USA

Setting its parameters from the first words spoken, I Remember Nothing exists precariously on the edge of chaos and poetry, structured around the five stages of epilepsy while looking at a day in the life of teenager Joan. Stuck in the tedium of small-town America and the humdrum of high-school, she is the poster-girl of teenage angst, a budding life-force arrested in development. Her only escape appears at a baseball game, as a source of curiosity and excitement offered by her blossoming puberty. Zia Anger purposefully induces a sense of disorientation and peril through casting choices and flourishes of magical realism, framing Joan’s sexual exploration against epilepsy’s impending assault. By the end, we’re left dazed, confused but fully submissive to the powerful impact of love and its menacing consequences. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF)

An intimate space where the highly personal note fuses with the general human condition is created by Nina Yuen in Raymond, allegedly a monologue of the artist's father, in fact an indirect account of her own family background. The visually striking narrative moves freely and playfully from calculations of the most curious sorts, such as the total number of miles driven from their home to her school or the equivalent in calories of the quantity of fruit the father has harvested during seventeen years, to reminiscences of his childhood, and memories of him as a young father and of her as a baby. At some point, the artist ingeniously weaves deep subjects into the fabric, like the origins of the universe, mortality and the passage of time, with captivating effect, creating a tender and enchanting personal discourse on the spiritual and emotional baggage bestowed on her. (Adina Marin, BIEFF)

For more than 25 years, Louis Akin has retraced Death’s footsteps, separating and re-arranging with detached objectivism the sequential facts of some of the most violent crimes in the USA. Working as a defense forensic investigator, his role in the 2009 mass shooting at a US military base took three years to reconstruct the crime scene that director Tom Rosenberg maps out for us in a spacious warehouse. Within this minimal mise-en-scene, Akin literally walks us through the events of that tragic day, leaving it up to the viewer to mentally reconstruct the carnage mapped out in words and diagrams. As the information accumulates, the mind tries to make sense of it all, but the incomprehensibility of mankind’s constant propensity to violence is too much to bear. Using the simplest of cinematic tools, Nothing Human opens our eyes to the abstract irrationality of violence and the paradox at the heart of what makes us human. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF)

Questioning beliefs and practices of ancestral divination in South-African societies, Greetings to the Ancestors, winner of the Tiger Award for Short Film, looks towards the invisible world and investigates the divine power of dreams. Ben Russell intermixes ingredients of documentary, ethnography and dream cinema, to illustrate the fluidity of the boders of consciousness, which dissolve and expand. The camera is either anthropologically engaged in the trance-inducing ceremony of the Jericho Congregation, or quietly tracking healers or poets who give account of vivid dreams induced by the hallucinogen African Dream Root, and eventually races along the African landscape, a surreal red filter applied over its lens. It is an expercise in what Ben Russel defines as psychedelic ethnography: a way to allow for the apparently objective facts of existence to be constantly reframed by radical subjective experience. (Adina Marin, BIEFF)

Kung Fury is an ambitious short film of high production value, which manages to pack every trope of the 80s cop movie genre. We encounter a visual compilation of all time monsters and patterns of action movies, the notion of going back to the past and a battle between good and evil, where the first one is helped by the presence of human-animal hybrids and the latter is the ultimate villain, Adolf Hitler. Apart from being a homage to all the impressive things of the 80s, its stylistic approach and thrilling visual effects mark its camp aesthetic with a sensibility based on deliberate and self-acknowledged theatricality; its graphics and cover story deepens in our brain and reveals a metatextual and an iconic construction of a cult and hip short film. (Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF)

Screened at Berlinale 2014, THE WHITE ROSES, by Diogo Costa Amarante, questions identity, gender and family roles, while creating a general sense of ambiguity, underlined by absurd and oneiric elements. Symbolist in content and post-modernist in succession, relying on its minimalist aesthetic and extra-diegetic performances, the film boldly presents the mechanism of coping with the loss of a loved one, and the irrational side of mourning (Bianca Bănică, BIEFF 2014) 

Addressing ethical issues of authenticity and creative ownership, EL ADIOS LARGOS playfully restores the opening scene of the (supposedly) only surviving print (a black and white, truncated, Spanish dubbed version) of Robert Altman’s classic, The Long Goodbye. Andrew Lampert's self-declared "painstaking restoration" sees the protagonist’s nocturnal ride to the supermarket becoming a psychedelic somnambulist’s trip. The characters float within a cinematic space, where analogue and digital artefacts playfully deconstruct the mise-en-scene, blotches of paint transforming the black-and-white space into a surreal carnival of color. A mischievous cinematic (re)reading that purposefully gets lost in the process, down the rabbit-hole. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF).

In THE DARK, KRYSTLE, footage from the popular 1980s soap opera Dynasty is skilfully turned into an unsettling psychodrama that pits against each other the polar-opposite female protagonists of the TV show, Krystle and Alexis. Making use of soap opera’s good-evil archetypes and their trademark emotive gestures, Robinson’s dramatically-precise montage and electronic score transports the characters in a multi-layered, metaphysical realm. Recalling David Lynch’s split-psyche narratives, The Dark, Krystle transcends its source material to become a wholly original and self-contained work of cinema. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF).

