Sixpackfilm Austria

A choreography-film charged with political significance, THAT HAS BEEN BOTHERING ME THE WHOLE TIME brings up issues of freedom and prohibition in the life of Muslim women. Here the burka represents a form of self-expression. The viewer is kept at a distance through disparate shots of a moving body, while very intense rustling and breathing places him right in the middle of the scene. Since this could never actually be possible in public, the short’s statement can only be done by showing that the film itself is an illusion. The final behind-the-scenes shot shows that everything was just a performance, hijacking cinema through cinema. (Bianca Bănică, BIEFF)

Winner of Best Short Film at Venice, the latest film from master of (post)modernist experimental cinema Peter Tscherkassky, COMING ATTRACTIONS is an homage to silent film’s cinema of attractions. His celluloid manipulation of fragments from advertising footage references sequences from silent films by adhering to their respective cinematic language. A pas-de-deux of form and rhythm, Coming Attractions brings the past to the present by offering a lesson in the history of cinema that is as much food for thought as it delights the senses. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF).

Guided by a suspicious voiceover and insider footage, we’re offered an exclusive, behind the scenes look at the evil machinations of a nation. The country? Iran. Its secret operations? The development of nuclear weapons and a nation-wide training program aimed at subversive, international terrorism. Bit by bit, a country’s tourist attractions and cultural charm are turned inside out, playing into Western tactics of fear-mongering. A frighteningly re/deconstruction of the manipulation of media-as-propaganda that has become so prevalent in our digital age, Empire of Evil makes us question the message by looking for its didactic fissures (or guerrilla chickens and robot mannequins). (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2018)

Wonderfully confusing, beguiling visual worlds are drafted in close-ups deployed like a fetish. The point of culmination of every take is desire and fantasy; the gaze´s object and subject become one. The film closes with a climbing scene in a snowstorm. The five protagonists climb up the wall and without ropes, so it appears, resolutely upward, out, beyond the picture. In Horse Boobs, Katrina Daschner masterfully succeeds in staging the ruptures and irritations that are so essential for showing and wanting, with a subtle humour and grandiose human and non-human actors. (Christiane Erharter)

Metaphorically turning their backs on stereotypes of form and narrative and focusing their attention - and camera - on the ‘gloomier’ side of California, Gerhard Treml and Leo Calice distance themselves from more prudent ways of approaching this American territory in cinema. The three stories feature characters who have moved to the desert to escape the anxieties inflicted by an increasingly disturbing society. The schizophrenic shaman of native Indian background, the mother worried sick about the danger of her daughter's falling victim to pedophiles, and the woman who runs a wormfarm and claims to lead a self-sufficient life, are depicted in minimalist scenes shot in disconcerting static bird’s eye view while their stories are spoken in voice-overs of tranquil tone but troubling content. The authors have chosen a most improbable angle for the shooting and telling of profound human stories with a unique blend of intimacy and distance. (Ioana Florescu, BIEFF 2017)

Isolating himself from the outside world and real human contact, the urban man reinvents his identity in the virtual realm, in the deliciously cheeky METUBE, by Daniel Moshel, a tribute to the countless performers seeking self-expression through the rhizomes of YouTube. Famous opera tenor August Schram plays the balding, meek protagonist whose self-recorded performance of Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen is interrupted by his doting mother. From there, the one-man show unleashes a flurry of genre-and-gender benders, reflecting the Internet’s kaleidoscopic personalities, as well as celebrating our aspiring, inner diva. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF)

DIARY OF SOMEONE WAITING shows the usual non-heroic life of young soldiers guarding the border, preparing for a war that is not coming, waiting to catch immigrants that never appear, bouncing around in the snow like twelve-year boys at camp. With absurd beckettian humor, any sense of authority disappears as the soldiers film one-another. The movie is a generic description of what life itself becomes at one point: a long wait for something to happen. With a keen eye sketching sharp observations, the film explores the soldiers’ true selves, in time of peace, when they have to make up their own minds on who and how to be. (Bianca Bănică, BIEFF)