistant at The Temenos. Eva currently lives and works in Brussels.
Daniel Cockburn
It Was So Beautiful
Vidéo | hdv | noir et blanc | 25:0 | Canada, Royaume-Uni | 2023
Can you remember the first time you ever saw the end of the world? An animal chatroom from some other plane of existence invokes a collage of image-quotations, looking at the habits and assumptions that cinema and its viewers have when it comes to imagining pictures of natural beauty and natural destruction.
Daniel Cockburn is a Canadian moving-image artist. Comprising short videos, live performances, and feature film, his work deals with language, rhythm, and thought experiments. It has been compared variously to the work of Charlie Kaufman, Jorge Luis Borges, Spalding Gray, and Philip K. Dick. He currently lives in Glasgow.
Esperanza Collado
Trágame nube (el cuerpo establece el ritmo)
Film expérimental | 16mm | couleur et n&b | 13:0 | Espagne | 2023
Trágame nube is conceived as an art installation in which two twin films are projected on the two sides of a screen, inviting the viewer into a circular experience of the space of projection. The single point of view has been deconstructed, implicating the body into a complex, dialectical cinematic space. The film is inspired in José Val del Omar’s ideas on cinema and perception. Val del Omar is probably the most important Spanish experimental filmmakers of the 20th century. Shot with Bruno Delgado Ramo, the two films have an exact complementary structure divided into three parts. The first one is a play tag with Delgado Ramo at the Alhambra palace in Granada, where Val del Omar shot some of his first emblematic films. The second and central part is devoted to activating in playful ways Val del Omar’s original documents, held at the library of Reina Sofia Museum. The film apparatus is presented on the third part as sculpture and performance in a loose association with Val del Omar's studio PLAT (Picture-Luminous-Audio-Tactile).
Esperanza Collado creates performances and installations that weave together film ideas and sculptural elements, activity she combines with creative writing and lecturing. Her work often explores intersections between art and theory. She has published “Things Said Once” (CA2M, 2024), “Paracinema. La desmaterialización del cine en las prácticas artísticas” (Trama editorial, 2012) and “Cerca de aquí” (Centro Guerrero, 2019). She has carried out postdoctoral scholarships at Anthology Film Archives (2009-2010) and Taiwan Fellowship (2020) with research projects around expanded cinema. She co-founded the record label LEVE (León) and the Experimental Film Club (Dublin). She has presented work in art centers, museums and film contexts around the world such as Museum of the Moving Image, Microscope Gallery, CCCB, Matadero Madrid, Image Forum, Taiwan Film Institute, Luis Adelantado, The Film-Makers Coop, Hangar, MNCARS, Tate Modern, Anthology Film Archives, MUSAC, Art Cinema OFFoff, Havana Biennial, Scratch Expanded, Images Festival, EMAF, Close Up Cinema, etc. She lectures at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca (UCLM) and MasterLAV (Madrid).
Max Colson
A Time of Crisis
Doc. expérimental | 0 | couleur | 18:17 | Royaume-Uni | 2024
Using ‘world building’ game design software, an island landscape is constructed from images, videos, 3D assets, and social media comments found online about Second World War Britain. A series of theatrical scenes are created from this material that dramatise this period's significance for Britain today, including the mythic importance of the so-called ‘Blitz Spirit’ - an idea recalled during times of recent crisis. As the island is built, viewers hear the voices of present day Britons, many of whom did not participate in the war, who have posted to social media about their reflections on that period of history. The film uses experimental documentary methods to consider what today’s fantasies of Britain’s wartime past say about the UK in the present moment. The film questions how wartime myths relate to, and sometimes ignore, new contemporary realities: pandemics, a globalised economy, the impact of digital technology on labour and social relations, and rising levels of poverty and inequality. The film draws on archive material from the Imperial War Museum, the National Archives, British newspaper websites, and 3D asset libraries.
