director: Gabriel Abrantes/ Daniel Schmidt

CARTE BLANCHE:

Golden Leopard winner of LOCARNO 2010 and Best Portuguese Short Film Award at INDIELISBOA 2010, A HISTORY OF MUTUAL RESPECT is a philosophical and sensual existential journey, “an unclassifiable eccentric and political film, reminding of the most daring works of Glauber Rocha. The 2 protagonists (played by the 2 authors) go to Latin America in search of third-world exotism and of a “pure” and “clean” sexuality. During this metaphorical journey, an universe of lost innocence and disenchantment takes shape, where no revolutionary or humanist utopia is allowed. The Western European heros’ cynicism mirrors the phantasm of wealth and comfort of the beautiful Brazilian girl they meet and try to seduce in the jungle.” CAHIERS DU CINEMA (ARIEL SCHWEITZER)

director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

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Grand Prize and Jury Prize Winner at Oberhausen 2009, screened and exhibited all over the world in top film festivals and museums/ art galleries, A LETTER TO UNCLE BOONMEE is part of of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s multi-platform PRIMITIVE PROJECT, which deals with the concepts of memory and extinction in North Eastern Thailand. PRIMITVE is set in Nabua, a place with a tragic history, one of the areas the Thai army occupied from the 60s to the early 80s in order to curb those who were accused of being communists. Nabua was the scene of fierce oppression, fighting and violence. PRIMITIVE  consists of a multi screen video installation, 2 short films ( A Letter to Uncle Bonmee and Phantoms of Nabua), an artist’s book and the feature film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives which won the Palme d’Or Award in Cannes 2010.

director: Ionuţ Florin Negrilă

An archaeological discovery on the future ring road of Constanţa – two tombs that are part of a 70-grave necropolis. Through time-lapse photography, the film covers in two minutes the four-hour process in which the remainder of two bodies, a man and a woman who lived in the 2nd/3rd century BC, was carefully brought to light.

director: Duncan Campbell

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Tiger Award Winner in Rotterdam Film Festival 2009, Special Mention winner in Indielisboa 2009, ARTE Award and FIPRESCI Award winner in Oberhausen 2009, Bernadette presents an unravelling, yet accumulatively open-ended portrayal of the female Irish dissident and political activist, Bernadette Devlin. Unconventionally cutting between archival material, animation, and scripted voice-over, Jarman Award nominee Duncan Campbell's film is interested in fusing documentary and fiction in order to assess both the subject matter and the mode of communicating it, creating a subjective, emotionally engaging image of a strong yet fragile, charismatic yet vulnerable human being.

director: Tim Bollinger

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In a Metro station strange events happen at the limit of perceptibility. Side chambers open up, inflating the daily normality with frightening flashes, completely disconnected, offering a surreal challenge. The shortfilm „between“ deals with the continual inner conflict between ease and restlesness, with beeing caught in a world of discord. Depicting a journey through worlds of the subconscious, it allows us to catch sinister glimpses of the human psyches ambivalence.

director: Miruna Boruzescu

A man, alone in a bathroom, is apparently making his usual hygiene toilet rituals, up to the point where, little by little, he is turning into the prototype of the self-destroying humanity.

director: Mihai Grecu

Receiving world-wide recognition both in film festivals and museums/art exhibitions circuit. the award winning work of Romanian born visual artist Mihai Grecu interweaves animation and film to create surreal landscapes, reminding of De Chirico Metaphisical Painting or Dali’s psychoanalitical symbolism.  CENTIPEDE SUN is a mesmerizing video poem on transforming landscapes, a symbol of isolation and a comment on the effects of Global Warming on the climate. Inspired by the sublime landscape of the mysteriously desert region of Altiplano, Chile, Mihai Grecu finds mythical creatures who might once have filled the now desolate landscape, a haunting metaphor for a desperate future world.

director: Sebastian Mez

It`s his job to clean this special room, an execution chamber at a state prison in the United States. Everytime there is an execution, he has to recover this place as it was before.

