Category: program 2023

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program 2023

Matchbox (Caixa de Fósforo)

Director Biography – Jennifer Cabral
Jennifer Cabral holds a BFA from two Brazilian institutions: School of Fine Arts Escola Guignard with a concentration in Photography, and a BFA in Social Communications from PUC-Minas with a concentration in Advertising. She relocated to the U.S. and attended classes at the continuing education Program at The School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2022, she received a Master of Information degree from Rutgers University School of Communication with a concentration in Archives and Preservation. Her studies focused on potentialities brought into collections when photography and archives intertwine.
A member of National Press Photographer Association, she started freelancing for newspapers in central New Jersey in 2002 and has been an independent photographer for over 20 years.
SYNOPSIS
As one of the finalists in a beauty contest, my maternal grandmother, Maria Eulina Vieira dos Santos, would be awarded with her photo stamped on matchboxes. Engaged at 15, her future husband did not approve such an award. She ended the engagement on May 13th, claiming her freedom and exclaiming: “On this day, slavery was abolished.”
In this work – part historical research, part imaginary – I confront the right of a white woman to compare her lack of autonomy with that of an enslaved body.
The subjugation of women prevalent in a patriarchal society is a mere backdrop to expose how inappropriate it is to compare the subjugation of a white woman with the systematic oppression, torture and appropriation of human beings. Especially by a woman that was member of a family that benefited from the systematic enslavement of other human beings as operator of sugar cane plantations in Brazil – the last nation in the western world to abolish slavery.

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program 2023

Manta Ray

Director Biography – Anton Bialas
Anton Bialas was born in 1990 in Paris, from a Swedish mother and a German father. He pursues cinema studies at Paris III La Sorbonne. His first film, Behind our Eyes (2018), has been selected at the FID Marseille, and has then been screened in many international festivals. In 2020, his film At the Entrance of the Night, premieres in the Berlinale official competition. Thus, The Blackbird Group Noir (2021) is selected in the official competition of the Visions du Réel festival in Switzerland, as well as in the Brive medium-length film Meetings. His last film, Manta Ray, follows on from his other films; in their exploration of marginal figures in search of poetic breaches.
SYNOPSIS
MANTA RAY is a fragmented portrayal of three characters in search of poetic and liberating openings in a muzzled and gradually authoritarian Paris of the 2020’s. United under the sign of the MANTA RAY, Kamilya, Ghost Rider and Gilles, each in their own way, organizes his secret melody, crafts a situation, where, alternately, a sense of lightness can be found, suffocated screams can uprise and reality be distorted into new horizons.

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program 2023

Knit One, Stab Two

Director Biography
Alison Peirse is a multi-award winning horror writer and filmmaker. Her fourth book, Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre has won awards around the world and was the subject of a screening series at the Museum of Modern Art in August 2022. Her last short documentary, Three Ways to Dine Well, won awards and played festivals around the world, including Brazil, USA, UK, Thailand, Germany, Spain and Nigeria.
SYNOPSIS
This essay film examines the representation of knitters and knitting, in over sixty horror films made by women, from the 1920s – 2020s.
Please note: English, Spanish and Bahasa Indonesian .srt files are available at the bottom of this project page. They can also be selected using the ‘CC’ button on the Vimeo file.
Spanish Subtitles by Valeria Villegas Lindvall
Bahasa Indonesian Subtitles by Sevita Amanda

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program 2023

Killing Cinema

Director Biography – Tomaso Aramini
Tomaso Aramini. Director, producer.
He holds a Ph.D. in filmmaking from Leeds Beckett University on film language and painters ideologies and practices. His practice centers around conceptual and political films, often hybridizing these two genres.
In 2021 he released his first documentary feature The Lost Shoes which won the London International Documentary Film Festival and got selected at over 20 film festivals worldwide including Europe Autour de l’Europe, Chichester International Film Festival, Signes de Nuit.
In 2022 he founded Method, a production company focused on International co-productions. While developing his next documentary feature Running for Anna presented at the 24th TDF’s Agora Pitching Forum he completed Uccidere Il Cinema/ Killing Cinema, a short doc on his artistic discipleship with maverick filmmaker Romano Scavolini.
SYNOPSIS
15 years of artistic discipleship between me and radical filmmaker Romano Scavolini recollected through a series of audio fragments recorded by Romano in which he discusses his uncompromising conception of cinematic art. An operation of semantic archaeology, resignifying a continuous flux of ideas, thoughts, sequences from his films and beyond.

