Programme Paris 2022

This film is about the nature of existence and memory. Seventy years ago, on a night, a musician was shot dead on stage in a nightclub in Shanghai, a story found by a Frenchman on an old newspaper today. Although the musician was long forgotten in the history,this French gentleman makes his way to Shanghai in the hope of finding the traces of the musician's existence. In a shabby old apartment, he reads aloud the novel written by Patrick Modiano, calling the spirits that used to live here.His voice evokes the response of the Shanghai musician. All of a sudden, it seems to him as if they share the same memories, details and breath. As Modiano puts it: "there was nothing to set us apart from the others, those Sundays in August.”

Zhou Hongbo graduated from Beijing Film Academy, with a master’s degree in 1999. His graduation film, A Fish Who Wants to Fly, was selected for Cannes Film Festival 2000, Cinefondation. Since then Zhou has made several features and documentaries which were screened at various international film festival.

Joanna is a singer who performs in a bar six nights a week, inside a hotel where she lives a few floors below. Her voice guides us through her work routine and the circular route between her room and the stage, all while the video continuously interrupts itself, disrupting the linearity of her story. 'B Plots' looks into the connection between images and physical spaces and how they mirror and affect each other. The mechanic movements of the camera are not hidden, but amplified, directing ones attention towards the camera as a medium and the materiality of the video.

Freja Sofie Kirk works within video, photography and installation, often in connection with one another. Through her ongoing work with two-dimensional representations, Kirk’s practice investigates how images generate meaning in contemporary society. Her work takes the form of a continuous study of spatial and medial constructions, the violence they perform and the architecture they manifest. By utilizing the camera, Kirk attempts to renegotiate the power relations inherent in both architecture and image production.

Nazarbazi [the play of glances] is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited.

Maryam Tafakory is an artist filmmaker based between London and Shiraz. Her work has been exhibited internationally including MoMA Doc Fortnight; IFF Rotterdam; Edinburgh EIFF; Melbourne MIFF; True/False festival; Zurich Film Festival; Whitechapel Gallery; Pergamon Museum; M HKA; and Anthology Film Archives amongst others. She has received several awards including, the Ammodo Tiger Short at 51st IFFR, the First Jury Prize at DocumentaMadrid, the Best Short Film at Festival de Cine Lima Independiente, and she was the 2019 Flaherty/Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence, NY. Her work has appeared at Criterion's The Daily, the Sight&Sound magazine, Filmmaker Magazine, and Senses of Cinema.

“Stretching and blurring the boundaries of video essay, experimental film and home movie, traces of a 1950s homemade melodrama by amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin intermingle with a mournful homage to the author’s grandmother and her vacated home. A powerful mélange of cinematic and domestic spaces, past and present.”

Carl Elsaesser (1988, USA) graduated from Hampshire college and University of Iowa. He lives and works between midcoast and interior Maine and Brooklyn, NY. He has made several short films which have screened at festivals in New York, Berlin, Michigan, Amsterdam, Korea among others. In his work, Elsaesser mixes genres and materials to produce work that “critically investigates the overarching presence of the historical without losing sight of individual experiences of human connection.”

The surface of the skull is smooth as marble, except for the fractures surrounding a small, round bullet hole. The camera penetrates this opening, revealing the rock-like landscape within, of deep ravines, jagged-edged craters, and bony reefs. Here and there we see a web hanging, inhabited by a spider. Bullet records the skull of an unidentified body from the Peruvian violent period, which raged from 1980 to 2000 and took 70,000 lives. Since then, many remains have been found but cannot be identified and they still hover, as it were, under the status “NN” ­–“No Name.” The film tries to shed light on the forces that penetrate the lives of people: natural or social forces that overtake observation, the imagination and memory.Bullet constitutes an indictment of arbitrary executions and judicial vacuum in which they remain.