Grand Prix winner at International Festival of Cinema Schools Belgium 2009 and Best Documentary Award Winner in ZINEBI BILBAO 2008, CLEAN UP is a radical, thought provoking view on death penalty.

director: Mihai Grecu

CARTE BLANCHE:    

 

Receiving world-wide recognition both in film festivals and museums/art exhibitions circuit. the award winning work of Romanian born visual artist Mihai Grecu interweaves animation and film to create surreal landscapes, reminding of De Chirico Metaphisical Painting or Dali’s psychoanalitical symbolism. COAGULATE tells an unusual story using the element of water as its main protagonist, creating the paradoxical concept of "liquid sculpture". The artist treats the themes of an universe in mutation and of modified perceptions, by showing different forms of matter behaving in ways that completely distort the perceptions of the viewer. In this choreography of fluids, mysterious forces twist the physical laws and affect the behaviour of living beings.

director: Ines Cardoso

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Excellent Award winner at Tokyo Video Festival 2009 and Best Documentary Award winner  at Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival Femina 2009, screened in Tampere 2009/ Sao Paulo 2009/ Belo Horizonte 2008 etc, COCAIS, THE REINVENTED TOWN is a poetic documentary about the patients and employees of an asylum town in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state. This is the story of a town that reinvented itself through a movie, or is it really the story of a movie invented by a town?

director:Tamara Taddeo

At the same time confession, love letter and mourning, Cold Rust is an exquisite epitaph to the filmmaker's father, that relates her loss when he leaves her mother and builds slowly to the shock of his brutal murder years later. Decaying Super 8 home movies, images of the abandoned family farm, lyrical moments and the enigma of an unsolved murder evocatively rekindle memories and dreams of the father she still loves. Nominated for the Best Documentary Award at REndez-vous du cinéma québécois 2007, screened in Hotdocs, Clermont Ferrand, Rio de Janeiro, Toulouse, Creteil, Kassel etc.

director: Ying Liang

CARTE BLANCHE:    

 

The Tiger Award for Short Film winner of Rotterdam 2010, CONDOLEANCES is a brilliantly structured conceptual piece of cinema: at the same time a sharply ironical socio-political satire on the construction of official versions of “reality” (i.e. lies) in Chinese media and governance and a deeply compassionate account on human tragedy. Most of the film is a one-shot scene of a small mourning ceremony following a real-life bus accident in China. A fixed camera position, reminiscent of the early days of cinematography, gives the viewer the opportunity of objectively gazing into a theatre which develops around a grandmother who lost two of her relatives in the accident. Her personal tragedy is turned into a precisely choreographed analysis of a social structure in which all participants are out for their own benefit. Reminding of the pictorial structures in Velasquez’s painting, the masterful mis-en-scene in depth of field, with its layering, multiple points of focus, constructs an active, engaged viewer, both intellectually and emotionally.

director: Joel Pizzini

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Best Experimental Film Award winner at Curtas Cinema Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival 2996, DORMENTE is an experimental poem about the beauty of the fleeting moments. Stations, tracks and electric wires from the night time frame of DORMENTE, which reveals forms without borders, paralysed forces, repetitive gestures, memories, self portraits and the darkness and isolation of our daily journey.

director: Alfred Schupler

A range of feelings pulsates in images along the sequences of EMBRYO, a lesson about reality and destiny. It is a moment of transformation, a moment that flows in an hourglass of memories and of emotions built on the unknown. It means steps towards another moment and footprints towards a past which, although very frail, bears the signs of the passage of time…

director: Jean Gabriel Periot

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France, summer 1944. The public punishment of women accused of having affairs with Germans during the war.

Distinguished with Innovation Award at Chicago International Documentary Film Festval and Grand Prix Winner at Tampere Film Festival, winner of 40 awards and screened in 200 international film festivals, EVEN IF SHE HAD BEEN A CRIMINAL is a stunning masterful film which covers a lot of ground for its so short running time. After a bloody and brutal war, victory has a dark side. Marguerite Duras’ eloquent but troubling work, The War [Ladouleur], gave expression to what that victory could mean for those who fought in the Resistance, lost loved ones, and felt betrayed by fellow countrymen. It could mean a settling of scores, a turning of the victor, ever so briefly, into victimizer. Orchestrating carefully combed archival footage and various renditions of La Marseillaise, Jean-Gabriel Périot’s Even if She Had Been a Criminal…gives visual form to this psychologically complex historical moment when joy was coupled with hatred, long-awaited triumph with a need for scapegoats, and pride with public humiliation.