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program 2023

Ingresso Animali Vivi

Director Biography – Igor Grubic
Igor Grubic (Zagreb, 1969) has been active as a multimedia artist since the early 1990s. His work includes site-specific interventions in public spaces, photography, and film. He represented Croatia at the 58th Venice Biennale. His critical, socio-politically committed practice is characterized by long-term engagement, his work focusing on past and present political situations, from an in-depth exploration of the fate of historical monuments and the demise of industry, to the examination of the predicament of minority communities. Though grounded in documentarist tradition, Grubić’s work in photography and film is characterized by an affective and empathetic approach that is deeply humane and often poetic. His work has been exhibited at various international exhibitions and institutions, including the Tirana Biennial 2 (2003); Manifesta 4 (Frankfurt, 2002); Manifesta 9 (Genk, 2012); 50th October Salon (Belgrade, 2009); Gender Check, MuMOK (Vienna, 2009); 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009); 4th Fotofestival Mannheim Ludwigshafen, Heidelberg (2011); East Side Stories, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2012); Gwangju Biennale (2014); Zero Tolerance, MOMA PS1 (New York 2014); Degrees of Freedom, MAMbo (Bologna, 2015); 5th Thessaloniki Biennial (2015); Cut / Rez, MSU (Zagreb, 2018); Heavenly creatures, MG+MSUM (Ljubljana, 2018); The Value of Freedom, Belvedere 21 (Vienna, 2018); 58th Venice Biennale (2019); Yerevan Biennial – The Time Complex (2020); Bigger than Myself, MAXXI (Rome, 2021).
Filmography: Ingresso Animali Vivi (2023), How Steel Was Tempered (2018), Monument (2015), Capitalism Follows Socialism (2012), Woman with a Candle (co-author with Lana Cmajcanin) (2011), East Side Story (2008), Angels with Dirty Faces (2006)
SYNOPSIS
Animals from Eastern Europe for the Italian food/meat industry used to be transported to the towns along the state border in Northeast Italy. From those conveyor-belt spaces of death, only one animal managed to come in and out alive.

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program 2023

I Am a Horse

Director Biography – Chaerin Im
Chaerin Im (1994, Seoul) is a filmmaker from South Korea with a focus on experimental animation. With the use of craftsmanship and distinctive materials, she explores gender issues and sexual imagery. She graduated from Seoul National University’s Visual Communication Design BFA program (2017) and earned an MFA degree from the CalArts Experimental Animation program (2020). Her films have competed in widely-known festivals such as Annecy, Ann Arbor, Animafest Zagreb, DOK Leipzig, Ottawa, Slamdance, and GLAS. She is the 2021 GLAS grant recipient.
Filmography: I am a Horse (2022), Eyes and Horns (2021, graduation film), Mate (2019, student film), Flora (2018, student film)
SYNOPSIS
Where are the girls? Unable to find girls in the diverse artwork of the Korean artist Lee Jung-seob, Chaerin Im unravels an imaginative tale of women born with half of their bodies being a horse and a tiger. These roaming women are too fierce and free to match their given role as a daughter, wife, and mother in the patriarchal society. The tale is inspired by the Korean birth dreams (Tae-mong) of her mom when she was pregnant with her twin sister and herself.

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program 2023

FLYBY KATHY

Director Biography – Pedro Bastos
Pedro Bastos was born in Guimarães, Portugal, in 1980, where he lives
and works. He is a visual artist, filmmaker, poet and screenwriter.
His films, “Ao Lobo da Madragoa”, “Cabeça D’Asno” and “Ambulatório Through Poesia de Augusto dos Anjos & António Nobre”, have been presented in several national and international festivals, such as Tyger-Internacional Film Festival of Rotterdam; São Paulo Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma Montreal, IndieLisboa, Curtas de Vila do Conde, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, Oberhausen ISFF, etc.
He was a scriptwriter for films by directors Rodrigo Areias, Jorge Quintela, David Doutel & Vasco Sá and Tânia Dinis.
Exhibits regularly since 2012, in individual and collective exhibitions,
having been selected for the Biennale d’Art Contemporain – Jeune Création Européenne 2015/17.
In 2020 he published his first poetry book, Piche.
In 2021 Collaborated in the creation and videographic realization of the community project in Vale do Ave, “Os Que Nele Habitam” with the artistic direction of Rui Souza for Outra Voz.
He is currently filming “Less than 50km from Home” – a cinematographic project around the industrial region of Vale do Ave, where he lives, based on its oral history and traditions.
SYNOPSIS
In 1981, English actress Kathy Harcourt mysteriously disappeared from the United States.
40 years later, this story unfolds, from an old 35mm copy of the last film Kathy Harcourt stared in.
This film retraces this brief episode of the golden age of adult cinema.

