Berlin 2024 Programme

Die Hörposaune (The Hearing Trombone) film / installation by Isabell Spengler, Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl, Germany 2022 filmed in a visual installation by Nadia Lauro short synopsis Through a floating camera motion, the film invites us to enter a world with its own logic, passing through sensitive membranes, liquefied borders and openings between inner and outer spaces. Here we attend a reading circle or vocal performance in memory of the counter tenor and queer icon Klaus Nomi, one of the first public figures to die within the AIDS pandemic. Daydream-like, as if to save them from oblivion, the film delves into the guts of fantastical, queer body imaginations - with spit, panting, oral sounds, singing, and vulva-like paper flower arrangements, whereby anatomical representations are reinterpreted.

Isabell Spengler (director) is a film/video artist from Berlin. In her films, installations and performances she analyzes and mediates diverging constructions of realities, imaginary worlds and their representation. Since 2005 she has created a series of conceptual Expanded Cinema works in dialogues with other artists. /www.isabellspengler.net Antonia Baehr (director) is a choreographer living in Berlin. Her pieces explore, among other things, the fiction of the everyday and the theater. She has worked with scores for many years - as a way to connect and collaborate. Baehr is producer of horse whisperer and dancer Werner Hirsch (performer in Die Hörposaune). /www.make-up-productions.net Jule Flierl (director) is a dance and voice artist from Berlin. She develops practices that conceive of the voice as a dancer. She revives the legacy of Valeska Gert, avant-garde dancer from 1920's Berlin, who first conceptualized the term ToneDance: to dance with one's voice. Her practice unsettles the relationship between seeing and hearing. /juleflierl.weebly.com Nadia Lauro (visual installation) is a visual artist and designer based in Paris, who works across contexts including scenic spaces, landscape architectures, museums. She conceived set designs, environments and visual installations with strong dramaturgical power, thus generating new ways of seeing and being together. /https://nadialauro.com

Un moment inattendu lors d’une séance avec un patient confronte un psychologue à son propre monde intérieur. Aliéné par l’isolement de sa vie citadine apparemment parfaite, le psychologue se heurte à une incapacité à comprendre et embrasser sa propre nature humaine. Son désir irrépressible pour son client l’amènera à découvrir qui il est vraiment.

La persistance d’une image fatidique et le besoin de s'y accrocher impliquent le dédoublement d’un souvenir. Ce dernier se trouve ainsi suspendu entre les multiples versions d’un même évènement, entre les représentations d’un passé et un présent déjà vécu, entre figuration et abstraction, entre mouvement et immobilité, entre film et photographie. Des impressions intrusives d'autres vies se superposent au souvenir, nous exposant ainsi à une réalité surveillée où nous nous demandons qui voit et que voir.

Juan Desteract est né à Saint-Germain-en-Laye (France) en 1997. Il vit actuellement à Buenos Aires, en Argentine. Il a étudié le design graphique à l’Université de Buenos Aires. Il a poursuivi sa formation en photographie et arts visuels au cours de divers séminaires, ateliers et résidences artistiques à Buenos Aires. Parallèlement, il s'est formé en écriture, composition musicale puis en improvisation musicale. A partir de 2021, il participe à des expositions collectives dans des espaces artistiques et des musées d'art contemporain en Argentine, au Chili, Uruguay, Espagne et en France. Son travail associe des disciplines diverses telles que la post-photographie, l'audiovisuel expérimental, le design graphique et l'improvisation musicale, en se focalisant sur certains traits distinctifs du cinéma structurel et du réemploi d’archives. Depuis 2020, Juan travaille dans le domaine du design graphique en tant que Professeur à l’Université de Buenos Aires et en tant que graphiste au Musée d'art moderne de Buenos Aires.

INCIDENT reconstructs a police shooting in Chicago in 2018, reassembling the event and its immediate aftermath from a variety of viewpoints, including surveillance, security, dashboard, and body-worn cameras as a continuous, synchronized split-screen montage.

Bill Morrison has been called “the poet laureate of lost films” (New York Times, 9/22/21). He makes films that reframe long-forgotten moving images. He has premiered feature-length documentary films at the New York, Sundance, Telluride and Venice film festivals. Morrison had a mid-career retrospective at MoMA in 2014. His found footage opus Decasia (2002) was the first film of the 21st century to be selected to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) was named one of the best films of year by more than 100 critics, and among the best of the decade (2010s) by the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair, among others. In 2021 Morrison became a member of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

Behind the Shield paints a filmic portrait of the city of Beirut over the past three years. It documents key moments in the country’s recent history – from the October Revolution to the port explosion of August 4th – while also shedding light on the mundane and commonplace facets of everyday life. Behind the Shield is a reflection on the city and the dichotomies that exist within it, juxtaposing the impactful and the mundane; the colossal and the minute; the urban and the rural. The work also highlights the camera as both a silent observer and a silent participant in the events the city has witnessed. Crucially, it explores the video camera’s transformation from a device that is used to surveil, control, and oppress of the masses, to a tool that gives people agency and grants them a voice.