director: Philip Hoffman

Filmmaker Philip Hoffman and poet Gerry Shikatani combine to make a cine-poem about the making of gardens, films and poems. Excerpts from Shikatani’s “First Book, Three Gardens of Andalucia”.
Excerpts from text by Gerry Shikatani:
”The world we might love, into which we pass through some gate. A garden, the worn azul and yellow tiles the assured passage so needed, then broken.”
”A garden includes water
It also includes thirst.”

director: Almagul Menlibayeva

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Exodus directs the viewer into present day Kazakhstan, where an equally strange and powerful tale unravels. While local men and women are in the process of packing up their Yurtas (nomadic tents) with the obvious intention to move on, a young girl watches, captivated and immobile, subsequently appearing to be left behind - synonymously invoking the experience of global uprooting. As an interlude and a visual bow to Kurban, two young women thrash their hair, symbolically transformed into birdlike creatures flapping their wings. The Peries (Shaman’s helpers) walk around the yurt making ancient shamanistic nomad rituals “The Closing Road” which makes nomads stay in the place. Only the small wondering girl is observing, the adults don’t.

director: Sarah Wood

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In an age dominated by the moving image what would it feel like to never see an image of the place that you came from? Exhibited in Tate Modern Museum London and BAM Cinematek in New York, Tiger Short  Award Nominee in Rotterdam 2010 FOR CULTURAL PURPOSE ONLY is an experimental film essay investigating the cultural importance of cinema.

The Palestinian Film Archive contained over 100 films showing the daily life and struggle of the Palestinian people. It was lost in the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982. Here interviewees, including Palestinian filmmakers, describe from memory key moments from the history of Palestinian cinema. An artist interprets the memory and draws what he hears. His drawings - animated - stand either for the original where the film is lost, or are corroborated by film imagery where the original film survives. This is a film about reconstruction and the idea that cinema is an expression of cultural identity - that cinema fuels memory.

director: Lernert Engelberts

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Artists are very good at explaining their art in self-appointed surroundings - friends, curators, colleagues. For a change, 'either proving, or disapproving the adage “you can never go home again”, Dutch artists Lernert Engelberts and Sander Plug documented 9 artists as they attempt to explain their often abstract art to their parents. Set in a starkly limbo grey environment furnished with just enough to indicate rather then replicate a comfortable home, it is the relationships rather than the art, which are brought into color focus. The results are at once touching and humorous: the parents lovingly indulgent of their offspring, or struggling to comprehend their artistic efforts - or both.' (Sleek Magazine)

The Tiger Short Award Nominee at Rotterdam Film Festival 2010 HOW TO EXPLAIN IT TO MY PARENTS : ARNO CONEN is part of this series. Multimedia artist Arno Coenen is sitting at a table with his father. Together they taste Arno’s self-brewed Eurotrash beer; followed by an attempt at a dialogue on how the brewing of beer can also be regarded as art. But ultimately, what is illuminated more than art is their mutual relationship. This both hilarious and moving portrait shows how difficult it is for the father and son to communicate.

director: Ruben Östlund

The Golden Bear Award Winner for Short Film at Berlinale 2010, screened/awarded in prestigious film festivals like Oberhausen, Edinburgh, Sao Paolo, Los Angeles, Sydney, Pusan, Melbourne etc, ”Incident by a bank” is a detailed and humorous account of a failed bank robbery. Ground-breaking with respect to technology and storytelling, it consists of a single take where over 96 people perform a meticulous choreography for the camera. ”Incident by a bank” recreates an actual event that took place in Stockholm back in June 2006; it’s an observation in real-time and a study of human nature , of how people act and react to the unexpected.

director: Sandrine Stoianov and Jean Charles Finck

Main Jury Award Winner in Premiers Plans Anger, French Community Award at Bruxelles Film Festival and Authors’ Prize and Press Award winner at Namur Film Festival, IRINKA  ET SANDRINKA is an emotional and beautifully crafted blending of animation and documentary. Fifty years separate Irene and Sandrine. One, member of the Russian nobility, experienced the fall of the regime, the lack of an exiled father and her adoption by a new family. The other grew up dreaming about a former Russia, land of fairy tales. From the memories evoked by her aunt, Sandrine Stoianov returns to this fascinating past in a colourful and composite world with its mix of children’s drawings, old family photographs and illustrations of pre-Revolution Russia.

director: Graeme Cole

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Awarded Honorable Mention of the Jury at Indielisboa 2009, screened in Bangkok, Sarajevo, Barcelona, Valencia, Poitiers etc, IT’S NICK’S BIRTHDAY is a unique home-made Super-8 musical. Nick can accept his fading youth if only Liz will acknowledge there is an impossibly profound connection between them. Over an all-day drinking session, the binds of human communication fray as they shamble through the last day of his twenties.

