Making Circles (métamorphosis) / Yoko Fukushima / Japan-France / 2002-2008 / 3’20

A woman makes herself white to erase her identity and ego. She tears away her hair and arranges it in the shape of circles to create another world. She abandons her clothes in the forest, lies down at the foot of a tree to return to the earth. Life is a repetition of construction and destruction, just like birth and death. Then where is the exit of this infinity circle?

Copy Shop / Virgil Widrich / Austria / 2001 / 12’

A man wakes up, arranges his hair and goes out into the street on his normal way to work. After he arrives, he xeroxes his hand (and his identity) and the world goes to pieces. The man continues to make copies of the film frames – first, a Doppelgänger appears, and then an infinite number of copies are produced.

Genius and Madness / Triny Prada / France-Colombia / 2010 / 6′

From a tender age some children know their destiny, they know what they were born for… An obsession, like a state of madness pushes them to realize their dream. Once that obsession is fulfilled, madness turns to genius. Time and space become one.

Surreal Random MMS Texts for a mother, a sister and a wife who longs for you / Christopher Gozum / Philippines / 2008 / 15′

Using a Pangasinan-language translation of Filipino-American activist Carlos Bulosan’s 1942 poem Landscape with Figures as a narration, an expatriate Filipino filmmaker working in the Middle East sends surreal, random, and found digital images of displacement and longing to his loved ones in the Pangasinan province of the northern Philippines.

Counterparts / Jan Verbeek / Germany / 2010 / 8’43

The stream of images and the stream of sound go their own ways and merge to a tragic constellation in the mind of the viewer. Image is a man continuously being absorbed in playing, silently by himself. Sound is the musical evidence of a woman’s voice – increasingly aggressive, violent and desperate.

Hau Raus! / Nhu Nguyen / Germany / 2009 / 0’31

Slap it out! An inner bondage creates a tension between sereneness and nerviness. Quietness and agitation oscillate between the two screens and highlight the tension between the two.

Masking for Serene Velocity – Heat Shot 3 / Yeonjeong Kim / South Korea / 2008 / 11′

Masking for serene velocity – Heat Shot 3 is the third part of HEAT SHOT series from 2007 and also an independent piece made by hand-process on 35mm film. Referring to Ernie Gehr’s masterpiece Serene Velocity, it explores the speed and movement between ordinary signs and memories. The collision between 16 mm and 35 mm film creates new movement of film itself, materially as well as a subtle range of emotions.

Thanks anyway / Matthias Wermke & Mischa Leinkauf / Germany / 2006 / 6′30

Armed with only a pail of water, we took on the Germans “stick-up-their-ass” mentality, proving once again that Berlin may be poor but it is still damn “sexy”.

Friday 18 February
8–9pm

ANGER
Duration: 30’36

F / Ethem Özgüven / Turkey / 2004 / 6′

Men rule the world and try to dominate women and their lives. Violence against women has many forms – physical, psychological, economical and social. The frameworks and names that allow violence are called honneur, familier peace, paid sexuel workers, culture… The only chance against violence directed towards women is to change the culture of male domination – in all senses.

Revolution contra revolution / Barbara Hlali / Germany / 2009 / 3’32

An abstract way of thinking about the possible effect of fanatic political action: the intended goal turns into the opposite and the activist has to fight against his own aims.

Mao Mao / Frédéric D. Overland / France / 2005 / 2’

A cry of solitary anger emerges from the maelstrom. Detournement and flicker are used here to transcend the futile nostalgia of political symbols tainted by the society of the spectacle and its inevitable issue: boredom. Let the dead burry the dead and pity them; for it is our destiny to be the first to enter into the new world.

Occupation / Leila Hotait / Spain-Lebanon / 2011 / 2’30

An audio piece on people’s, and in particular women’s, resilience, resistance and intimacy.

October / Ezzam Rahman / Singapore / 2010 / 7’34

October is adapted by two real failed relationships. Shot in London in October 2009, this film is made accidentally through a series of video clips the director had collected during his study trip there.