Shot in the period 2012-2017 during travels to and fro between Romania and the USA, using personal archive and combining 8mm film with digital files, States Uprooted attempts to challenge the idea of rituals in transition, identity, longing and its perception in different countries. (Călin Boto, BIEFF 2018)

The prologue to The Green Fog shows a dial being turned from “Talk” to “Listen”. In a studio cinema, a man in handcuffs is held at gunpoint as he watches the images on the screen. A map can be seen, with a finger pointing to San Francisco. Reporters stand in front of a building, poised to deliver news by loudspeaker; the public wait in fear. The Golden Gate Bridge appears, bathed in green light; a storm rises, the steep streets of the city are entirely deserted. The structure of this film by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson pays homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo: a dizzying assemblage of film and TV images both familiar and unknown, all from the Bay Area. From this trove of found material, they have created a cinematic fantasy that pulls the viewer in and never lets go. (Berlinale 2018)
 
“As befits the Maddin imagination, The Green Fog is constructed with an eye for the bizarre and the joyously perverse. Discontinuity is sometimes wildly heightened, in classic Surrealist mode... This is an exuberant, celebratory, often marvelously funny piece of work; it’s also strangely melancholic and mesmerizingly uncanny.” (Jonathan Romney, Film Comment)
 
“At this stage in his career, Maddin has mastered a particular form of filmmaking, and has garnered significant approbation for it. But instead of simply generating more of the same, his newest work finds him taking on new collaborators, trying radically new things, and broadening his formal repertoire. In every way, The Green Fog is the work of a bold, forward-thinking artist.” (Michael Sicinski, Letterboxd)
 
“More than a literal fusing of the city's famous atmospheric conditions with the green hues of Vertigo, this fog takes on its own mind-bending significance, pushing the film toward the fever-dream territory of Maddin's other films. Even working with some of the most mainstream ingredients one could possibly find (including, in a funny moment, an NSYNC video) and one of the most familiar settings on earth, Guy Maddin knows how to make things strange.” (John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter)
 
“Somehow, not withstanding its fragmented diversity of images, and despite the fact that it features very little dialogue..., The Green Fog remains intelligible and remarkably coherent, even as the narrative lines expand, bend and contort to include sundry digressions... The film, in essence, is a brilliant exercise in meta-narrative, which raises questions galore about reality and representation, time and space, genre and gender, individual and urban identity, cinematic suture and casting etc.” (Geoff Andrew, Sight & Sound)

Screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, American Reflexxx is a social experiment pushing the limits between passive voyeurism and active participation. A revealing tight blue dress, neon coloured heels and a reflective mask make up the armour performance artist Signe Pierce dons, as she struts down an esplanade at night-time, posing provocatively. Her androgynous presence incites curiosity, disgust and confusion. However, as the audience grows, their feelings swiftly turn from probing to entitled aggression and disregard for others. Powerful and chilling, this short film reveals the darkest side of mob mentality and a disturbing readiness in finding justification for violence. (Diana Mereoiu, BIEFF 2017)

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER - THE ART OF BODYBUILDING consists of unprocessed, original 16mm material which the director herself shot during the Mr. Olympia Bodybuilding contest in the 1970s. VANLOO filmed Arnold Schwarzenegger, then Mister Universe, around 1975/1976. In her art installation “Sculpting the Body” she presented him as a living work of art: some of the poses were reminiscent of Rodin’s “The Thinker”. This art installation is unfortunately lost, but the original recordings have been used for a new cut. In this new film we see footage of an interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger by Raymond Mondini, recorded just after the Mr Olympia competition in 1976, combined with footage from the competition itself.

The film III tackles the issues of rape culture and sexual assault through three different cases in three different countries: China, Vienam and Romania; it also considers the way these cases where similarly “dismissed” by the authorities.

Drawing on Albert Camus’ eponymous text, Luiza Pârvu and Toma Peiu’s Sisyphus 2.0 is a visual compendium of humanity’s search for meaning. Made of real surveillance footage, the film assumes its perspective’s omniscience, beginning as a series of quotidian assemblages of ‘a day in a life’ of the global citizens, embraced by a voice-over retelling of the Sisyphus myth. With deep humanism and sensibility, Pârvu and Peiu question the meaning of the search, as man-made violence and natural cataclysms - the other side of humanity’s essential creative impulse - jolt the daily existence of the surveilled humans. In the end, faith overcomes fatalism, the search becomes the meaning itself, and the film’s closing, noble gesture, cradles us to the lullaby of hope. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2017)

A film crew follows three grieving participants of Miami's annual T Ball, where folks assemble to model t-shirts and innovative costumes designed in honor of their dead. “When you do things with your hands, it heals you in places lower than where you cry from,” she says and makes a costume out of crisp bags for her late son. Because he loved crisps. T is a film and a ball and a ceremony for the ones that have been lost and those who have lost someone. It is a manifestation of grief, anger and the spiritual power of creativity. (Berlinale)