Sirine Fattouh is a Lebanese artist living in Paris. Interested by histories from below, her personal work, as a researcher and artist consists of examining the consequences of violence and displacements on people’s identities. She holds a doctorate in Visual Arts and Aesthetics from the University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne and a Master degree from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts of Paris Cergy.

What role does childhood play in developing experience? How are personal present and past connected in the process of aging? The longing for the places of the personal past was the reason for a trip to Flensburg in 2001 a few weeks before 9/11. More than 2000 photos were taken in just a few days. It was only many years later that the negatives were digitized and it was only more than 20 years later that the need to process these recordings into a composition arose. The turbulent German-Danish history on both sides of today's border and the places of childhood come together in a whole where the past merges into one experience in the now. 3636 images are processed frame by frame in the first 3 movements. Each movement is containing 24 sequences of stills. The amount of images in the stills increases from 4 to 625 images simultaneously. After the first 3 movements the process is repeated towards the infinite to end in structures similar to the layers one would find in rock formations.

Thomas Mohr is exploring processes of perception and memory systematically in performance, painting, video, installations. From 1985 onwards a growing archive containing more then 600000 pictures regarding a wide range of events of transition from a collective meaning to very personal moments. Distributed by LIMA. Sreenings at various festivals since 2009: IFFR/Rotterdam, JMAF/Tokio, Ars Electronica, Transmediale Berlin, IFF Japan, NeMaf/Seoul, IKFF/Hamburg, Jihlava IDFF, HAFF/Utrecht, Media Art Biennale Wro, Rencontres Paris/Berlin, EMAF, Atonal Berlin, Projects with music at Stedelijk Museum, Orgelpark Amsterdam, Edith Russ Haus Oldenburg, CCAM / Scène Nationale de Vandœuvre. Michael Bonaventure , based in Edinburgh & Amsterdam, is composer, organist and collaborator in new and experimental music projects; Extended cyclic works predominate in his output including huge body of electronic and electro-acoustic pieces as well as instrumental and organ music. From a sonic universe deriving its inspiration from mysticism and ritual, natural and imaginary worlds, astronomical and supernatural phenomena.

Lev works at a construction site in a new suburban residential area in Western Germany. But things change, friends will leave and the forest becomes a place of desire

Maximilian Bungarten born in 1993, in North Rhine-Westphalia, studies Documentaryfilm at HFF Munich and Université Paris VIII. Together with Camille Tricaud and Felix Herrmann, he founded the production company Benedetta Films. His award-winning short films have screened at numerous international film festivals including ISFF Clermont-Ferrand and art institutions like Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

Set in the darkest time of the year, a feverish and delirious film about a small and ever-shrinking island – the Ecstasy – located somewhere between the search for pleasure and the inherently destructive powers of capitalism.?

Matti Harju has screened work at the Rotterdam, Locarno, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Torino, BFI London, Edinburgh, AFI FEST Los Angeles and Clermont-Ferrand film festivals among others. He studied film directing at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in the UK and holds an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. His second feature, Fury, is currently in post-production.

A passing meteorite connects a roaming young woman, a burned-out factory worker and an unemployed young man during a long winter night. A portrait of the night and the people in it.

Yentl De Baets is a Ghent based director and cinematographer. He graduated at the film department of the KASK School of Arts in 2021 with his short experimental fiction film 'Burning Clouds'.

MAGMA is a method driven and improvisation based film project produced and directed by Julian Rabus. The shoot consists of long situations that last up to several hours and are filmed with up to four cameras. Actors are given space to behave without dramatic functions. Following intuitions opens a way to engage with certain psychological patterns and find narrative structures, which then manifest themselves in the editing and the viewer’s perception. In the film couples and peer groups try to find their way in everyday situations: they perform, reveal themselves, make themselves vulnerable, are insecure, fall in love or pretend to the others.

Julian Rabus works as a director and producer in the field of media art and narrative film since 2016. After he graduates from Academy of Fine Arts Munich in the class of Julian Rosefeldt he studied Film Directing at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles and moved back to his hometown Berlin to finish his studies at the University of Arts in the Narrative Film class of Thomas Arslan.

One winter night, the sea threatens once again the tower block where two neighbours live. The next day, their children come to prompt them to leave everything behind.

Francisco Dias was born in 1999 in Porto, Portugal. In 2019, he lived and studied in Norway. In 2020, he completed the Bachelor's in Sound and Image and in 2023 the Master's in Cinema at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, having obtained scholarships for both courses. Rooted in his culture and personal experiences, his films focus on coming of age, human relationships and landscape. "I Don't Like 5 PM", winner of the Take One! competition at Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival, and "Coast" stand out in his filmography.