Capturing the unconventional handcrafted aesthetic of Aidan Smith's songs, this is a musical for those who wouldn't normally go near one. The dancing creaks and the vocals strain when four ordinary folk attempt to impose meaning and color on their mundane and aimless lives, worn away by ennui and isolation. Sundays don't come with a three-act structure, and we don't have hidden reserves of magical talent. We have mood swings, private theories and temporary epiphanies.

director: Christine Molloy/ Joe Lawlor

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Prix UIP winner and European Film Awards Nominee of Rotterdam 2008, JOY is a story about a 17-year-old girl who has gone missing. The film is a police reconstruction of Joy’s last known movements in a local park, which begins as reverently as you would expect but gradually changes into something meditative and poetic. Accompanying piece of Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor debut feature HELEN, JOY is a film-within-the-film, a hauntingly evocative vignette comprised of one very long take (albeit with two small inserts) that looks like the kind of missing-persons advisory that a police force headed by James Joyce might produce. With its deliberate slow-motion and skillfully choreographed construction, JOY takes us on an intriguing journey, not just across the public park of its setting, but also into our own imagination. By the end of it, more than just a reconstruction, the film is rather a meditation on the fragility of youth.

director: Neil Beloufa

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The feeling throughout the visual artist Neïl Beloufa’s film Kempinski is strangely dystopian and anxious. Holding fluorescent lights that softly glow across their faces, people emerge from the dark and speak about a magical world.

Grand Prix winner at Indielisboa 2009 and ARTE Award winner at Oberhausen 2009,  exhibited in museums and art galleries all over the world, Kempinski is a unique mixture of science fiction and documentary. Its scenario, filmed in various towns in Mali, is defined by specific rules: interviewed people imagine the future and speak about it in the present tense. Their hopeful, poetic and spiritual stories and fantasies are recorded and edited in a musical  hypnotic way. Spoken in the present tense, these visions of the future become eerie and palpable. ‘Kempinski’ thus cleverly challenges our exotic expectations and stereotypes about Africa.

director: Werner Herzog

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This short film is Werner Herzog’s unique visual version of a famous opera aria. Herzog’s moving yet enigmatic interpretation of Puccini’s love duet “O Soave Fanciulla” (“Oh Gentle Angel”) from LA BOHÈME is set among the Mursi people of south-west Ethiopia. Herzog combines powerful imagery to produce a wholly original marriage of opera and film.

director: Djie Han Thung

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A documentarist becomes the victim of his cinematographic subject - the camera turns around against himself: the spectator witnesses the point of view of a cameraman following the indigenous inhabitants of a tropical forest for an unknown purpose. It gets clear that the movements and observations of the camera don’t fit those of the indigenous people. Where can a voyage based on complete misunderstanding and mistrust lead? The space behind the camera seems to be a protected space. But this is an illusion. When communication does not take place, death is happening.

director: André Schreuders

“Are you afraid of what will come?” “I’ve been longing for light..” - One of the very few dialogue lines in LIGHT, an intimate “existential road movie” by the Dutch visual artist Andre Schreuders. Selected in Cannes 2010-Quinzaine des Realizateurs, LIGHT follows an old solitary woman who makes her last trip. Learning that she is terminally ill, she takes some things in a suitcase, puts her fish in a plastic bag and leaves on foot. During her lonely journey she has several brief but special encounters, when she is confronted with unexpected friendliness and human warmth. LIGHT is emotionally rooted in the filmmaker’s personal experience: his aunt, having a cureless disease, chose to go to a monastery and die by refusing all food and drink.

director: León Siminiani

A film about someone who once loved a woman in a desert with a camera.

