Author: gibaster

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program 2023

Zabriskie Point

Director Biography – Cho Seoungho
CHO Seoungho (1959, South Korea) holds an MFA in Graphic Arts from Hongik University and an MFA in Video Art from the University of New York. His work focuses on using digital processing techniques to manipulate everyday objects and scenes into highly lyrical sound and image collages, and has been the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He lives and works in New York City.
SYNOPSIS
A landscape that has captivated many filmmakers and enshrined itself in our collective cinematic lore is here abstracted to its foundation: colour, shape, light and shadow. Through the high contrast geometry of its image, the film brings us further from its popular references and closer to the essence of the cinematic experience.

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Repetitions

Director Biography – Morgan Quaintance
Morgan QUAINTANCE is a London-based artist and writer. His moving-image work has been shown widely, with presentations in 2020 including Curtas Vila Do Conje, Portugal, at which he received the Best Experimental Film award and CPH:DOX, at which he received the New Vision Award, both for the film South (2020); European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; and Images Festival, Toronto. Over the past 10 years, his incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their sociopolitical contexts have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK.
SYNOPSIS
An exercise in observing repetition, following patterns and deciphering loops. Drawing focus through the lull of recurring images and repeating sounds, a clearer image emerges of industrialised labour and the vulnerable bodies of those performing it. This film finds a rhythm, much a like a machine, to manifest the misgivings of the working class.

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program 2023

Exterior Day (Esterno giorno)

Director Biography – Giulia Magno
Giulia Magno is an Italian filmmaker, art historian and curator based in Rome. Her films have been presented internationally, including at the ICA Miami, the National Galleries of Scotland, and the National Museum of Cinema. She has collaborated with institutions such as the ICA London and the MAXXI Museum in Rome to curate exhibitions exploring the intersection of film and contemporary art.
SYNOPSIS
Inspired by a famous exchange of letters between Michelangelo Antonioni and Mark Rothko, “Esterno giorno” is an experimental love letter to Italian cinema. Embarking on a journey in the footsteps of the characters played by Monica Vitti, the filmmaker poetically intertwines contemporary footage shot across Italy and the Jordanian desert with excerpts from Antonioni’s films, creating an illusion of continuity between past and present. From a metaphoric desert (the industrial area of Ravenna, where film masterpiece “Red Desert” was shot in 1964) to a real one, the physical spaces explored by the camera become psychological landscapes, states of mind, atmospheres. As the camera lingers on the architecture of La Cupola—the futuristic house in Sardinia designed by avant-garde architect Dante Bini in the 1960s for Antonioni and Vitti, then real-life partners—the line between reality and fiction starts to blur.
In collaboration with Archivio Michelangelo Antonioni.

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program 2023

Why Are You Image Plus?

Director Biography – Diogo Baldaia
Diogo Baldaia was born in Porto and grew up in the city of Maia. He studied at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (ESTC/Lisbon) where he graduated in Film Directing and Cinematography. He took a master’s degree in Visual Arts at KASK Conservatorium (Ghent, Belgium). He worked and lived in Brussels before returning to Portugal, where he is currently based in Lisbon. His films have been awarded and shown at national and international film festivals, such as the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Vienna Shorts, Oberhausen, IndieLisboa, etc.
SYNOPSIS
Ima is a little girl who passed away too soon. Desperate to talk to her grandmother, she decides to possess a young boy. But an old spirit is interfering with her plans.
At a conceptual level, “Waking Field” represents an ongoing exploration in observation, meditation, and artistic research. Why do we stare and slowly decompress at the sight of light on water, a distant flock of birds or an empty bag hovering in an alley ? There is an apparent gray area of experience where cadence, familiarity and abstraction are in balance and serve to connect us in an elemental and unified manner. Ive sought to expand on these moments of “betweenness” and shift them towards the primary.

