24 – 29 noiembrie 2020 / Online / ediția a 10-a
Home

Partners

Berlinale Spotlight: Forum Expanded

    You are here

    • You are here:
      • Home > Films > Berlinale Spotlight: Forum Expanded

Berlinale Spotlight: Forum Expanded

Berlinale Spotlight: Forum Expanded Presentation by Ulrich Ziemons, curator of Berlinale Spotlight: Forum Expanded Since 2014, the Berlinale Forum Expanded – the showcase for experimental cinema, film- and video installations, talks and performances that takes place in the context of the Berlin International Film Festival – and its organizing institution, Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art – have had a steady presence at BIEFF. Each year, the Berlinale Forum Expanded Spotlight program provides a glimpse into the most recent Forum Expanded edition, combining select works from the program into new constellations. This year's spotlight brings together four films that speculate about futures in which the entanglements of technology and humanity have become ever more intricate. They present worlds in which our dependence on electronic devices leads to a systemic collapse when these devices are destroyed by solar rays. They think about the personhood of algorithms and the datafication of migration. And they speculate about the possibility of re-animation and immortality through an artificial intelligence's interest in humanity's past atrocities. Together, they project uncertain futures in order to confront a past and present of inequalities, violence and struggle.

Berlinale Forum Expanded Showcase – Humans and technology in conversation

As the intermix between humans and technology is becoming increasingly complex, with phenomena becoming data and algorithms, the promise of immortality encapsulated in AI, people relying more and more on digital devices and the question of inequality and violence persisting in spite of these, how do contemporary experimental filmmakers grasp our present and its possible futures?

Based on this year's selection of Berlinale Forum expanded, the panel - which is moderated by curator Ulrich Ziemons - will touch upon the above topics.
 
Directed by: 
AYOUNG KIM
At the end of POROSITY VALLEY, PORTABLE HOLES (2017), Petra has merged with its own clone and been transported into a dimension that transcends time and space. It awakens to find itself dropped on the shoreline of an island known as “Crypto Valley.” The island is home to numerous minerals/data fragments that are now adrift, having lost their homes for different reasons. It is a land of boundaries, neither “here” nor “there” – an island, in other words. Petra once again experiences a migration review, facing authorities who regard migrants as equivalent to aliens or viruses. Failing its review, Petra gets confined to the “Smart Grid” that serves as an alien detention center, but after encountering a visual/auditory hallucination there, it escapes, following a beckoning voice to the island’s center. There, within the caverns, it encounters the Mother Rock, a data center or ancient cloud and transcendent presence that has existed in this place for eons…
THE PHANTOM MENACE
UK
2019
36'
Directed by: 
GRAEME ARNFIELD
Welcome to the age of cosmic radiation! In 2021 the Sun fell to its lowest point of activity since the birth of science. Compiling stories from the recent past of interaction with cosmic radiation at ever descending altitudes, “The Phantom Menace” is a techno driven stroboscopic climate fiction film written in conversation with various Amazon warehouse workers. Initially inspired by the proposed plans for the U.S government to install their fragile predictive supercomputers deep underground in order to protect them from these upcoming ancient alien invaders, the film uses once costly low-resolution scientific visualizations produced on these supercomputers to speculate on the role of image labour in the subterranean near future. Planes crashing, computers malfunctioning and elections going haywire - these were just the prequel to the future.
A I O U
USA
2019
30'
Directed by: 
ADAM KHALIL, BAYLEY SWEITZER, ANTON VIDOKLE
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
CITIZENS OF THE COSMOS
USA / Japan / Ukraine
2019
30'
Directed by: 
ANTON VIDOKLE
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.

 

Copyright © 2010-2020 BIEFF Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival. All Rights Reserved.