Jeunesse en mouvement / Lionel Soukaz / France / 2003 / 9’

France, June 2003, prime minister Raffarin plans a pension reform. The French people unite to express their disagreement. They took to the streets in a dynamic movement of resistance and creative anger.

FANATICISM
Duration: 42’15

The First Ones / Hatice Güleryüz / Turkey / 2000 / 4’40

Evocation of family home movies with the Super-8 aesthetics. The artist shows us two groups of students. These images emerges from a black screen as a perpetual back and forth between presence and absence. The sound track is composed of school sermons and the national anthem repeated in a loop. The repetition brings us to question the hold of nationalist sentiment over the individual and analyses the submission to the collective order starting from a very young age.

I, soldier / Köken Ergun / Turkey / 2005 / 7’14

I, Soldier is the first part of a video series in which Köken Ergun deals with the state-controlled ceremonies for the national days of the Turkish Republic. The nationalistic attributes attached to these large-scale events are framed in a non-descriptive way and shown from an almost voyeuristic point of view. I, Soldier was shot at the National Day for Youth and Sports, the day that marks the start of the independence war of the Turkish people under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the Allied Forces back in 1919.

Mighty Ballistic / Josephine Turalba / Philippines / 2008 / 6’51

Sculpture Bullet Dress made of .45mm, .38mm caliber bullet and shotgun shells. A performance by Josephine Turalba walking and interacting with people in the streets of Manila. Death cultivates visibility, what has disappeared is the loudest that calls for us. What can be seen is what is no longer there.  Trauma triggers the search for that inner voice that calls us to slow down and mend.

Even if she had been a criminal… / Jean-Gabriel Périot / France / 2006 / 10’

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

Sophistication / Sarnath Banerjee / India / 5′

Sophistication is a collage animation based on real images and drawings by Sarnath Banerjee. It depicts ironically the fanatic and indefatigable political and religious conquests of mankind from Europe to Asia.

Helenés – Apparition of Freedom / Christoph Draeger / Switzerland / 2005 / 18’30

Helenés combines two examples of propaganda from East and West. A bleak Hungarian instructional film on nuclear attack is presented in its entirely, strategically subtitled witz text from George Bush’s inauguration speech – an idiosyncratic interpretation of the concept of freedom.

Saturday 19 February
2–3pm

FEAR
Duration: 49’25

Kirkirerland / Patricia Reinhart / Austria / 2008 / 1’20

The disaster of the present has become an irrevocable reality. Inspired by Arthur Rimbaud’s A season in hell, Patricia Reinhart explores a mythologic, nebulous scene situated at the end of the world, close-by the realm of the dead.

Excerpt / Guli Silberstein / Israel-UK / 2008 / 4’35

An excerpt out of Internet video news: a family is hiding behind a wall in a neighborhood that turned into a war zone. The image is processed, discovering new dimensions, and creating a troubling contrast between content and imagery, leading to an uneasy effect: anxiety deconstructed into pixels.

Of Anna and Dreams / O Zhang / China-USA / 2010 / 12′

Of Anna And Dreams is a visual journey into the dreams of Anna May Wong (1905-61), the first Asian-American actress to earn a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. She defied cultural and legal barriers to achieve international success and was a true pioneer of her time. This film is a modern, artistic interpretation of three dreams exploring three themes in her life: fear, identity complex and lust for love.

Mr Moth / Arnaud Delord / France / 2002 / 9’

When I was a little boy, Miss Marple would say: “If I don’t stop torturing insects, Mr Moth will come and get me in the middle of the night…”

False Friends / Sylvia Schedelbauer / Germany / 2007 / 5’

A montage of mid-century found footage: mysterious strands are obsessively braided to create a poetic reflection about an anxious interplay of memory and projection.

Sbara / Larissa Sansour / Palestine-UK / 2008 / 8’30

Heavily referencing the 1980s cult classic The Shining by Stanley Kubrick, the video piece Sbara explores the castigation of Arabs in contemporary Western dialogue. By adding an audio montage combining historical and current quotes on the Middle East, to footage paraphrasing scenes from the original film, Sbara seeks to expose the cyclical nature of Middle Eastern rhetoric and policies, and emphasize the psychological terror inflicted upon those at the receiving end of this repetitively stagnant political discourse.