Premiered in Locarno 2009 and selected in the avant-guard section of IDFA Amsterdam - Paradocs 2009, LIMITS:1ST PERSON is an intelligent, ludic self-referential reflection on the dialectics reality versus cinema. A voice-over talks us through the strange relation developed between a woman walking across a desert and the camera that follows all of her movements. What at first looks like a stylistic exercise will turn into a failed love story.

director: Lesław Dobrucki

'A woman is like wool: the more you beat, the softer she becomes’ (an old Turkish saying). The omnipresent household violence against women remains a taboo subject among the Turkish community in Germany. Premiered in Karlovy Vary 2010 International Competition, this inventively-edited documentary by Dobrucki is not a typical intervention reportage, but a poetic collage comprising of documentary material, family photographs and children’s drawings. The feverish, dynamic takes perfectly capture the atmosphere of danger and uncertainty that affects the protagonist of the film. At the age of thirteen she entered into marriage with her cousin and was sent by her family to live with him in Germany. The marriage turned into a nightmare. Beaten and humiliated, she eventually resolves to run away - as far from her home as possible. Even today she has to live in hiding from her husband's family, for whom her escape is seen as disgrace and betrayal. After all she has suffered, will she be able to pick up the shredded pieces of her reality into a new whole?

director: Miia Tervo

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Winner of Grand Prix and Best National Film Award and also European Film Awards nominee of TAMPERE FILM FESTIVAL 2010, premiered in PARADOCS, the experimental section of prestigious IDFA Amsterdam 2009, LITTLE SNOW ANIMAL is a hauntingly beautiful and thought provoking film which surpasses any narrow genre definitions, pushing the border between documentary, fiction and animation to explore human existential issues in a complex multi-layered way. A collage of live action, audio documentary recordings, hand drawn animation and archive material to create an impressionistic picture of a 16-year-old girl's troubled state of mind.

director: André Schreuders

A huge man’s face, superimposed over the view of a tranquil sea, preaches: “Blessed are those who fall head first. For they will see the world differently.. if only for a moment.” The head vanishes, and a bungee jumper comes into view, hanging from a rope coming from the sky, like a marionette. MANIFESTO FOR A FREE FALL is a personal and exploratory discourse on the phenomenon of bungee jumping, a (self) ironic visually beautiful essay about our struggle with the two-headed monster: boredom and mortal fear. Lots of people try to escape this by seeking exciting, adrenaline raising activities like bungee jumping. Falling versus jumping philosophy, as desperate attempt to reconnect with life.

director: Floris Kaayk

Just when you thought it was safe to use that chip implanted in your hand to automatically log into your computer, a new documentary is released illustrating in grim detail the dangers of medical implants. Exhibited at Venice Biennale 2009 and Centre Pompidou, winner of New Dutch Talent Award at Amsterdam Film Experience 2007, selected in IDFA, Dok Leipzig, Annecy, AFI Fest etc. Metalosis Maligna is a documentary about a disease that affects patients with medical implants. Metalosis Maligna occurs when a metal implant interacts badly with human body tissue, causing the metal to grow tendrils, which eventually puncture the skin from within and destroy it. The movie shows the development of the disease from its early stages through to the gory advanced stages, by which point entire sections of flesh have fallen away and all that is left is a skeleton of scrap metal.

director: Dana Bubáková

MINDBENDER is an animated film on the border between an objective storyline and an abstract expression of complex emotion in images. About such concerns, when words are not enough.

director: Arthur Kleinjan

Exhibited initially as video installation at Busan Biennale, Busan Museum of Modern Art South Korea and afterwards at prestigious festivals like Clermont Ferrand, Rotterdam and Ann Arbor, MOMENTS OF CONSIDERED TIME, by Dutch visual artist Arthur Kleinjan, is a personal reflection on courtship, fiction and reality, photography and film, history and memory. The film revolves around a series of photographs taken in Cairo (Egypt), all of which depict couples courting along Cairo's main bridges. The narrator discovers similar photographs which were left behind in a photo-lab but never picked up. They belonged to a press-photographer who had since gone missing.

director: Pouyan Jafarizadeh Dezfoulian

Haunting images offer a glimpse of generational tensions between tradition and desire for freedom. Swim across the screen and drift through dreams of lovers and rivers; see how a vase can contain the ocean.
This story about a hero with a thousand faces deals with gender identity against the backdrop of traditional cultural values and expectations.

director: Adelheid Roosen

“Now that my mother has developed Alzheimer’s disease, I don’t see her dissolving, I see her appearing. I see her as an Alice in Wonderland: she is falling through time.

