Selection #5

Grayscale

70mins

In this program, space becomes time, unfolding within film itself through its own plasticity and decay. A spiral of black and white in a laconic greyscale forms correspondences while remaining in tension with its material condition, at the threshold between bodily perception and the suspension of subjectivity. Vectors, hieroglyphic forms, grain, flickers and blinks emerge as pure attractions, colliding into a shifting field of sense, a physical cartography of instability, a perceptual tableau between inscription and sensation.

TICKETS

Sun 31 May

17:00 - 18:30 / ACUD KINO

Simon Payne
GREYSCALE

UK, 2025, 3’ 00”, DCP, German Premiere

The rolling stripes that this piece begins with suggest a sense of depth from the outset, and evoke a seascape. Increasingly complex waveforms accrue as the stripes begin to separate out. The image plane is not just a surface phenomenon: we are drawn to see through it.

Raquel Vermunt
A HOUSE WITH A VIEW
Latvia / Netherlands, 2025, 4’ 14”, 16mm, DCP, German Premiere

A house faces outwards, but turns inwards, like a lens, locked inside. This poetic 16mm Black&White film observes the rhythms of light and shadow as they drift across the interior of a house. Still and silent, the house becomes both subject and observer, a vessel for time, presence, and memory. Without narrative or dialogue, A House with a View invites us to see space not as backdrop, but as witness.

Sophie Watzlawick
WHERE NIGHT FALLS A THUD
Germany / Austria, 2025, 8’ 00”, 16mm, DCP

At the heart of the human being, in the air and under the sea.
Beyond these tableaux, the worst is happening
An invisible off-screen disaster
A human-made desolation which, if it doesn't kill, requires to open up to other realities
To tremble in the turmoil in order to survive.

"Where night falls a thud" explores the minutiae of natural textures, beings, and phenomena, an idling gaze steeped in equal amounts of grief, anxiety, and serenity, at times trembling as if in a state of existential tremor; all the while drawing a fine parallel between the materiality of nature and that of film, conjuring a sense of gravity in the face of ecological anguish and digital angst, underpinned by fleeting, stark poetic thoughts that encapsulate its sense of dread towards a world that is heading down a deeply unpredictable path.

Kate Solar
(FOR ONCE I DREAMED OF YOU)
Canada, 2026, 06’ 00”, 16mm, DCP, Berlin Premiere

As night falls over the fields, a woman looks into unknown areas: the space after a poem, the distance between map and territory, the darkness between film frames. A pastoral nocturne turns inside out.
This 16mm work was shot at Film Farm in Mt. Forest, Ontario, then re-photographed with flashlight contact-printing. Intuitive processes consider the image and soundtrack as a living thing that breathes and decays.

Robert Schaller
RUN
USA, 2026, 12’ 00”, 16mm, European Premiere

An optical quest to capture the experience of running through the Colorado mountains on and around the Continental Divide.

Manuel Knapp
ABOUT THE NATURE OF DARKNESS
Austria, 2025, 14’ 00”, DCP

Against the sounds of a raging sea, DE NATURA TENEBRARUM plunges the viewer into near-total darkness. Using images created using low-light photography, Manuel Knapp rearranges detailed representations of oceans and forests into a series of lines and waves in constant motion. Pictures form and almost immediately break apart, like gestures in a musical composition. Etching complex patterns of varying density, Knapp applies state-of-the-art technology while referencing the early European avant-garde of Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter, and Walter Ruttmann. (Michael Sicinski)

Siegfried A. Fruhauf
THIS ARROW POINTS
Austria, 2025, 2’ 00”, DCP

At some point, I stumbled across the sentence “How is it that the arrow points?”. Since then, this question, formulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his “Philosophical Investigations”, has stayed with me. The main theme of the “Investigations” is the principle that the meaning of an expression is its use in language. Modified from this, I am concerned with the task of how an expression acquires its meaning in cinematic use, especially when it comes to abstract source images. This Arrow Points is a first result of my “investigations” into this. (Siegfried A. Fruhauf)

Douglas Urbank
MOIRÉ
USA, 2026, 7’ 00”, 16mm, DCP, World Premiere

Layers of patterns generate sound. Exposures made through 16mm film contact printing.

Nikita Baranov
THE SOOT
Russia / Armenia, 2024-25, 14’ 00”, DCP, German Premiere

The film uses 80mm check tape as an analog cinematic medium. The movie demonstrates the peculiarities of the image produced by the thermal printer.The noise of the coarse grain becomes a separate expressive means and even the main character.Traveling through the gloomy images that are on the verge of discernibility the audience and its imagination becomes the basis of the narrative and the film itself.The film replicates the Rorschach test effect, where the viewer can perceive their own image within abstract forms. This effect became the foundation for creating the film.

Grayscale

Sun 31 May

Wed 27

Thu 28

Fri 29

Sat 30

Sun 31