“In 1991, thanks to a grant, I stayed in Berlin for a while. I wanted to work on the fall of the Wall and the ensuing reunification. But traces of the Holocaust kept bringing me back to the heart of history. Places bore witness to the past with a violence I had never experienced. La Sept ordered me a sixty-minute sequence shot for the ‘Live’ series. Four times I tried to retrieve the connection with present. Nothing suited me. Finally, I settled for a minimal option. I found myself in my bathroom, the tiles of which reminded me of the torture centre in Berlin’s memorial space ‘Topography of terror’, and without consciously meaning it, I resumed the conversation started with Our Nazi.” (Robert Kramer, “La fin de l’histoire”, Documentaires n° 8, 1994)

Here, the cinematographic gesture, anchored in a singular place, reaches the universal. Jean-Jacques Andrien returns to film in the Northeast of Belgium, in the region of Herve, Wallonia, bordering the Netherlands and Germany, where, some thirty years earlier, he had shot both Le Grand Paysage d’Alexis Droeven and Mémoires. He returns to this familiar landscape, and takes up a recurring interrogation of his cinema, dealing with transmission or non-transmission of farming land, this time in a new context. At a time of reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, and namely of the abolition of milk quotas by the European Union, amidst the negotiation of the Transatlantic Trade Treaty, this film, built around sensitive portraits of farmers, reveals, by giving them a voice and showing their struggle for survival, a peasant world of today, its deep-rooted culture and its interrogations about the present state of the world. – Jacques Lemière

Animated photo-negatives illustrate a WWII tragedy.

Drifting through the densely forested landscape of Southern Slovenia, Greetings From Free Forests, like a lifting fog, reveals a refuge of embedded historical memory. The film travels alongside the testimonies of local hunters, foresters, cavers, and foragers among others— orbiting around an absence left by radical struggle after it has come to fruition and since faded. During WWII, this forest served as a sanctuary for the Partisan Liberation Front, who were resisting the Fascist occupation of Yugoslavia. Remnants of this event can still be found throughout the forest in various states of decay, but also within images that sought to preserve the revolution’s emancipatory energy for future generations—images now stored in an underground film archive buried within the forest itself—depicting both the violence and the hope that came with radical change.

Each time the film flow is interrupted to record an image, the strobe light seemingly freezes the motion of the waterwheel—unleashing its motion patterns and creating an illusion of reversed motion and standstill—contradicting its actual speed. Our perception is tricked twice simultaneously: the illusion of the moving image is created in camera while the illusion of standstill is enforced by the strobing on the water wheel’s patterns.

Somewhere in the Alentejo, there are two large earth-covered kilns where a man makes charcoal. The essential elements of fire, water, air, earth and space reflect, breathe and celebrate the rhythm of the Earth.

Archivo Pittoresco is a map-repertoire of songs intertwined as a multilingual lament, played in a very personal percussive guitar technique and transcending musical categories. Each one-song concert explores different paths within the constellation of fragments.

Critical examination of the special effect of the dolly zoom – first used by Hitchcock in Vertigo -, Vertigo Rush becomes a declaration of love to film and the richness of the cinematic language. Used as an extremely effective means of creating shock in numerous films (Jaws, Goodfellas), here the focus of 20 minutes of experimentation is on the sensation of rotating and revolving (vertigo).

A man, a child, two wars, a river, a tree. A man and a child meet on a river bank, sharing the same memory and a secret. They find in each other the serenity, the silence and the time they lost in the flowing water of the river.

Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory is a meditation on the Palestinian people’s struggle to produce an image and self-representation on their own terms in the 1960s and 1970s, with the establishment of the Palestine Film Unit as part of the PLO. Unearthing films stored in archives across the world after an unprecedented research and access, the film begins with popular representations of modern Palestine and traces the works of militant filmmakers in reclaiming image and narrative through revolutionary and militant cinema. In resurrecting a forgotten memory of struggle, Off Frame reanimates what is within the frame, but also weaves a critical reflection by looking for what is outside it, or what is off frame.

In the Navarro’s textiles, animals, objects and spaces are represented. Their fabrics are made in the backstrap loom, a Pre-Hispanic technique preserved by indigenous women for centuries. Through textiles, women have built the archives of a parallel history of Mexico’s crosscultural relationships, “mestizaje”, colonialism and modernity. Echoing the politics and ethics represented in the objects they weave, the Navarro have built an ecological and familiar micro society, earning their independence and freedom.

A postcard from an imploded society. Bringing mundane objects to life to interpret place through materials, The Grand Bizarre transcribes an experience of pattern, labor, and alien[-]nation[s]. A pattern parade in pop music pairs figure and landscape to trip through the topologies of codification. Following components, systems, and samples in a collage of textiles, tourism, language, and music, the film investigates recurring motifs and how their metamorphoses function within a global economy.