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program 2023

Waking Field

Director Biography – Brian Alexander
Brian Alexander is a transdisciplinary Artist who’s works are specifically focused on the unseen, unheard, and under served life forms among us. His practice involves the development of one off tools, processes, and programs in order to realize the space beyond our collective limitations in perceptual bandwidth. Believing the adage “a fish cannot tell you about water”, Alexander’s works point towards the gaps between human intent and understanding by bridging the Earth’s deeper signatures and reconnecting us all in a grounded and immersive experience.
His 34 year professional career spans public and commercial Art endeavors including Sculpture, Installations, Sound and Performance, as well as product and technical process development. He currently holds 28 patents with permanent works in MOMA NY, Cooper Hewitt, and Smithsonian.
In 2011 He established Trace Bloom as a blanket field of exploration and artistic research for all forms of media in an immersive, and fully inclusive approach. Distilled as definition, Trace Bloom is; to loosely outline perceived phenomena, to develop the tools and conditions for emergent expression, and to allow that expression to grow unencumbered to a point of perceived resolution or shared understanding.
SYNOPSIS
Waking Field is an optically based experimental film shot in realtime without computer generated effects or post processing. The only physical subject is light and water. I have developed open lens systems which operates in complete darkness in a 20’ x 30’ room. The actual lenses have no body and are a combination of glass and melting ice which degrade over time such that no two takes are exactly the same nor are they repeatable. The art of the process has become in creating the conditions which manifest the effect since it is largely uncontrollable, it is a practice of allowing and openness. The audio is created primarily in realtime with as few post tweaks as possible. It is hoped that this sense of the immersive, rooted in physical reality can serve to ground us and help reset media stereotypes.
At a conceptual level, “Waking Field” represents an ongoing exploration in observation, meditation, and artistic research. Why do we stare and slowly decompress at the sight of light on water, a distant flock of birds or an empty bag hovering in an alley ? There is an apparent gray area of experience where cadence, familiarity and abstraction are in balance and serve to connect us in an elemental and unified manner. Ive sought to expand on these moments of “betweenness” and shift them towards the primary.

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program 2023

Underground Ants

Director Biography – Leevi Pienihäkkinen, Kristiina Kekomäki, Oskari Koponen
Leevi Pienihäkkinen is a film student from Finland. Leevi is studying Film and Television at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. Leevi specializes in cinematography but is also interested in directing and editing. He also has experience working on fictional short films as a lighting technician and editor. Leevi has also studied journalism and he has a previous qualification as an electrician.
Kristiina Kekomäki is an easily enthusiastic and diligent aspiring screenwriter. She is studying at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences to become a screenwriter and is interested in societal issues and politics.
Oskari Koponen is by nature thoughtful and easily enthusiastic budding cinematographer . He is studying cinematography at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and is interested in filmmaking and storytelling.
SYNOPSIS
Have you ever wondered what happens inside an anthill?
The ants’ industrious and disciplined life also includes a surprising way to relax. Deep within the depths of the ant society, its members thoroughly enjoy the life of an ant. Demanding tasks require fittingly substantial amusements.

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program 2023

TOXX

Director – Luna Mrozik Gawler
SYNOPSIS
TOXX wonders what the body becomes in world and epoch united in contamination. As studies identify microplastics in clouds, air pollution particles in placentas, and PFAS ‘forever’ chemicals in 90% of tested breast milk, TOXX meditates on microbial migrations and the choreographies of change, exploring a planetary inheritance of industrial residue. Traversing territories of toxicity, and queer(y)ing the eco-monstrous figure, this work reckons with the grotesque figurations of ecological presents and the uncanny futures that might evolve from it. The porous progeny of the Toxicocene find themselves united in contamination across every cell, site, and species. Resisting the urge to withdraw from the disquiet of such intimate incursions, eco-monstrous figures invite us to turn towards the chimeric forms haunting contemporary myths of ecologic purity or return. TOXX lingers in the disquiet of post-normal narratives, refusing the convenience of utopic/dystopic binaries, to instead it favour the morphic muck of transition without the expectation of arrival. The Toxicocene offers no apocalypse, no salvific future, only the motley miasma of bodies seeping, blooming, metabolising and mutating in transition, unceasing. A toxomythology without end.

