SELECTION #3
19:50h / ACUD KinoA CURE FOR SPECTRES (37')
Cinema as a seance to summon spirits, bid farewell to the departed, or, like Antonin Artaud said of the Balinese theater, “an exorcism to make our demons flow”. A flaming psychedelic abstraction gives way to a stream of skeletal images, a high-contrast black and white pulse that drums on the senses in an hypnotic rhythm. Medical imagery, an ethnographic document and Rorschach-like blots are the raw material for a programme where personality test and healing ritual, the psychological and the mystical, merge into each other. (T. I.)
What Is Beyond the Hellraiser
Guillaume Vallée
2' 38'', 2017, Canada, European première
The journey is up to you. Music by Hazy Montagne Mystique.
gvallee.com
Quiet, Walnut
Juana Robles
8', 2018, Switzerland, German première
Quiet, Walnut accompanies a dear friend through her emotional states during the dying process of her cancer ill mother in Belgrade.
homerunjr.com
The Spectre Watches Over Her
Rajee Samarasinghe
14', 2016, Sri Lanka/USA, European première
A reaction to the seminal text by Swiss anthropologist Paul Wirz entitled "Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon”, this high contrast hand processed film considers a history of colonialism and ethnographic practices in South Asia. At my mother’s village, I restaged an exorcism once performed on her in the early 1960s when she was a little girl. Possessed by the lecherous entity known as the Kalu Kumara, the Sanni Yakuma healing ritual was performed over a 12-hour period.
rajeesamarasinghe.com
An Empty Threat
Josh Lewis
7', 2017, USA, German première
A sequence of truces, a personality test offering mostly slippage
joshlewisfilm.com