Nevada: Of Landscape and Longing is a reminiscence of a journey through the desert state of Nevada in the Summer of 2009. It is an encounter with the state as two distinct sides of an American coin, both rural and urban, living through the recent economic collapse and longing for an abstract past.

A poem in image and sound between humankind and nature.

Eastern Belgium. The district of Fourons, site of a bitter linguistic conflict. The changing world of farming – industrialize or go under, adapt to EEC norms or be sidelined – provides the film’s historical backdrop. The emotional story is every bit as dramatic, concerning the death of the father. These tragic events simultaneously affect the life of a young farmer. Will he take over his father’s farm or move to the city; create a new life for himself far from all the problems and conflicts, or leave death and the great landscape of Alexis behind, as suggested by his aunt, a lawyer in Liège?

Born out of an “objective hazard” (a 16mm roll where two different subjects were imprinted by mistake), Jeny303 is a composite work intertwining two portraits. On the one hand there is jeny, the feminine alter ego of a transgender millennial dealing with a heroine addiction. On the other hand, there is the 303 building, an iconic modernist architecture in a public university in Bogota (Colombia). The images of the body and the edifice interlace and depict jeny303, a character on the threshold of a transformation to come.

Antonia is a lyrical singer whose beauty is uncommon, lush and somber. Recovering from a suicide attempt in a rehabilitation institution, all her family ties are irreparably broken. But her sister remains deeply affected by what happened… An (auto)fiction intertwining ethnography, musical cinema and reenactment, drawing the portrait of an artist coming back from the underworld.

A day in the life of Sena, who lives in a cinema projection booth in Sarajevo, screening the few Yugoslavian films of which copies still remain, taking us on a journey through her past.

A film with no answers but as many questions as there are stars in the universe, Austrian structuralist Johann Lurf has chosen an audacious and ever-expanding subject for his feature film debut: the stars of cinema. Not the movie stars, but the stars in the night’s sky, pinpricks of light against the darkness excerpted from films beginning at cinema’s dawn and continuing to this present day in a project that is planned to be expanded yearly. These stellar instances, riven from context with sound intact—ambient hums, grand orchestral scores, pedantic explanations, dreamy speculation—are magical fields of darkness sprinkled with possibilities. Lurf’s jazzy editing, balancing tranquil concentration and jumpy jitters based on his methodology of retaining each clip’s length, image and sound, sends the audience on a journey across the tones of promise and threat that emanate from the cosmos. A subject difficult if not impossible to accurately photograph on film, we are therefore greeted again and again by the varied interpretations of the starry night by matte artists and special effects wizards, gazing now in stillness, now in careening motion across or into space at incandescent nebulae, distant twinkling dots, and the black void in-between. Surveying a history of cinema’s fixation with, and escape to, outer space, we find both what audiences in their own times saw up there, as well as mirrors of our own wonderment: Awe, terror, hope, arrogant confidence, melancholic yearning and blank, awesome silence. These are the rare moments when the movie audience, backs to the projector, in fact faces light projected at them: Our eyes are the screens for the cinema of the stars. (Daniel Kasman)

A brief presentation of some of the central themes running through a body of work containing nearly thirty films: the relationship between character and experimental animation; the borders between art, craft, and commodity; and animation’s position within a documentary practice.

The Tokyo Reels is a multi-faceted, collaborative project that involves research around the collection of films and posters that were kept in the PLO’s representation office in Tokyo. The project’s mission is to explore the production of images and narratives in the framework of international solidarity between Japan and Palestine in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

“Route One links Canada to Key West in Florida. In 1936 it was the most travelled route in the world. In 1988, it runs beside super highways and through suburbs, cutting through the old dreams of the country. During five months shooting along this route, I did not have the impression of filming the past, but rather of revealing the present. From the shadows of the interchanges, the town centres of glass and steel stand out against the horizon like studio décors. We were in the present, affronting difficult times.” – Robert Kramer

Trilho is a record of sensations that aims to capture the essence and breadth of Desencaminharte 2018, by following the construction of ten different projects in Alto Minho over several months. In this narrative, the territory is the starting point for a poetic analysis of art, landscape and memory.

A travelogue upstream the Amazon river where Modernist constructions have been abandoned like the memories of an engulfed civilization of the future. A science-fiction documentary evoking colonization, former utopias in Latin American forests and their cohabitation with the present.

On a lake surrounded by tall buildings, a man builds a boat. The dream of an impossible journey to escape the memories of an everlasting past.

Blending found home-movie audio and silent images of the everyday, Nostalgia creates a cinematic space between memory, personal media and loss. The work concerns something fundamentally human within the personal, an experience built from a patchwork of memories, stitched together, that seeks the comfort of an idealized past.

Two elderly sisters live in an old house situated opposite the school where they used to teach. Their care and attention is shared between the house and the garden. Their daily life, serene and unhurried, is full of memories and small tasks. Whilst the garden reveals the passing of time, the house seems to live with quivering light and trembling breath. Illness arrives, unannounced apart from that of age itself.