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program 2023

They’re all dead

Director Biography – Marisa Benito Crespo
Marisa Benito Crespo (Barcelona, 1974) has a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts and a Master’s Research Degree in Art, Music and Aesthetic Education. She lives and works in Córdoba, where she teaches Audiovisual Media at the Mateo Inurria School of Art. Her research work focuses on staged or constructed photography from the perspective of female creation. She combines her professional activity with audiovisual creation and photography. The aesthetics of her work are generated through images shaped by sensory experience, the imaginary and the memory, and photographic and cinematographic language.
With her short film Dúctiles (2018), Marisa won the Video Art Award at FEM TOUR TRUCK 2018 – International Feminist Video Art Festival. This work was also the winning short film of CORTOS EN FEMENINO 2019. She was a finalist in the IV International Competition DONA’M CINE 2019. She has been selected for the programme of women’s short films by the INSTITUTO CERVANTES, presented in 21 cities where this institution has headquarters. She has participated in the official selections of various festivals, including: 6th VAFA International Video Art Festival (Macau, China), CYFEST 12 Digital Video Art Program (Saint Petersburg, New York), FIVAC 8th Camagüey Video Art Festival (Cuba), FIVA 08 International Video Art Festival (Buenos Aires), IBRIDA Festival (Forlí, Italy), LAN Audiovisual Festival Obrero (Bilbao), and IVAHM 2019 International Video Art Festival (Madrid). In 2021 she presented at PHOTOALICANTE International Photography Festival.
Her work Artificio (2016) obtained a mention at the 1st FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DE CORPORALIDAD EXPANDIDA in Buenos Aires. She has taken part in the official selections of various festivals around the world, including: Feminist video art festival FEM TOUR TRUCK (which toured though Latin America and Spain), 6 UNDER THE SUBWAY VIDEO ART NIGHT (New York, Madrid, Berlin, Buenos Aires and Valencia), BIDEODROMO 2016 International Film and Experimental Video Festival (Bilbao), MA/IN 2016 – MAtera INtermedia Festival – a digital art festival (Matera, Italy), III CONCURSO INTERNACIONAL DONA’MCINE 2016 (Spain), IVAHM 2017 Festival Internacional de Videoarte (Madrid), and IBERODOCS Ibero-American Documentary Film Festival (Edinburgh and Glasgow).
In 2009, she co-directed La Cita, which was placed as a finalist in the video-creation section of the 13th edition of the FESTIVAL DE MÁLAGA.
SYNOPSIS
In this post-photographic context of the digital age, we relate to images in a different way; they have other meanings, and they have been dematerialised. They have become elements without a body, ephemeral and superabundant. The transition from an analogue to a digital process has become a paradigm shift.
Family photographs used to be a treasure, passed down from generation to generation, which we could look at and touch to evoke the memory of a moment, or of a loved one. We have a memory fragmented between the photographic paper and the screens. It is easy to find a photo in our albums, but not so easy among hundreds of files and folders. If we do not look at them, these photos cease to exist.
What will the memories of this digital generation be like? People will no longer have a box in which to store the photographs of their lives, of their history.

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program 2023

STRATIS

Director Biography – Antonis Maros
Antonis Maros is a visual artist and film maker based between London and Athens, Greece. He is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, the Athens School of Fine Arts, the Department of Communication, Media and Culture of Panteion University and the Veaki Drama School in Athens. He works with performance art and moving image to explore issues around identity, confinement, and exclusion as social and cultural constructs. His work has been exhibited in the UK, Sweden, France, and Greece.
SYNOPSIS
On the most isolated island of the Aegean Sea, a man faces a series of paradoxical challenges to reach his final destination.

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program 2023

Still Life with Woman, Tea and Letter

Director Biography – Tess Martin
Tess Martin is a filmmaker/visual artist based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her work is informed by hand-made animation techniques and their potential to explore the human condition. Persistent themes are our place in nature, our relationship to the past, and how memory and perception inform identity. She creates short films, interactive installations and paintings/prints.
Filmography: Still Life with Woman, Tea and Letter (2022), Orbit (2019), Ginevra (2017), The Lost Mariner (2014), Mario (2014), They Look Right Through You (2013), Hula Hoop (2012), The Whale Story (2012)
SYNOPSIS
A photograph is a window into the past, but sometimes the border between the past and the present is not entirely clear. This stop-motion animation invites us to think about our relationship to time by portraying one woman caught in the middle.