I fall after her, discover where she is, what she is going through, what she is doing or saying.” ( ADELHEID ROOSEN)

Nominated for the IDFA Award for Short Documentary and the Best International Documentary for The Norwegian Documentary Film Festival 2010, screened in Karlovy Vary, Vancouver, Huesca etc, MUM is an originally stylized movie, replete with tenderness and humor, about a journey into the world of an ill woman. By theatre maker Adelheid Roosen’s about her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease.

director: Irina Ghenu

After her friend left, Nana remains only with a pair a glasses that she and her friend used to have. What would happen if one of the two glasses falls and breaks?

director: Daya Cahen

10,000 Russian boys and girls are preparing themselves for a heroic future. They call themselves "Nashi", or "Ours" and they are Putin's fast growing youth movement. They are the chosen ones, the future elite of Russia, the budding managers and politicians of the country that is destined to become the global leader of the 21st century. World premiered in PARADOCS, the experimental section of IDFA 2008, screened in Oberhausen, Hamburg, Centre Pompidou, Reina Sofia Museum Madrid, Haus der Kultur der Welt Berlin, NASHI is an uncanny revisitation of routines and rituals from a not too distant past. Propaganda and group activities can function as an instrument in a process of mass radicalization.

director: Denis Villeneuve

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During an opulent and luxurious banquet, complete with cavalier servers and valets, eleven pampered guests participate in what appears to be a ritualistic gastronomic carnage. In this absurd and grotesque universe, an unexpected sequence of events undermines the endless symphony of abundance. Canal+ Award for Best Short Film at Cannes Critics’ Week 2008, awarded in Toronto, Odense, Montreal, Barcelona, Austin, Calgary, Sitges, winning over 50 international awards and being selected in over 200 film festivals, Next Floor is a surreal, metaphorical film about gluttony - a view on human behavior in our era of over consumption.

director: Mihai Chirilă

NIGREDO is a non-narrative film, a musical experiment about the morning routine. In the bathroom the water runs black from the tap and, instead of getting clean, the human gets dirty, confronting with his dark side.

director: Gabriel Abrantes/ Katie Widloski

CARTE BLANCHE:

In postmodern descent, Gabriel Abrantes finds inspiration in the famous Manet’s Olympia, to reinterpret/explore the possible realities behind it.
OLIMPIA I : A female professional sex worker is visited by her homosexual adolescent brother and his two dogs. He confronts her about her line of work after having played trivial pursuit with mother on the sun deck. He wouldn’t pay a dime for her disgusting breasts.
OLIMPIA II: A transvestite professional sex worker from a middle class Texan family waits for customers while listening to Henry Gorecki and drinking mini diet Coca-Cola. His maid,  the ‘chocolate covered strawberry’ comforts him by rubbing his ‘soft batch’ and they begin making love.

director: Birgitte Stærmose

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The European Film Awards Nominee of Rotterdam 2010 and Honorable Mention winner at Berlinale 2010, OUT OF LOVE is challenging the borders between documentary and fiction to portray the lives of children trying to survive the aftermath of the Kosovo war by selling cigarettes on the streets of the battle-scarred city of Priština. Through fictional monologues performed by the children against the ghostly post communist backdrops, in an almost oneiric register, the film gives us access to their gripping and sad story of memory, loss, and fear. The staging of reality at first gives an uncanny feeling of artificial, which creates a distance, but very soon the deep emotional impact of this approach becomes overwhelming.

director: George Chiper

The fragile yet monumental actress Coca Bloos portrays a woman whose life is destroyed in the blink of an eye. Years later, she tells her story in front of the camera. Was her fate already sealed in the lifelines in her hand? In a series of tableaux in bleached-out colours, we see how after her life degenerated after an accident into endless repetition. From the bathroom to the living room, from the sink to the bed, day in, day out.

director: Nicolas Provost

CARTE BLANCHE:

Winner of Prix de Signes - Signes de Nuit Film Festival 2007, Special Jury Prize Clermont-Ferrand 2008, Prix UIP Vila Do Conde 2007, Nomination European Film Academy Award, Berlinale 2007 etc.
The crowded streets of New York City turn into fictive, cinematographic scenery. Provost is playing with our collective memory, its cinematic codes and narrative languages questioning the boundaries between a staged, suggested reality and authentic fiction. Although for the most part filmed with a hidden camera, Plot Point presents a highly dramatic construction with overly sophisticated images and a subtle but tangible urge in the soundtrack. The meticulousness with which Provost shoots and edits the images and sounds make Plot Point the perfect trailer for dramatized experience in our daily life - an ordinary walk on the street will never be the same again.
(Jury statement EMAF, 2008)