Max Colson documents aspects of architecture and landscape that illustrate Britain or notions of Britishness. He does this using photography, 3D imaging technologies, and film. His films have been selected to screen in a variety of film festivals such as DOK Leipzig (DE, 2019 and 2018), Sheffield Doc Fest (UK, 2018), Aesthetica Short Film Festival (UK, 2017), Hamburg International Short Film Festival (DE, 2018) and Kassel Dokfest (DE, 2017). In 2023 he was recognized as an artist film maker ‘Lodestar’ by Film London and was supported by their Fellowship programme for emerging artist film-makers. His previous film Construction Lines was the winner of the Short Fiction category at the Architecture Film Festival London and was also a winner of the UK’s Tenderflix Artist Video Prize (both 2017). His work has also been screened within contemporary art and photography galleries such as The Photographer’s Gallery (UK), Fotomuseum Winterthur (CH), C/O Berlin (DE), and Werkletiz Centre for Media Art (DE). He is a graduate of the London College of Communication’s MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography.
Juliette Corne
La Starosta
Vidéo | 4k | couleur | 15:0 | France | 2024
Dans l'Est de l'Ukraine, la route M03 relie Kharkiv au Donbass, marquant l'ancienne ligne de front de 2022. Le long de cette route, une station-service carbonisée accueille la réunion des habitants du village de Kamynka, détruit à plus de 90 %. Les bancs sont les caisses de missiles de l’armée russe, laissées après leur retrait lors de la contre-offensive de septembre. Malgré une tentative de rester rationnels et méthodiques, les tensions entre les habitants deviennent palpables, transformant la recherche de réponses en un véritable combat. Cette vidéo explore les conséquences de la guerre sur la population de l’Est, à travers la destruction matérielle, psychologique et relationnelle.
Juliette Corne est titulaire d’un diplôme national supérieur d’arts plastiques des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Son travail navigue entre l’art contemporain et le cinéma, explorant les évènements socio-politiques contemporains et leurs conséquences sur les représentations et les intimités. Attachée à révéler les mécanismes qui engendrent une normalisation de la violence, elle capte, à travers ses films, ses installations et ses photographies, des moments de vie qui continue malgré l’horreur et la guerre. Comment envisager l’espoir, l’amour ou l’avenir dans des situations où l’exil, la solitude et la peur cristallisent toutes les énergies vitales ? En questionnant les biais des point de vue occidental hégémonique, en transmettant une parole et des silences recueillis avec pudeur et sensibilité, elle sonde ces endroits où des formes de liberté se réinventent à travers l’imaginaire et où la rencontre avec l’autre devient possible.
Emily Curtis
All that Love Allows
Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur et n&b | 14:0 | France | 2023
L’histoire fabuleuse mais vraie de Mary Read et Ann Bonny, pirates du XVIIIe siècle. Le jour où Ann a aperçu Marie pour la première fois, ses jambes n’ont pu que trembler.
Après des études de philosophie et d’histoire de l’art, Emily Curtis se tourne vers le cinéma et fait un Master avant d’intégrer la fémis dans le département Montage. Elle monte des films documentaires et de fiction, des histoires de corps, trouvant plaisir à expérimenter au sein de différentes formes d’écriture.
Takuya Dairiki, Takashi Miura
Dairiki and Miura 3
Doc. expérimental | digital | noir et blanc | 60:51 | Japon | 2023
Dairiki and Miura talk and play in their neighborhood.
Co-directors, Takuya Dairiki and Takashi Miura, were born in 1980 in Osaka, Japan. They have been friends since childhood and started making films together for fun, doing everything by themselves – directing, script writing, photography, soundmaking, acting, editing, and art work. "Dairiki and Miura 3" is the fourteenth film they have co-directed.
