Selection #2

Talking of A Land

62 mins

A constellation of works drifting through fractured geographies, ancestral echoes, and unstable terrains of memory. Landscapes are reimagined through photochemical interventions, archival traces, and embodied journeys: entangled in colonial myth and marked by precarious physicality. The films move across displacement and belonging, between light, water, and grain—where diaspora unfolds as both poetic and political, while nature remains desolate and the land speaks in images layered through time.

– G.B.

TICKETS

Fri 23 May

19:00 - 20:30 / ACUD KINO

Bill Brown
MONTREAL

Canada, 2024, 3’ 00”, 16mm, DCP, sound, European Premiere

In 2003, I crossed the Atlantic on a freight ship and shot some mini-DV footage along the way. As the video record of this trip deteriorates, I transferred it to 16mm Tri-X reversal film to save it from extinction. A meditation on the (in)stability of archival media, memory, and bodies in motion.

Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu
I CARRY THE UNIVERSE WITH ME

USA, 2024, 21’ 00”, 16mm, DCP, sound, World Premiere

In a future dominated by technological images, how will human culture be rewritten? Will history be reset? Is the land beneath my feet still habitable? Is the sky the same sky? I was curious about how artificial intelligence described the images I took of the world. Here a cow is seen as a horse, and a boat is seen as a vase. Realities and hyperrealities are woven together as if this is the prototype of the myth of modern life.

Agnès Perrais
RED EARTH BLACK EARTH
France, 2024, 7’ 00”, 16mm, sound, German Premiere

Four motifs of an insular landscape: dunes, grass, stormy skies, sea. These motifs are inflected and intertwined through various photochemical operations: successive printing generations, flat printing, bipacking, and chemical toning; unsettling the steady, desolate shots to create an imaginary landscape where elements and matter meet.

Laurence Favre
ZERZURA
Switzerland, 2024, 11’ 00”, 16mm, sound, Berlin Premiere

How do we perceive “nature”? Is it a 'thing' to which we humans are external? Or are we all part of a mesh where there is no centre nor periphery? Can an assemblage of sounds and images invite us to see ‘nature‘ as living, sentient and endowed with agentivity? Following 'Resistance' (2017) and 'Osmosis' (2022), 'Zerzura' closes the trilogy 'Corpus Animale'.

Samy Benammar
AVANT SERIANA
Canada, France, Algeria, 2024, 19’ 00”, Super 8, DCP, sound,
German Premiere

Mom, you brought me back to our homeland. All I know about these harsh landscapes I learned from books written by the hand that burned these mountains. I try to undo the colonial myths engraved into my memory, but the hills escape my gaze. Do you think I, too, have become the white djinn spoken of by the legends surrounding our martyrs?" Avant Seriana is an essay film shot in Super 8 in the Aurès region of Algeria. Observing the landscapes of my native land, I realize that they are divided into several images and times. Two different countries are formed: the Algeria of the mountains and an imaginary one born of the tales I've read in colonial archives. My gaze no longer belongs to the places where I was hoping to return to my roots.

Talking of A Land

Fri 23 May

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