The Night I became a Doll / Alice Anderson / France-UK / 2009 / 9′

The Night I Became a Doll is a nine-minute film, which deals with a violent power play between a mother and daughter. The maternal bond, a recurring subject in Anderson’s work – is explored here in a troubling mise-en-scene: The mother is only capable of taking care of a doll so the daughter doesn’t eat, speak or move for weeks and becomes a doll. The film explores the theme of maternal rejection as Anderson continues her probing into the psychological complexity of the family unit.

Saturday 19 February
3:30–4:30pm

MONO NO AWARE
Duration: 66’11

The outline of everything / Yuki Hayashi / Japan / 2010 / 7′

Yuki Hayashi creates animated works by cutting and combining some of the many photographs and videos he has taken and stored on his computer. In The outline of everything he uses computer drawing in order to manipulate this photograph and video data. A line, which serves as a vestige of this data, begins to move while maintaining the relationship to the photographs and videos. The artist made this work while thinking about questions such as whether this data, which has no materiality and possesses a certain kind of indefiniteness, can interact with defined images and what lies at the limit of that world.

Breakfast / Izabela Plucinska / Poland-Germany / 2006 / 2’20

At the breakfast table a man and a woman don’t have anything to say to each other… until a wind blows into the room and turns their lives on its ear. Breakfast is a beautiful excercise in clay-mation and relief.

Opak / Lily Wittenburg / Germany / 2007-08 / 12’

Opak explores a city through an erratic cinematographic stroll. Reading the different fragments, the viewer divines that the poetry of this video lies in the impossibility of pursuing the coincidence of the events. The narration is presented in fragments without an obvious order, seen from an elevated balcony over the emptiness. An archive of laundry, waving in the wind. An empty space opens between the people’s lives and the necessity of a story, that suddenly becomes inadequate.

A state of crystal / Johanna Reich / Germany / 2010 / 3’20

The camera lies in a puddle on the ground. It films the surroundings and the reflection of the surroundings on the water’s surface. The artist runs towards the camera and jumps into the puddle thus destroying the mirrored image. The camera lying in the water is rotated by 180 degrees. As a result, the image above and not, as would be expected, the image below is destroyed at the moment of the jump.

Orientations / Ismaïl Bahri / Tunisia-France / 2010 / 7’30

The video Orientations is made of a sequence filmed by a subjective camera that recounts a wandering in the city of Tunis. The off-screen reflected in a glass filled with ink is used as a compass and an illusory float with a funambulistic progression. In this very simple optical device, the appearance of city fragments gives directions and stretches the horizon. The video shows a walk of short-sightedness and a gathering of images of the overflowing, and distraction of senses.

Napoleon / Taro Izumi / Japan / 2009 / 2′

During his first stay in Paris, Japanese artist Taro Izumi tried to appropriate the city in a peculiar and poetic way: he catches and assimilates objects, monuments and passerby by drawing them in the palm of his hand.

Weekend / Paula Un Mi Kim / Brazil-South Korea / 2009 / 7’45

A single young woman that lives in a big city with lots of cute couples around, like Seoul, might have depressing weekends. Or… might not. It all depends on her point of view.

In the field / Biying Zhang / China / 2010 / 3’16

The video in the field expresses humanity through the exposure of the interaction between human beings and nature, via observations that partially reveal an unpredictable connection between the internal world and external surfaces.

Shadow of movement / Masakazu Saito / Japan / 2009 / 8′

Viewing movement as “a shifting of the position of an object during a given period of time” (including no movement), this series digitally processes moving figures to visualize the trajectory of their movements. It makes the movement visible from new aspect.