Sharon Daniel
Reasonable Doubt(s)
Doc. expérimental | 4k | couleur et n&b | 71:0 | USA | 2024
Reasonable Doubt(s) is a multi-part, multi-media examination of the role of police and prosecutorial misconduct in the wrongful convictions of Black people focused on the relation between race, place, identity, and systemic injustice in the US criminal legal system. Reasonable Doubt(s): Chapter One “Central Valley,” is an immersive, three-channel video installation documenting the history of official misconduct that led to the wrongful conviction of Timothy James Young, an innocent, Black, death row prisoner currently incarcerated in California’s Pelican Bay State Prison. Young’s death penalty conviction in predominantly white Tulare County, California, depended on police misconduct (including suborning the false testimony of a jailhouse informant, witness intimidation, and evidence tampering), prosecutorial misconduct (withholding exculpatory evidence and racially biased jury selection), judicial abuse of discretion, and false or misleading interpretation of forensic evidence. The 40,000-page case file and over 12,000-page transcript of Young’s trial, provide a startling account of a ten-year-long investigation and prosecution riddled with racist abuses. Reasonable Doubt(s): Chapter One “Central Valley,” delves deeply into this massive set of documents to investigate the investigation and trial, interlacing archival media based on transcripts, case files, and forensic evidence, newly recorded and performed ‘readings’ of transcripts and reports and original interviews with legal experts and case participants. Set in the Central Valley of California, Reasonable Doubt(s): Chapter One also draws a connection between the history of Black migration from the Jim Crow South to the area in the 1930s and 40s, the rise of mass incarceration and the prison building boom in California’s agricultural communities in the 1980s and 90’s, and their disproportionate rates of arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of people from their relatively small and marginalized Black communities. The video installation introduces a media-rich digital archive in which Young’s case history provides a narrative through-line linking stories of official misconduct and racial bias in the cases of five other wrongfully incarcerated Black men from southwestern Ohio and Chester, PA. These Black men, like thousands of others, have been wrongfully imprisoned because of who they are and where they were from - because they lived within a history of racism and economic struggle in which place, race, poverty, and gender predetermine their encounters with police and courts. The correspondences drawn between their case narratives in Reasonable Doubt(s) demonstrate how racism, corruption, official impunity, and indifference to innocence undermine the credibility of the criminal legal system in the United States.
Sharon Daniel is a media artist and scholar who creates interactive and participatory documentary artworks, builds digital archives and writes essays addressing issues of social, racial and environmental injustice, with a particular focus on mass incarceration and the criminal legal system. Her documentary-based art works have been exhibited in museums and festivals internationally such as CPH:DOX, Copenhagen (April-May 2021), in Electronic Literature Organization’s COVID E-Lit exhibition, Bergen, Norway (April 2021), in Barring Freedom, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (Oct – May 2021), in the Museum of Capitalism, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons School of Design, NYC, NY (Oct – Dec 2019) in a solo exhibition Secret Injustices, at the Schmidt Center (US, FL, 2017), as an official selection in the Alternate Realities exhibition at Sheffield Doc|Fest (UK, 2016), and in a solo exhibition titled Convictions at STUK Kunstencentrum, (Belgium, 2013). Daniel’s works have also been shown in museums and festivals such as WRO media art biennial 2011 (Poland), Artefact 2010 (Belgium), Transmediale 08 (Germany), the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival DEAF03 (Netherlands), Ars Electronica (Austria), the Lincoln Center Festival (NY/USA), the Corcoran Biennial (Washington DC) and the University of Paris I (France). Her essays have been published in books, including Female Authorship and the Documentary Image (Oxford University Press, in press), Context Providers (Intellect Press 2011), Database Aesthetics (Minnesota University Press 2007) and the Sarai Reader05, as well as in professional journals such as ASAP, Cinema Journal, Leonardo, Studies in Documentary Film and Springerin. Her writings and projects have also been published in online journals such as Stretch, Thresholds and Vectors. Daniel was honored by the Webby Awards in 2008 and the Rockefeller/Tribeca Film Festival New Media Fellowship in 2009. In 2015-16 She was named in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts “YBCA 100” – a list of “the creative minds, makers, and pioneers that are asking the questions and making the provocations that will shape the future of American culture”. She was a 2017 Fulbright Scholar at Ulster University in Art, Design and the Built Environment. Daniel was recently awarded a 2023-24 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.
Adheep Das
Half-Portrait of Dadu
Film expérimental | hdv | couleur | 5:15 | Inde | 2023
Like many people in their later years, my grandfather had a set of oft-repeated stories. Towards the last few months of his life, a brand new person,'Chetan' started populating his life. This poem-film is an attempt to understand the feeling.
Adheep Das likes mixing various mediums and finding out what comes of them. Fascinated by science and arts alike, his interests take him to places that merge the two. As part of a 3 person collective, he got the ThinkArts Grant for Children in 2022. 'Moonless', a film he directed and animated, has competed at DokLeipzig and Dharamshala Intl. Film Festival, amongst others. His documentary 'Khaalti Kaay Varti Kaay' competed at IDSSFK, Kerala. Some of his work has also been exhibited as part of the Kochi-Muziris Students' Biennale and the Wrong Biennale. He has worked on a live shadow puppetry production called ‘Zig Zags to Earth’, and has performed at venues such as Max Muller Bhawan, Delhi, and Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts, Delhi. He has also been part of the Serendipity Arts Foundation Residency 2024.