I am a visual artist and filmmaker who works with video installations. I have had recent exhibitions at, among other places: De Pont Museum (NL), MAXXI Museum (IT); MALI – Museo de Arte de Lima (PE); Rose Art Museum (US); La Casa Encendida (ES); Palais de Tokyo (FR); Kyoto Art Center (JP); Das Fridericianum (DE); and Matadero (ES). My work has been shown at various art biennials and internationally, including Videobrasil, the 13th Havana Biennial (CU), Asian Art Biennial (TW), the 2nd Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition (CN) and the Beijing Biennial (CN). I have also collaborated as audiovisual art director for stage productions in Peru, Spain, Austria and Italy. In 2018, I was granted the Han Nefkens Foundation Award. I live in Amsterdam, where I teach at the Rietveld Academie. I am currently a PhD research student at the Department of Visual Cultures - Goldsmiths, University of London.

This is a part of a developing series titles UAP (Unidentified Arial Phenomena). Looking to the sky can reveal both threats and salvation. This was shot and edited on a phone and is intended eventually to be presented on the intimate format of a phone. Shot and edited in summer 2021.

Pierce has been making films, video, and installations for over 3 decades with screenings at Cinematheque francais, Pompidou Center, Sundance, NYFF, Rotterdam, EMAF ad many other venues. Among others, he is recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Creative Capital Fellowships. For the past 8 years he has been living in LA where he was dean and is now faculty at CalArts.

A group of people from different backgrounds fall into a doze at a fairly masculine old Mexican bar: security guards transporting a naked man, a boy giving secret signals, women carrying long-barreled guns, and rocks. The lines narrated by the performer are taken from the notes of a serial killer, political materials, and the dying words of Takijiro Onishi, originator of the kamikaze tactics.

Director and visual artist Val Lee founded Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel(GMGS) with Hikky Chen in 2008. GMGS is active in visual and performing arts. GMGS uses ephemeral situations to lead the audience into a form of live art that comprises action scripts, installations, sound, hypnotic rhetoric, composite structures, and mise-en-scène. The collective has collaborated with non-performers to construct political fables with a dream-like method. GMGS’s works have been exhibited at the Vernacular Institute, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Forum des Images, Grand Palais, the Danish feminist initiative ARIEL, Taiwan Contemporary Cultural Lab, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and Hong-Gah Museum; and joined the Taipei Arts Festival, the Gwangju Biennale, the Taiwan Biennial, the Urban Nomad Film Fest, and Month of Performance Art in Berlin.GMGS has been sponsored by the Hong Foundation (2021), the Liveworks Festival Lab artist residency program (2020), the Asian Cultural Council New York Fellowship (2019), Taishin Visual Arts Award (2017), and the National Culture and Arts Foundation.

Encyclopaedias describe St. Elmo's fire as a harmless meteorological phenomenon caused by a strong static discharge. In Philippine mythology, a "santelmo" is a wandering soul of a deceased person who has not found peace yet. Three young men wandering through countryside seeking in vain reconciliation with the world. Their aimless journey is accompanied by rustling of leaves and grass, chirping of insects, and singing of birds, conversations about people for whom they have suffered and whom they plan to take revenge on. Yet, they are prevented from freeing themselves by memories that cannot be killed.

Liryc Dela Cruz (1992) is an artist and filmmaker from Tupi, South Cotabato in Mindanao, Philippines and now based in Rome, Italy. His works were selected and screened in different international film festivals and art events. His debut short film “The Ebb of Forgetting” premiered at the prestigious 68th Locarno Film Festival. His films are thematically related to his origins, history, and personal psychology. His works outside cinema focuses on care, indegenous practices, decolonial practices, post-colonial Philippines, transpacific slave trade, hospitality and reconnecting the colonized and slave body to the soil. Dela Cruz was one of the key collaborators of Philippine independent master filmmaker Lav Diaz. He is also considered as one of the representatives of the slow cinema movement (Ji.hlava IDFF ‘18). In 2019, he represented Italy at the UK Young Artist in Nottingham, he was selected as one of the artists of AtWork Venice mentored by Simon Njami and was the Editor in Chief of the Where is South exhibition at the Palazzo Querini, Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi as part of the “Rothko in Lampedusa'' initiative during the 58th Venice Biennale. In 2020, he was selected as one of the young emerging filmmakers to represent Italy in Berlinale Talents during the 70th Berlin International Film Festival. Dela Cruz was also mentored by French Political Scientist and Activist, Françoise Vergès during the Mediterranean Ecofeminist Decolonial Union for Self-Education in Lecce, Italy. Recently, he debuted a performance in Teatro di Roma - Teatro Nazionale in Rome as part of his ongoing research project “Il Mio Filippino/a,” a project about “gestures of care and cleaning methods” of Filipino cleaning workers. The same project was also a recipient of Artissima - Torino Social Impact Art Award for the year 2020 and has been selected by Cité internationale des arts Paris for their residency program in 2022 and by Mattatoio di Roma for its Prender-si Cura residency programme. Currently, Dela Cruz is developing “Ocean as a Space of Perpetual Care '' a project based on indigenous care and hospitality of pre-colonial Filipinos and from the diary of Antonio Pigafetta.

Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage is a project by artist and filmmaker Rosa Barba following an invitation by Point Centre for Contemporary Art in Nicosia and curator Mirjam Varadinis to propose and realize a project in Cyprus. The work proposed by the artist in 2013, started in 2014 and consists of two parts: a film and a long-term open-air cinema installation. The project was then presented to the Italian Council and received the first prize at the international competition (Third Edition) in 2018, and was awarded a grant from DGAAP (Directorate General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries), Italy. Barba’s film is exclusively shot in Cyprus, including underwater shots of the Mazotos shipwreck, as well as aerial shots from archaeological sites. It is an investigation into the loaded, transforming topography that is already palpable in the landscape, before we actually understand what language it creates for our society. In that, the film follows Barba’s artistic approach to examine liminal states which manifest in between contested spaces, both mentally and geographically, in order to allow for a new perspective. The inaugural screening took place in Autumn 2021 at the open-air cinema installation in the Buffer Zone.

Rosa Barba (b. 1972 in Italy) lives and works in Berlin. Rosa Barba studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Barba’s work is represented in numerous international collections such as Collezione MAXXI Arte, Rome, Italy; Collezione FRAC Piemonte, Vercelli, Italy; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Lemaître Collection, London; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto; Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Kunsthaus Zürich, MACBA Barcelona, Mambo Bologna, Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Germany and Jumex, Mexico City. She has participated in group shows amongst others at MASS MoCA, USA; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz; La Cinémathèque Française, Paris; WIELS, Brussels; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Swiss Institute, New York; 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art International Triennial of New Media Art 2014, Beijing, China; 19th Biennale of Sydney; International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia; 2010 Liverpool Biennial; 52nd and 53rd Venice Biennale; 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art; Biennial of Moving Images, Geneva.

Le pipeline géant Keystone transporte chaque jour plus de 700 000 barils de résidus impurs depuis les exploitations à ciel ouvert de la forêt Boréale à travers les Grandes Plaines des Sioux, souillant les terres et les réserves d'eau. Dans une plongée au coeur des ténèbres, l'histoire contemporaine retrouve le temps prophétique des commencements :"lorsqu’il n’y avait ni lune ni étoile”, le lieu des spectres, du surgissement et de la disparition.

Cécile Hartmann is a french artist and filmmaker based in Paris. Born in Colmar, she studies Art at the National Fine Arts Academy of Paris (2000) and Art History in Human Sciences at the University of Strasbourg. Inspired by documentary aesthetics and Minimalism, her work questionnes the divisions between a constructed world and a natural world. Using different mediums and image regimes she fuses video, photography and performative gestures to create effects of instability and sublimity in her representations. Close to the terrestrial surface, in search for hidden layers and collective mythologies, her cinematic language plays on the indecisive nature of perception, between the visible and invisible, the organic and non-organic, past and futur. Main exhibitions included : Le Serpent Noir, MABA, Nogent-sur-Marne, Achrone, MOCA, Hiroshima, Et voici la lumière, Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, The family of the invisibles, SEMA Séoul Museum of Art, AGITATIONISM, Eva Internationale Bienniale, Limerick, De la Casa a la Fabrica, Palau la Virreina, Barcelone, French Edges, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Paysages de la conscience, MAMBO, Bogotà, Microclimat, CCC, Tours.