Three notes / Jeanno Gaussi / Germany-Afghanistan / 2007 / 4’

“Twenty pictures are left as the only evidence of my early childhood home – the evidence of an almost forgotten home. When I look at these images I have the feeling that they are not part of my life, as if they belong to someone else. In staged cinematographic rituals I am trying to close this gap, finding myself in these pictures, to re-appropriate those memories. Memories of Kabul, Afghanistan, a certain time and a certain place.”

Outside the sun is shining / Masayo Kajimura / Japan-Germany / 2010 / 9′

Outside the sun is shining documents the inside of the former Kurhaus (spa hotel) in Ahrenshoop/Germany. The empty rooms of the ruin were filled with poetry, as if this in-between state of decay had stories and inhabitants of its own. The building was pulled down in 2009. What is left is the eternal sea.

Saturday, 19 February
5–6pm

MELANCHOLY
Duration: 58’9

Dark Continent / Marylène Negro / France / 2010 / 6’10

Dark continent is made from 3 photographs of a sculpture by Pedro de Mena: Penitent Mary Magdalene (1664). The title of the work is inspired by a text of Sigmund Freud who wrote in 1926: “the sexual life of adult women remains a dark continent for psychology”. A dark and obscure continent, secret and hidden, that designates the female space as a space of strangeness. Being lost and alone with her love, Mary Magdalene is looking for the one she thinks is lost, unable to recognize him. Obsessed by her desire that has lost its object, she is unable to see. Only the word of the other gives her back her ability to see.

Sentimental Journey / Tony Wu and Georges Hsin / Taiwan / 2003 / 10’

A three-part love story: a girl is talking about her ex-boyfriend who is now chasing a homosexual love. Although she stays at home, both of them are exploring simultaneously an unbounded sexual journey. The traditional narrative monologue is manipulated to link the experimental segments. As the story goes on, the emotion of those original and abstraft footages are becoming touchable.

Lethe / Yuki Kawamura / Japan / 2005 / 4′

Two lovers swim in a river called Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. In Greek mythology, the Lethe flowed through the Underworld, where all those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness. The couple never meets and thus drifts apart. A girl dives into the river to forget an unhappy love.

Oh torment (Wa Wailah) / Monira al Qadiri / Kuwait / 2008 / 10′

Oh Torment (Wa Waila) is a surreal film based on an old Kuwaiti folk song, whose words are almost like a trance of sadness. Monira al Qadiri used this aesthetic as a metaphor for her film, interpreting it as a vehicle for personal grief: the film depicts love lost, displacement, gender identity, and death in an extremely visual yet absurd manner. It can be described as visual poetry. The artist personally enacted the main male ‘singer’, and all the roles of men and women are swapped in the film.

Divine Invasions / Matthias Groebel / Germany / 2006 / 9’59

Divine Invasions is an anonymous biography of the American fiction author Philip K. Dick. Everybody is talking about him but his name is carefully erased. Two concurrent sections of the screen contain imperceptible 3D information, the constant reflection creates an electronic prayer mill: a method of remembrance.

Endnote / Ashish Avikunthak / India / 2005 / 18′

Three women reminisce about their times at school and rekindle and affirm old friendships. They share a strange secret about each other that is never made known to us. The film is a cinematic interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s 1966 dramaticule, Come and Go.

Saturday, 19 February
7–8pm

DESIRE
Duration: 56’4

Black Cherry / Lucky Kuswandi / Indonesia / 2005 / 5′

A woman finds herself confronted by her own image: who is she, and what makes her a woman? As she finds a black cherry that seduces her, she is forced to explore and to finally take full control of her own body.

Strips / Felix Dufour-Laperrière / Canada / 2009 / 5’

A masculine noun, which is a shortened form of striptease. From “strip”, to remove, to take away, and “tease”, to entice, to tempt. All this in plural.

The return / Tulapop Saenjaroen / Thailand / 2008 / 5′

“The Return” is an attempt from the artist to recall his lost memories concerned with his dead father who passed away in 1991. The funeral photographs are overlaid with the voice of the artist performing as his dead father coming back to life.

