Selection #8

Echoes for Revival

60 mins
In attendance: Tiziano Doria & Samira Guadagnuolo,
David Alzate Gomez

A methodical echo on the division of otherness, of understanding of the self both as self and as other, these works approach memory as a way to reconstitute the self. Places of memory from where the otherness speaks in the form of death, the other who comes back miraculously for a final revival. The use of found footage opens up a space for evoking new identities, where roots are revisited, simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. The film medium as a map where the effects of differences between the self and the other emerge, the cinematic compass marks the leftovers of the historical qualities, giving visibility to forms of representation that execute power over ontologies.

N.S.

Sat 25 May

18:30h / ACUD STUDIO

David Gómez Alzate
Fosfeno
Germany / Colombia, 2018, 11’, 16mm > HD, colour, sound, Berlin Premiere

It’s a phenomenon characterized by the experience of seeing light without light actually entering the eye.
In 1967 the anthropologist G. Reichel-Dolmatoff published a study about an aboriginal colombian culture, although the tribe in question was not visited and the only interviewed informant was far away from his cultural ambient and tribal territory. Through it, he discovered a relation between ritual hallucinations and the phosphene formula, a phenomenon characterized by the experience of seeing light without light actually entering the eye.

Jean-Jacques Martinod
La Bala de Sandoval
Ecuador, 2018, 17’, 16mm > HD video, colour, sound, Berlin Premiere

PASSWORD : monopolio
Isidro Vargas recalls his encounters with death as he meanders through the tropical rainforest.

Tiziano Doria & Samira Guadagnolo
Canti Neri
Italy / Somalia, 2019, 4’ 18’’, 16mm, b&w, silent, World Premiere

PASSWORD : somalia
A poetic recollection of a personal and collective memory, the work dissects, decomposes, fragments, distills and then re-creates anew - in a time that beats in repeated rhythm, slow and circular - the dream of an ancestral childhood, of nomadic shepherds and tangled bushes of war and raids, and in this magnified gaze, the film wonders about the meaning and the nature of it's own observations. Canti Neri (Black Songs) comes from the analysis of a private and family archive, property of the authors, who have selected some frames transposing them from S8mm to 16mm. The original films have been combined in a new way, focusing on details that had escaped from the eye of the operator, on the periphery of the image, extrapolating details, dissolving the flow of action and reiterating it in a dilated time. And it is not just a matter of recalling a private memory, but also and above all, a social and collective memory linked to the colonial history of our country: blind attempts at conquest and repression, chronicles of war, failures reiterated and buried in a complex and imponderable reality, distant and profoundly different, emblem of the difficulty of discerning and understanding, where even the most recent ideals of liberation where born, were betrayed and then corrupted. And yet, finally, a rich memory, which transforms and becomes possibility, redemption, allegorical childhood, imaginative and poetic well.

Rita Tse
New Woman 新女性

Canada, 2017, 26’16’’, 16mm > HD video, b&w and colour, German Premiere

New Woman is a meditative journey that investigates the look of the “New Woman” in Chinese silent screen. Through using archival film footage with intertitles also derived from the Chinese silent films, the film explores patriarchal perspectives in the portrayal of women in Chinese silent cinema, and deconstructs their appearances in order to reveal the impressive talent and outlook of the “New Woman”, which have been largely ignored and forgotten. The film features four thematic sections, Virtue, Modeng Woman, Unbound Feet, and New Woman. The footage of each section has been re-worked differently by using relevant hand processing and manipulation techniques, including toning, reticulation, solarization, contact printing, and coffee processing.

Echoes for Revival

Sat 25 May

Thu 23

Fri 24

Sat 25

Sun 26