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program 2023

Evanescence

Director Biography – Mare Šuljak
Mare Šuljak is a multimedia artist from Dubrovnik, Croatia. She holds an MA in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. She is a member of the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU) and Croatian Freelance Artists Association (HZSU). Her work was presented at numerous solo and group exhibitions, as well as film festivals in Croatia and abroad. Her short experimental film Site Selection (2012) screened in the official competition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and won her the award for Best Debutant at the Croatian Film Days.
Filmography: Site Selection (2012), The Doorway (2013), 722 032-2 (2013), Tailor (2019), I Am Better Off When You Are Silent (2019), Pink Stories (2021), Before Dark (2022), Evanescence (2023).
SYNOPSIS
I walk through empty corridors and dance with the light. I erase myself from every frame and meet all versions of myself.
…
Evanescence is a reflection on death and transience from the point of view of a person remaining behind. It is a film about the search for identity in an ever-changing world, whose future itself is increasingly uncertain. The death enforces the awareness of the inexorable nature of transience. Enfolded by space that is in a state of constant flux, endlessly emerging and disappearing, the author too fluctuates with it.

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program 2023

DIGITAL NO-MAN’S

Director Biography – Lida Zacharopoulou
Lida Zaharopoulou is a data analytics engineer and interdisciplinary artist from Athens, Greece.
She completed her studies in Computer Science at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and worked for a year at CERN as a software developer. She continued her academic pursuits with a Master’s degree in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
Currently, she is a postgraduate student of Digital Arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts, while working in the field of data analytics.
SYNOPSIS
AI-generated images have nowadays become so realistic that distinguishing the real ones from the fakes is nearly impossible. Trained for days with massive data and GPUs scattered all around the world, they have crossed the borders of the Uncanny Valley into the hills of visual perfection.
What about those digital beings that do not have the resources to complete their training? These low-res synthetic creatures are the low-class citizens of the Humanoid Realm. They can’t afford to train forever nor to be GPU nomads. They are stuck in the Uncanny Valley, always striving to convince the Discriminator they look real enough, always dreaming of climbing the steep hill of human likeness.
A short animated film exploring AI through AI, this project aims to shed light on the inner workings of AI algorithms, specifically those responsible for creating realistic human faces, like the GAN models. GAN systems (Generative Adversarial Networks) are machine learning algorithms comprising two neural networks: the Discriminator and the Generator. The core idea behind this model is a fascinating game played between these two entities: the Generator continuously produces images in an attempt to deceive the Discriminator into perceiving them as real rather than synthetic. In response, the Discriminator assesses each image’s authenticity. This intriguing back-and-forth between the two networks is played out repeatedly, resulting in the production of increasingly realistic images.
The video depicts a fictional dialogue between the Discriminator and the synthetic creatures it evaluates. These creatures engage in a Sisyphean effort, an endless struggle to reach an elusive perfection, as they strive to deceive the Discriminator and rise above their pixelated origins.

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program 2023

Contrapunctus V

Director Biography – Kenji Ouellet
The film’s director Kenji Ouellet is half Japanese, was born in Québec, Canada and is based in Berlin. He graduated in piano performance (MA, City University of New York), in Digital Art (University for Applied Arts, Vienna) and in Experimental Media Design (Film, University of the Arts, Berlin). His work consists mostly of films/videos and performances, and has been shown and won distinctions internationally, including at the Media Forum (Moscow International Film Festival), the Zendai Museum of Modern Art (Shanghai), the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art (Bremen), Videologia (Volgograd), the Cologne Art Film Biennial, the Strange Screen Festival (Thessaloniki), Le Havre Biennial, Media Art Friesland (NL), the European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), Videoex (Zürich) and at the Mois Multi (Québec).
Biography/filmography, longer version:
https://www.kenjiouellet.net/en/biography/
SYNOPSIS
CONTRAPUNCTUS V (5) is an experimental documentary featuring mind fragmentation, a search for patterns and Japanese urban architecture. A time capsule of sorts, centered on (biological or artificial) brain states, it makes different themes and voices converge and connect in a rhizomatic, multitasking structure reminiscent of musical counterpoint (and attention deficit behaviour symptoms).
The images show simultaneous events and multi-layered architectural structures. The soundtrack involves multiple voices interacting in a polyphony, each voice associated with one theme: there are quotes about sleep, capitalism and work, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, the effect of the internet and related technologies on the brain, and quotes from people suffering from dementia.
Japan is according to recent statistics the country where the population sleeps the least, and has the worlds largest percentage of older adults. It is in those ways and others at the forefront of issues and trends that are global. The film is not a straightforward portrait of the cities it shows. They become metaphors and a point of departure for a reflexion on those global themes, as well as symptoms of time and space disorientation.
In a world where the border between work and free time is increasingly blurred, the time when we sleep and dream may be the last area completely free of work. We are (often voluntarily) trying to change that.
Many try to sleep less (to different and sometimes extreme degrees, like those experimenting with polyphasic sleep) in order to work more, often motivated by the productivity mindset.
A correlation has been observed between lack of sleep or disruption of sleeping patterns and the onset of dementia.
In parallel to our brains striving to multitask and adapt to media technologies (involving changes in attention patterns, some addictive behaviours etc.) and our presently unavoidable ageing-related neurological decline, we witness the increasing capabilities of an old fantasy, artificial intelligence.