There is a spider living between us / Tejal Shah / India / 2008 / 6′

There is a spider living between us considers desire – the yearning for two, to become one. This assimilation exists also in the myriad of techniques used – still frame animation, photo collage and memoir. We wander through, amid layers of language, lesbian sexuality and tribadism – as a political, sexual act, as well as a physical fusing/ scissoring. Ultimately the viewer is delivered into a space of reflection, about the larger philosophical questions around desire, as we may choose to frame it for ourselves.

The place you left / Junho Oh / South Korea / 2006 / 10’23

After you left and I remained here alone, the place of memory turns to be vile and empty. Although it’s too hard to wait for your answer without promise, I’m waiting for you while holding my breath and feeling your way.

Hulahoop Soundings / Edwin / Indonesia / 2008 / 7′

Lana swings on a hulahoop when taking sex calls. Nico is madly in love with her. Heidy is his jealous girlfriend who believes Lana has put a spell on him. A remake of Joel Coen’s thesis film, Soundings.

The boy and the sea / Victric Thng / Singapore-Korean / 2008 / 3′

A visual monologue of how the sea yearns for a boy.

Été / Romain Kronenberg / France / 2007 / 14’41

Eté is a movie of shadows and light where three people experiment different kinds of love.

Sunday 20 February
4–5:15pm

HAPPINESS
Duration: 23’22

Heels Down, On Your Feet / Yuko Kamei / Japan / 3’04 / 2004

The protagonist is a full-time office worker who practices dancing at night. Both are important aspects of her life, and none of them are a compromise to the other. The artist asked her to wear the work uniform and dance her choreography under the sky.

Féhérkék / Rita Bakacs / Hungary-Germany / 2008 / 1′47

I can blow the clouds away, so you can see the sky. In Hungarian, the word “fehérkék” has two meanings: “fehér” means white and “kék” means blue. Therefore the first meaning is “whiteblue”. But “fehérkék” is also the plural of “fehérke”, which is the diminutive form of “fehér”. So, the second meaning is “little white parts.”

Out loud / Stéphane Gérard / France / 2011 / 5′

Virtual lives allow people to shape themselves into as many new identities as they want. In the end, no one really knows who is behind each of them anymore. However, this other reality hasn’t completely taken over humanity, and sometimes there are still authentic loud and colourful laughs behind the ordinary “LOL”.

Hello Antenna / Veronika Samartseva & Anna Samoylovich / Germany-Russia / 2008 / 4’40

Hello Antenna is the story about Susie, her mother, the Royal Family and shopping. An animated music video with lots of airplanes, antennas and one big explosion.

Schaukeln / Steffi Stangl / Germany / 2005 / 3’37

Between a balcony and a living room hangs a swing. The artist takes to the skies and moves like a pendulum between the inside and outside. After a while she becomes static and the world passes around.

Frontière / Isabelle Levenez / France / 2009 / 5’14

Frontière depicts a static and emotionless shot of people immersed in a steam bath, enveloped in silence.

ISOLATION
Duration: 47’40

Le silence est en marche / Pierre-Yves Cruaud / France / 2001 / 3’30

Inseperable barriers limit vital space of more or less human activities. We attend the development of already regulated lives. Will we hear voices? The film interrogates our report on social conditioning.

Berlin – Beijing a.m. p.m. / Szilvia Ruszev / Germany-China / 2006 / 5’

A girl and a boy in Berlin and Beijing, a possible love story. Their lives happen simultaneously in a split-screen frame with the city-life as a background. The two protagonists, such as the two cities and cultures are so far away and so different, but at the same time very similar. One day, maybe a day of departure, a day of searching for something. Will they ever meet?

Les illuminés / Halida Boughriet / France-Algeria / 2007 / 1’27

With Les illuminés by Halida Boughriet, the viewer’s vision, the screen, is mixed up with that of a woman wearing a burqa, the video artist herself. The viewer sees the world – the astounded passersby she encounters on a moving sidewalk inside the Montparnasse train station in Paris – through her eyes, her obstructed vision. Les illuminés offers a radical experience of otherness and demonstrates that apart from being symbolic, the covering of women is first of all material.

