Selection #5

Heterotopias

70 mins
In attendance: Niyaz Saghari, Silvia das Fadas

“Between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred.”
Heterotopias. Michel Foucault

Space is produced elsewhere when the poet narrates a forgotten incantation, when emptiness takes the main role for a storyline, when the rural invert the already established relations by transforming the inhabitants affinities, when a dead colony returns from a temporal axis by means of the filmic medium, when counter-sites are portrayed as ethnographic ensembling utopias, when sacred places deal with history as this unfolds into the desanctification of its own geological qualities. The social and the physical space fall into a heterogeneous condition, this series of portraits of a place alter the designed set of relations and displace the dreams towards the elsewhere. They are not any more anthropological places but non-places. Intersections of time and space, an undefined place which is both the narrative and the narrator.

N.S.

Fri 24 May

21:00h / ACUD KINO

Niyaz Saghari
The Stairs, The suitcases and The Grand Hall of Books
Iran/UK, 2019, 6’, Super8 > HD video,b&w, sound, German Premiere

The poet Ali Sarandibi takes us to an experimental journey in to his work place in The Grand Hall of Books in Enghelab Street in Tehran, best known for its bookshops and Tehran University. The sound bites from the shopkeepers tell the story of the arcade and how their work condition has changed lately. With Poetry by: Ali Sarandibi.

Amanda Katz
Community Room
USA, 2018, 4’, 16mm > HD video, colour, sound, International Premiere

32 words: On my daily commute, I find myself drawn to this underutilized space, tacked-on to a newly constructed condominium. Filmed on the first day of Spring. 210 North 12th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
48 words: Images from the exterior of an underutilized “community room” in a Williamsburg condo are combined with interior field recordings of the space. The film places the viewer simultaneously inside and outside, a 4-minute pause to consider the potential of these empty sites that are mysteriously on display.

Sarah Bliss
Unless You’re Living It
USA, 2019, 8’ 23’’, 16mm > HD video, b&w, sound, International Premiere

An edgy, unsettling portrait of place and power in rural white Ontario that challenges the correlation between seeing and knowing, and the ravages of late-stage capitalism. Hand processing, contact printing, tinting and toning engage the film as a body that, like the residents of Mt. Forest, sustains injuries, wounds and burdens, but also has the capacity for delight, revelatory pleasure, and transformation.

Nelson MacDonald
There Lived the Colliers
Canada, 2017, 6’ 30’’, 16mm > HD, colour, sound, German Premiere

In Nova Scotia between 1850 and 1920 thousands of wooden duplexes were built by coal and steel companies to house the influx of workers. Now, it's been decades since the coal mines closed and the steel plant has been dismantled, but the simple houses remain. This short experimental documentary shot on 16mm relies only on images of the homes to suggest the personality, resilience, hardship and history of the working-class people who have inhabited this place for the last 150 years.

Sílvia das Fadas
The House Is Yet to Be Built / A Casa, A Verdadeira e a Seguinte, Ainda Está Por Fazer Portugal / USA / Austria, 2018, 35’52, 16mm, colour, sound, Berlin Premiere

A travelogue to places which defy the surface of the world. In order of appearance: an ideal palace built by a postman after each of his daily rounds; a red house designed by a socialist agitator; a pacifist tower erected against the movements of History; an exuberant garden engendered in the feminine; and a merry cemetery, which conjures a community of equals in the outskirts of Europe. To ensure we risk our joy for those who act in their own time.

Julia Goodlife
Slowly, Within a Fractured Mass
Norway / UK, 2017, 8’ 46’’, Super8 > HD video, colour, sound, German Premiere

Slowly, Within a Fractured Mass was filmed during a stay at a Greek Orthodox monastery in Norway. The film questions the interaction between physical and non-physical realms, exploring the emphasis on the five senses in their ritual practices as means for experiencing God. Immateriality is evoked through references to God’s invisibility and intangibility whilst the narrative of the the physical follows one of the nun’s geological research into the stability of a mountain plateau – an area where they plan to re-build their monastery. The film reflects upon their proposition that the complexities of the natural world manifest as evidence for the presence of a creator.

Heterotopias

Fri 24 May

Thu 23

Fri 24

Sat 25

Sun 26