director: Marcel Lozinski

Church bells ring over a beautiful world of harmony which is underpinned with emptiness. Something is missing here. Is it sense? Or an aim? Or bonding? Winner of 2009’s European Film Award for Best Short Film, POSTE RESTANTE is a beautifully photographed emotional piece of observational cinema, capturing the birth, delivery and reincarnation of undeliverable letters in Poland.
Seemingly resembling an educational movie about the postal system, the film gradually moves into metaphysical realm. Letters whose addresses are impossible to find end up at the Undeliverable Letters Department of the Post Office in Koluszki. There are around a million of them in Poland each year. The film tells the story of one of them: a letter on which a child’s hand has written at destination address ‘God. Heaven.’

director: MARA MATTUSCHKA / CHRIS HARING

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A new result of the inspirational collaboration between the visual artist Mara Mattuschka and the choreographer Chris Haring, the Innovative Cinema Award winner at Diagonale 2008 and Honorable Mention of the Jury in Oberhausen 2008, the multi awarded RUNNING SUSHI is a highly original piece of experimental dance cinema exploring the profound disconnection between the interior and exterior life of contemporary Adams and Eves. A couple in a running sushi restaurant. Their first conversation soon explodes into a performative parallel world of the protagonists’ unspoken thoughts and emotions, where their bodies express more, and something totally different than their words.  Every coming sushi evokes a story from the unconscious repertoire of the chaos of human relationships. Wish-machines are cranked up and the language of body and gestures turns the objective reality slowly into a grotesque nightmarish world.

director: Nadia Tan

 

All the following secrets are true. They have never been told to anyone before.

A short experimental documentary, SECRETS is a collection of anonymous audio recordings of real secrets illustrated through abstract and surreal imagery. The director’s stylistic and technical approach to each of the stories is strikingly different. In making the film, the intention was to allow each secret to stand on its own, without judgement. The imagery complements the voices, without colouring the viewer’s perception. The editing is fluid and discrete, leaving room to breathe between each story.

director: Davide Pepe

CARTE BLANCHE:

The camera slowly moves in the course of time describing, in a Magritte way, several heterogeneous urban landscapes. The double narrative register allows an accurate description of the environment and its temporal evolution. The gaze is wondering about the metropolis destiny. A shrill voyage into a space of magnificent nervousness and threat. Beauty is broken, the existential alphabet declined into emptiness. In an anticipated future only relicts and ruins of human existence will remember a culture, which haven’t understood on time it’s programmed destiny to disappear.

director: Reynold Reynolds

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Winner of Distinction Award in Transmediale Berlin 2009 and screened internationally in museums and exhibition spaces, the two screen video installation SIX APARTMENTS follows six isolated people life in their apartments, side by side, oblivious to each other and the violent process of deterioration happening to them, their apartments, and the earth.

director: Signe Lillemark

 In an empty room flooded in solitude, a woman is holding a golden fish in a glass. The dream-like logic is filling the emptiness with painful emotion.

director: Salome Jashi

Often the faces of those who are silent express more than words ever could. In her expressionistic experiment SPEECHLESS, Salome Jashi makes us witnesses to a tragedy we never see. The film is a sequence of static shots showing faces of people whose lives have been affected by 2008 war between Georgia and Russia: a stranger on the verge of crying, a young man drifting into a restless sleep, a girl covering her eyes with her hand as her tears burst out, a mused woman lulling a child. They are all speechless. The horrors of the war are not physically visible on the screen. Yet, the silent sadness and pain and fear on their faces have a powerful emotional impact, much stronger than an objective depiction of war. The viewers are not outside witnesses anymore, they empathically experience the tragedy on a personal level.

director: Andrei Radu

SYMBIOSIS is a reinterpretation of the human body as a conceptual organism, made of parts, but a part itself. The human movement is a symbiosis of thoughts. This is how people connect with their bodies. Every movement of the human body is a deconstruction of feelings, impulse, and reason. Conscience is what makes a corpse become a body and what puts all the parts together in a human being.

director: James Lees

CARTE BLANCHE:

An unique mixture of sociological research, conceptual art work, performance and cinema, THE APOLOGY LINE succeeds in transforming a highly intimate communication into a powerful aesthetical set. The camera steps into private spaces, offering a panorama of a society doomed to isolation and inner pain. In haunting images and sounds which linger in the mind for a long time, THE APOLOGY LINE goes straight to the neuralgic point of a social and psychological reality. The voices whispering in the night, the cries and shouts of the anonymous speakers, which only by their assured anonymity risk opening up, reveal the artwork as the last resort of sublimating a private painful truth into a necessary reflection and (self)confrontation.

director: Šimon Hájek

This short experimental film combines intimate diary records of two different persons. The viewer becomes a witness to the confrontation between Caroline H.’s diary (report/ A4 notes, sound) and auteur’s diary (record/ 8mm film, frame).

director: Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni

CARTE BLANCHE:    

 

Fascinating view of life in a small Indian town. The Best Cinematography Award winner at Indian National Film Awards 2009 and the Golden Conch Best Short Film Award in Mumbai 2009, The Spell gives us, in the form of one long slow tracking shot, a fascinating insight into what happens behind the walls of a block of tenements near the train station in a small Indian town. Very briefly, we share their very personal lives. The camera takes us to the kitchens, living rooms, toilets, bedrooms of the inhabitants, in some of their most private moments. Masterful light, sound design and art direction recreate the same space into intimate universes that our fleeting gaze briefly grasps, wishing to linger a bit longer inside each of their stories. Yet  an inescapable force carries us further while a strange nostalgia stays behind.

director: Amit Dutta

CARTE BLANCHE:

A small Indian village, a house, early morning; a family is sleeping. The boy is sleeping next to the window. He is asleep, yet awake. A mysterious man with a black coat comes every morning when everyone else is sleeping. The boy has seen him before in his dreams. In this state between conscious and unconscious, the boy hallucinates about the history of his mysterious sleepy village, childhood and nostalgia.

director: Jonas Odell

World premiered in Berlinale 2010 Competition, European Film Awards Nominee of Krakow Film Festival 2010, screened and awarded in prestigious film festivals all over the world, like HotDocs, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Telluride, Sidney, Edinburgh, Sao Paulo, Sarajevo, Vila do conde etc,  TUSSILAGO is an innovative and ever-evolving combination of animation, live action and documentary to recreate a personal story and an historical era. West German terrorist Norbert Kröcher was arrested in Stockholm on March 31, 1977. He was leading a group planning to kidnap Swedish politician Anna-Greta Leijon. A number of suspects were arrested in the days following. One of the people arrested was Kröcher's ex-girlfriend, "A". This is her story...

director: Naveen Singh

CARTE BLANCHE:

TWENTY SEVEN THOUSANDS DAYS places the confrontation with the death in a strange light, as possibility to reconstruct the truth of one’s own life. It is a convincing reflection on the limits of self awareness and perception of reality and on the tragic irreversibility of time and personal history. More then a biological ending, death means the confrontation of dying each moment by not perceiving potentials and consequences of each act. Being confronted with the unconscious awareness of missing time and unlived life is not only painful, but sometimes unbearable.

director: Olivier HEMS

CARTE BLANCHE:

A dead man forgotten in his apartment for 16 months leads to a bureaucrat's unexpectedly tender discovery of the man's love story and lonesome ending. Based on the 8 mm home movies and writings found in the apartment, the reconstruction of the dead man’s life starts. His ending gets readable as the last act of a lonely life, in which the separation from the beloved appears as the decisive moment of self abandon and auto destruction.

director: Ulu Braun

Westcoast is a panoramic video collage of a mystic collapsing water world, consisting of interweaved scenes mounted on a coastline - somewhere between Rotterdam and Sydney. Critics Award winner in Zagreb Experimental Film Festival 25FPS, shown in exhibitions and museums all over the world, Westcoast presents a deeply disturbing tableau of a post-transnational wonderland punctuated by eerie, repulsive bursts of garbage, animal afterbirth, careening speedboats and bloody water - all of it meant to convey the horrors that dwell just beneath the surface of Western culture's shiny, happy façade.

director: Andrea Pallaoro

CARTE BLANCHE:

An elderly woman and her son struggle to coexist in a house that shelters a spectacular menagerie of birds.  Surrendering to their codependence, inside a world that bears no exit, they go about their bedtime ritual resisting and succumbing to each other’s needs. Within the everydayness of their gestures and movements lurks a secret, and the anticipation of what might come is the dawning question.