Ohne Titel (Fragment) / Alexander Schellow / Germany-France / 2010 / 4’37

Ohne title (fragment) animates the facial landscape of a 96-year-old woman who lives at a clinic for Alzheimer’s patients in Berlin. The film addresses the status of a subject in which the individual framework of perceptions and memories begin to dissolve, bordering on dysfunction. Revealed are exclusive moments of “just before” – a perception, a thought, and a memory. In such a zone, the individual begins to disappear. The result of this endless mental movement does not seem like an absence – neither of identity nor of meaning. By creating a model case of alternation, the film offers the visitor a shared space and a time-sequence. It examines the establishment of communication without language; of narration and utopia in a literal sense.

Nightmare / So-youn Park / Korea / 2009 / 6’36

Nightmare is the artist’s response to the story All at One Point in which Calvino describes all matter as existing in a single point before our invention of time and space. In So-youn Park’s version, white noise from the radio implies the constant interruption of a social system which shapes our lives, through the conceptual grids of time and space, into chains of meaningless instances, to which the sleeper reacts in a spasmodic manner.

Let go aviary / Sookoon Ang / Singapore / 2004 / 3’20

With one’s self to mind ‑ Solitary without solitude. Imagination at liberty.

Nouba / Katia Kameli / France / 2000 / 5’

A traditional wedding scene behind a music video aesthetic that puts into play a potential tragedy. The film is based on a faraway and exotic reality in rhythm, painting local images over global music.

From B to H / Saki Satom / Japan / 2002 / 3’10

From B to H, catches the movements of a solitary woman as she dances to canned music in an office lift, that is transformed into a privat ballet studio.

Dogs / Massimilian & Nina Breeder / Italy-USA / 2010 / 9′

An action of control, domesticated and regulated by relieving pain, and freeing a wild race into the Alaskan Tundra, driven by eight sledge dogs. Ruins of machinery populate the landscape. Dogs is a reflection on the action of exert force in order to move, and a consideration on the effects of pain relievers on the perception of movement. Isolation is expressed as internal condition in response to society and as an act of self fulfillment.

Reflect / Machima Ungsriwong / Thailand / 2010 / 6′

A shadow can be distorted unlike the real object. Is that what you long for?

Sunday 20 February
8–9:30pm

IMPERMANENCE (Duration: 83’12 min)

Magia / Gérard Cairaschi / France / 2010 / 6’35

A young boy molds objects with clay that he then manipulates, combines and associates, in an obscure ritual. As the objects/representations he creates combine and develop a narrative, the fast alternation of images on the screen imbricate and shape images/apparitions that only the “lanterna magica” of cinema and the magic of editing allow. Magia means enchantment.

Peach Blossom / Qiulin Chen / China / 2009 / 16’37

The video Peach Blossom was filmed in a factory, ruined by the We chuan earthquake at the end of 2008. On one hand, Peach Blossom brings more concern to the disaster areas, getting people to help those in need; on the other hand, the earthquake is only a background of the work, not the theme. Like in her former works, Quilin Chen focuses on the relation of people’s lives and the changing circumstances.

Old Choi’s Film / Bin Chuen Choi / Hong Kong-Germany / 2002 / 18’

Old Choi’s Film is a documentary about the last seven weeks of the life of the artist’s father in Hong Kong. Whenever Bin Chuen Choi comes visiting from Berlin, he used to take photographs or videos of his father. When he learnt that his father was diagnosed with cancer at a very advanced stage, he decided to capture their remaining time with his camcorder, for as long as possible.

EARTH [cinema] / Tzu Nyen Ho / Singapore / 2009-10 / 42′

We see the site of an unknown disaster, the debris of history that constitutes the story of Earth. Upon the site, lay fifty 50 humans oscillating between consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death. Sometimes, one of them emerges into the foreground – clutching a fist, batting an eyelid, or weeping for his neighbor. At other times, these figures recede from the light, losing their individual shapes to form a gigantic organism, breathing in unison, pulsating like a jellyfish, though their journey across Earth.