My mother used to tell me that our dining table was as old as I am. I wonder how old the tree was when it was cut down to be turned into our table. I am fascinated in this kind of transmutation from the natural world to the human one, and how a tree takes on new lives long after it has been cut down. This video essay incorporates archival photographs from the American Colonial Era in the Philippines (1898–1946), exploring the sticky relationship between humans and nature and their entanglements with empire. Taking plants and trees as starting points, it aims to reflect on the intertwined roots of photography and capitalism in the Philippines.

Shireen Seno is an artist and filmmaker based in Manila whose work addresses memory, history, and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home. A recipient of the 2018 Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, she is known for her films which have won awards at Rotterdam, Shanghai, Olhar de Cinema, Vladivostok, Jogja-Netpac, and Lima Independiente and have screened at festivals including New Directors/New Films, Yebisu International Festival of Art & Alternative Visions, NYFF Currents, and institutions such as Tate Modern, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and Portikus.

Re-worked footage from an unfinished film by Senegalese director Mamadou Johnny Sekka forms a re-examination of The Jackson 5’s 1974 trip to Dakar.

Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker, producer, and educator. Aiming to create a third cinematic space or consciousness, Owusu’s work explores the colliding identities of black immigrants in America through multiple forms, ranging from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media. In her works, feminism, queerness, and African identities interact in African, white American, and black American cultural spaces. Named by IndieWire as one of six preeminent “avant-garde female filmmakers who redefined cinema,”, her work has been screened extensively at festivals and museums nationally and internationally and are available on streaming platforms including PBS, The Criterion Channel and MUBI. In 2013 her short film KWAKU ANANSE was well-received at the Berlinale Shorts and won the 2013 Africa Movie Academy Award. Her short film RELUCTANTLY QUEER was nominated for the Golden Bear and Teddy Award at the 2016 Berlinale Shorts. Owusu has received numerous fellowships and grants including the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists (2020). She has been invited to the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Cecilia Alemani. She currently lectures at Harvard University.

"Under the White Mask: the film Haesaerts could have made" uses fragments of "Under the Black Mask", a 1958 film about Congolese art directed by the Belgian artist Paul Haesaerts and qualified as colonial propaganda. This new film imagines what the masks, now subjects and not objects, would say. Aimé Césaire's "Discourse on Colonialism" is spoken in Lingala for the first time. This speech is still a critical mirror for Europe. "Under the White Mask" is limited to elements already existing in 1958.

Matthias De Groof (1981) Belgium. Filmmaker and scholar. His award-winning films have been presented at venues like the IFFR, Cannes Pan-African Film Festival, Le FIFA and the Berlinale. His edited book “Lumumba in the Arts” is published with Leuven University Press, and reached the top-100 "books to escape the news" (LitHub). He has held appointments at the New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence of the Bayreuth University; and the Waseda University in Tokyo. Throughout is artistic and academic career, he was granted fellowships by the Canon Foundation, the KONE Foundation, Fulbright and BAEF. His filmography, produced by Cobra Films, includes “Under the White Mask” (2021), “Palimpsest of the Africa Museum” (2019), “Lobi Kuna" (2018), “Diorama” (2018) and “Jerusalem, the Adulterous Wife” (2008) among others.

In the Summer of 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in her country, Helga Davis wrote a text that voices her pain, her despair and also her hopes for the future. After collaborating on Helga Humming (2019) and One (2020), the text became the starting point for a new film and a first work co-signed by Helga Davis and Anouk De Clercq. OK scrutinises the relations between Black and White while searching for the essence of collaboration and caring about the other.