What Happened to Her is a forensic exploration of our cultural obsession with images of the dead woman on-screen. Interspersing found footage from films and police procedural television shows and one actor’s experience of playing the part of a corpse, the film offers a meditative critique on the trope of the dead female body. The visual narrative of the genre, one reinforced through its intense and pervasive repetition, is revealed as a highly structured pageant. Concurrently, the experience of physical invasion and exploitation voiced by the actor pierce the fabric of the screened fantasy. The result is recurring and magnetic film cliché laid bare. (Kristy Guevara-Flanagan)

What do Spielberg’s aquatic monster and a doll have in common? Their shared cold, dark eyes, whose gaze Jonathan Wysocki delves into in order to investigate his early memories for the trauma associated with his first viewing of Jaws. Using documentary reenactments and personal testimonials, Wysocki takes the viewer through a candid analysis of his childhood to his developed, adult self, isolating the rooted fear and shame that had trailed his life. An endearing portrait of a director’s journey of self re-discovery, A Doll’s Eyes reminds oneself that it is never too late to look within and into the past in order to stand up and face a brighter future. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2018)

The distant future. An orbital facility of unknown origin. Here, the debt of taking a life will finally be repaid... through resurrection. The victims of military violence across time are systematically brought back to life and guided through the all-too-familiar facility. As a staff of identical ushers draws back layers of confusion and pain, the freshly resurrected gradually become aware of the reality of their corporeal reinsertion: perhaps the world of the living is not a world at all; to be alive in this place may merely be an exhibit. We, the resurrected, overwhelmed by a literal second life, will of course discover our one inevitable destination: a place to sit, have a drink, and talk it out

If Magritte’s Treachery of Images ‘n’est pas une pipe,’ in SCOTT CUMMINGS’ own words, “BUFFALO JUGGALOS is not a documentary.” At first, it even starts off as a stylized portraiture of America’s Juggalo community, the fan base devoted to the rapcore group Insane Clown Posse (and its affiliate label bands). Hidden behind their ritualistic makeup, a procession of Juggalos stare into the camera with passive nonchalance as they are framed in commonplace suburban settings. Yet with each still-life tableaux, the comfort of suburbia is unsettled as the Juggalo ethos manifests itself, plunging us into its surreal psyche. By the end, we’re left seduced and abandoned by Cummings’ celebration of sub-cultural Americana, a visceral life-force whose life philosophy is No Fucks Given.” (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2016)

Screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Night Soil – Economy of Love portrays “a Brooklyn-based movement of female sex workers, regarding their work as a way for women to reclaim power in a male-dominated pleasure zone; their mission being to rearrange sexual conventions and ideas about intimacy itself. Vivid imagery is accompanied by a spoken score, revealing Bonajo’s vision on contemporary spirituality and expectations surrounding gender roles, by playful, sensual, and feminist-driven means. (…) Bonajo questions the complex relationships that exist within and without the natural world, challenging the traditional notions that divide nature, people, and technology.” (Galerie AKINCI)

WHITE AFRO is a deceptively simple film about a highly complex phenomenon - that of the appropriation of marginal cultures y the white majority, with self-aestheticizing and mercantile purposes. Using an archive instructional film on how to give perms, Adoma Owosu subltly uses image to reclaim her heritage. (Flavia Dima)

CITIZENS OF THE COSMOS is based on the manifesto of Biocosmism, written by Alexander Svyatogor in 1922. Shot on locations in Tokyo and Kyiv, in collaboration with a group of amateur actors, volunteers, and extras, the film presents an imagined community voicing the historical desires of Russian Cosmism – immortality, resurrection of the dead, and interplanetarism – all set in everyday life in contemporary Japan. Using urban shrines, cemeteries, a crematorium, tatami rooms, a bamboo forest, an industrial gas plant, and city streets as an open air stage, the film gradually narrates the text of the biocosmist manifesto while presenting a sequence of dream-like tableaus, featuring rejuvenation through blood transfusion, funerary processions and demonstrations, the Danse Macabre, the cremation bone picking ceremony (骨上げ), attempts to communicate with the dead using stethoscopes, and a theremin orchestra recital, among other scenes. Set to an original music score composed by Alva Noto, CITIZENS OF THE COSMOS is an experiment in defamiliarization: a speculative test of the universality implicit in Cosmism’s premise when projected outside of the sphere of Russian language, geography, tradition, and culture.

Pe fundalul unor imagini alb-negru nefocalizate, onirice, se aude târziu în noapte convorbirea telefonică dintre doi străini. Înregistrarea audio autentică a conversației dintre o femeie numită Jane și un veteran al armatei americane începe cu reţinere şi, precum cei doi, şi noi bâjbâim în întuneric: de ce bărbatul o sună pe această femeie şi care e relaţia dintre ei? Cadrele se focalizează şi dezvăluie imagini cu doi dansatori graţioşi. Pe măsură ce dialogul fluctuează între stinghereală, tensiune și emoție, devenim martorii a două persoane care au nevoie de legătura acestă emoţională, în ciuda diferențelor superficiale dintre ei. (IDFA Amsterdam)