The Eyeball Person
| Japan
11:42
2023
|
- Yuri Muraoka
The Enlightenment
| United States,
12:09,
2023
|
- Stephanie Barber
The Instability of Clouds
| United States,
15:16,
2023
|
- Zazie Ray-Trapido
Reversal
| United States,
6:34,
2023
|
- Diane Nerwen
VALERIJA
|Croatia,
15:00,
2023
|
- Sara Jurinčić
IS HEAVEN BLUE?#2
| Norway,
16:55,
2023
|
-
menno de nooijer, paul de nooijer
Total: 01:17:36 (77 mins)
The Eyeball Person
| Japan,
11:42,
2023
|
- Yuri Muraoka
This film is about gazes and goodbyes. An attempt to weave images with words and to weave a poem with images. I realize that living is suffering to see that Nemu, the one of my daughters, squirms with the struggle and sunflowers squirm to try to bloom.
The Eyeball Person
村岡由梨
Now that I’m older, if I crush the two evil eyeballs
idling in my hand all these years,
a pure, transparent jelly will ooze out.
I look up at the sunflower
and try to convince myself
that I don’t have to be ashamed.
Nemu taught me
what a beautiful, desperate flower that a sunflower is.
Translation：Annie Iwasaki
Yuri Muraoka was born in Tokyo in 1981.
Dropped out of the high school attached to Japan Women's University,
graduated the 26th class of Image Forum Institute of the Moving Image.
Continues to create moving images and photographic works of "self-portraiture".
All of her works are self-created and self-performed.
Her major works are Schizophrenia (2016), Transparent, the world is. (2019) and so on. Her latest film Transparent, I am. (2020) won the Grand Prix at the 67th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. She’s been working on poetry since 2018.
A mother of two daughters.
The Enlightenment
| United States,
12:09,
16mm
2023
|
- Stephanie Barber
Listing dangerously into poetry, philosophy and sound art, Barber's new film (distributed by Video Data Bank) finds Yon and Payola in a Victorian conservatory. They are companionable, disoriented and petulant––they whip wildly through these disembodied states. Payola reads an excerpt of their experimental essay on the age of enlightenment.
Payola's research, and presentation of this research, is a purposeful affront to empirical data, the scientific method and other enlightenment ideals, while reveling in the desire for the revolution and intellectual expansion those thinkers championed.
The concepts are undermined by the form and register of their delivery OR the concepts are strengthened by the poetry through which they are presented.
The soundtrack for The Enlightenment was originally commissioned by the Diffusion Festival for multi-channel sound work, curated by M.C. Schmidt for High Zero.
Stephanie Barber is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been focused on an expanded poetics resulting in the creation of films, books, installations and songs. This work sits between cinema and literature, science and spirituality, philosophy and comedy and manifests as a corpus that moves beyond allegiance to media and works hard at defying classification.
The Instability of Clouds
| United States,
15:16,
2023
|
- Zazie Ray-Trapido
Two neighbors bond after a shared traumatic event, a continuous home development creeps into nature's threshold, and a community celebrates freedom. The Instability of Clouds navigates an ecosystem in decay and growth while traversing across its spaces of comfort, spectacle, and disaster. Through the observation and construction of facets within a suburban neighborhood in Southern California, connections between landscape, neighbors, and environment ruminate on the American Dream and its resonances.
Zazie Ray-Trapido is a filmmaker from Philadelphia based in Los Angeles. Her films have been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Viennale, Curtas Vila do Conde, Maysles Documentary Center, ICDOCS, Crossroads, and more. She holds a Bachelor's degree from Bard College and a Master’s in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts.
Reversal
| United States,
6:34,
2023
|
- Diane Nerwen
REVERSAL combines images and sounds from movies released or broadcast in 1973, the year the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade. In the strange new reality ushered in by the Dobbs decision, the slogan "We won't go back" is recalled with bitter irony. This collage piece evokes the spectre of regression and repression that has followed the Court's decision.
Diane Nerwen is a video artist and art educator. She has shown her work internationally, including screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Guggenheim Museum, NY, the Tate Modern, London, carriage trade, NY and the Berlin Film Festival. She was awarded a DAAD Artist in Residence Fellowship in Berlin in 2001. Nerwen was born in Montreal and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
VALERIJA
| Croatia,
15:00,
2023
|
- Sara Jurinčić
This hybrid documentary takes us on a journey into a world without men. The island tradition is, that the women choose the image that will represent them on their grave after they're gone.
Reality and subconscious mix, as the author questions: “How does it feel to have a family tree consisting only of women? What do our ancestress’ whisper from their silent portraits?”
We’re following two women, traveling from the mainland to the island graveyard, to visit their Valerija.
On the journey, the author is questioning the archetype of an island woman and her own female heritage through a participatory process.
Sara Jurincic, architect and filmmaker (1989. Zadar, Croatia). Graduated at AF Zagreb 2015. Worked and exhibited with: W.O.R.M. Rotterdam, Klubvizija lab, CAFxCPH, Restart, KONTEJNER. In 2018. she established NOMAD STUDIO – art and spatial-experiment lab, involved in projects, exhibitions and workshops around Europe. In 2019. and 2020. she is part of Sarajevo Talents, EW Talent lab (Wiesbaden), Dok Leipzig Short n’ Sweet pitch (with the project “VALERIJA”). She won multiple awards for her debut film that has been shown on more that 30 international festivals, including Oberhausen film festival (international competition).
IS HEAVEN BLUE?#2
| Norway,
16:55,
2022
|
- menno de nooijer, paul de nooijer
Film has kept the De Nooijer busy half a century. Now time is catching up with the lives of Paul and Françoise. Time leaves its mark on the faces and bodies of the three main characters. What was young gets old, what was healthy is sick. Uncertainty has crept in. What started out tough ends in melancholy. In that sense, this is a farewell. Not just a farewell to an oeuvre, the result of fifty years of filming, but also a farewell to a living together marked by art, photography and film.
Paul de Nooijer (* 1943) has been making films for 40 years now – an incredible achievement in a field not exactly showered by public interest and funding. His reputation is solidly based on works displaying mostly ‘illusionism’ – the interdependency of film and photography. Since son Menno (*1967) joined in this ‘family business of art’ as a full-fledged partner in 1989, the films became faster and more colourful. But more importantly, the focus of their artistic efforts slightly shifted from just photography and film to a combination with theatre and performance. De Nooijer consciously opted for a blend of traditional disciplines based on the ideals of the Gesamtkunstwerk and Oscar Schlemmer’s interdisciplinary Bauhaus theatre. In this concept photography and film formed part of a larger, total event.
De Nooijer love to pay tribute in their incredibly varied work. And they do this more often than not tongue-in-cheek. Tribute to prominent works of art history – directly (like in Birth to Michelangelo) or slightly more hidden (like in Touring Holland by Bicycle to van Gogh). Tribute to pieces of Popular Culture (Tarzan & Jane) or tribute to traditional culture (Stripshow 1850). Tribute to other film makers (e.g. Frans Zwartjes by stressing pixilation in black& white and artificially recreating time-flow) or tribute to the essence of the photographic process (I Should See; A Fortified City). Yet they always remained true to their own art as the sad but likewise funny episode with Bill Gates exposes.