Anouk De Clercq explores the potential of audiovisual language to create possible worlds. Her recent work is based on the utopian idea of ‘radical empathy’. Her work has been shown in Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, MAXXI, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, BOZAR, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlinale, Ars Electronica, among others. She has received several awards, including the Illy Prize at Art Brussels in 2005 and a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention in 2014. Anouk De Clercq is affiliated to the School of Arts University College Ghent as a visiting professor. She is a founding member of Auguste Orts and initiator of Monokino. Anouk De Clercq is the author of Where is Cinema, published by Archive Books. Helga Davis is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist who works as an actress, singer, writer and composer, as well as a radio and podcast host. Helga Davis performed as a principle actor in the 25th-anniversary international revival of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach. Davis' music career has included a stint in the rock band Women in Love, in the 1990s. More recently, Davis has starred in operas and theater pieces internationally, including Robert Wilson's The Temptation of St. Anthony, libretto and score by Bernice Johnson Reagon; Octavia E. Butler's Parable Of The Sower, Milton by Katie Pearl and Lisa Damour; The Blue Planet, a multimedia theater piece, by Peter Greenaway and Saskia Boddeke; and Soho Rep's Jomama Jones, Radiate. Davis hosts the "Helga" podcast, live events for New Sounds and WQXR-FM's Q2 Music.

Places of Articulation: Five Obstructions takes the spectator on a journey across borders, from Northern Ireland to Tibet, passing through Germany, Albania and Flanders. However, it explores a more deeply engraved border, the invisible border of our oral cavity, which marks and defines the sounds we can emit and the words we can pronounce. Since biblical times and up till nowadays asylum procedures, this border is exploited to discriminate and divide. Moving between territories – sonic, anatomical and political ones – this installation examines how voice and pronunciation are used as identifiers, eventually become mobile checkpoints, determining fates and sometimes costing lives. Employing different imaging methods and visualisations, it renders these checkpoints visible, while questioning the limits of identification and revealing blurred lines or zones of ambiguity that defy binary categorisation.

Effi & Amir, nés et grandis en Israël, travaillent en duo depuis 1999 et vivent à Bruxelles depuis 2005. Ils ont étudié les beaux-arts à l'Académie Bezalel de Jérusalem et au Sandberg Institut d'Amsterdam et ont appris eux-mêmes, bien plus tard, comment faire des films. Leur travail, qui utilise les médias audiovisuels, la performance et les stratégies participatives, se situe à la frontière floue entre le documentaire et la fiction, et traite des mécanismes de construction - de l'identité, de l'appartenance au groupe, de l'histoire et de l'œuvre elle-même. Le travail d'Effi & Amir a récemment été primé dans des festivals de films documentaires (docAviv, IndieLisboa, En ville !, festival Jean rouch) et ils sont les lauréats du Prix de parcours documentaire audoiovisuel 2022 de la Scam.

Hier.(2021) moves seamlessly between politically charged reflections and personal memories through a constellation of voices and lyrical material. In Museum Arnhem (NL) during its renovation - a place of conservation in transition - we meet a cast of young women who express themselves through music, poetry and dialogue. Together they sensitively explore themes such as hybridity, trans-nationality and diasporic sensitivities in the midst of persistent reverberations of colonial history in contemporary society. Alongside the cast, the location Museum Arnhem, is also a meaningful “voice”. Originally built in the late 19th century as an ‘outdoors club’ by people with a colonial past, we see the building stripped down to its foundation, with worn concrete and elegant art nouveau features located next to each other. In this site of rubble and potential we follow three ‘sonic lines’: the band FRED, poet Pelumi Adejumo and historian Lara Nuberg. With music and poetry, we encounter not only socio-political urgencies, but also undercurrents of existentialist and vulnerable themes. Tenderly yet confident, we see the protagonists in friendship and cooperation, we hear about love, the sorrow that comes with it, life questions and certainties, by which they express the basis for a changing possible future.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh develops works, whereby the cinematic format is used as a methodology for production and as the basic language for various forms of presentation, collaborating with participants in different scenarios, to co-produce the script. Recent solo presentations include: work, work, work (work) at Museum Sztuki in Lodz 2021; tono lengua boca at Fabra i Coats, Barcelona 2020 and CA2M Madrid 2019-20; Cinema Olanda, at the Dutch Pavilion in the 57th Venice Biennial 2017. Van Oldenborgh has exhibited widely including the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, bauhaus imaginista, HKW Berlin 2019, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 2020 and Sonsbeek20->24, Arnhem 2021.