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The programme seeks to explore the ambiguous nature of emotions and the latent tensions that arise from opposite forces holding together and sometimes morphing into one another. Relief and revenge. Care and violence. Sensuality and risk. Through gestures and through enactments, interior energies are manifested on the outside, raising the question whether a release is possible and in what forms.
01
Flowers blooming in our throats (2020)
Eva Giolo, 9min
Filmed in 16mm just after the lockdown caused by COVID-19, Flowers blooming in our throats is an intimate, poetic portrait of the fragile balances that govern everyday life in a domestic setting. The artist films a group of her friends in their own homes, performing various small actions in accordance with her instructions. Giolo chooses to walk a shifting line where gestures remain symbolically ambiguous, expressing a kind of violence that is not immediately recognizable.
Eva Giolo (b.1991, Brussels) is an artist working in film, video, and installation. Her work places particular focus on the female experience, employing experimental and documentary strategies to explore themes of intimacy, permanence and memory, along with the analysis of language and semiotics. Her films, installations and other projects have been widely exhibited at festivals, museums and galleries internationally, including Sadie Coles HQ, Harlan Levey Project, WIELS centre for Contemporary Art, MAXXI–National Museum of 21st Century Art, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Palazzo Strozzi, Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente de La Plata Buenos Aires, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Kunsthalle Wien, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Media City Film Festival, Viennale, FIDMarseille, Courtisane Film Festiva, Cinéma du Réel and Punto de Vista among others.
02
La Bouche (2017)
Camilo Restrepo, 19min
A man learns his daughter has been brutally murdered by her husband. Time stands still as he oscillates between the need for solace and his urge for revenge. A musical featuring Guinean percussion master, Mohamed Bangoura (“Red Devil”), loosely based on his own story.
Camilo Restrepo (1975, Medellín, Colombia). Since 1999 he lives and works in France. His films have been selected for major festivals such as The Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, Berlinale, Toronto, Rotterdam, Mar del Plata and New York. He has twice won the Pardino d’Argento at Locarno. Los Conductos, his first feature film, was part of the international competition Encounters at the Berlinale 2020, where it won the award for Best First Film.
03
Jupiter (2013)
Wilawan Wiangthong, 4min
This video work is part of Wilawan Wiangthong’s ‘Imagination Identity’ project created in 2013. Jupiter is a composite identity, a synthesis between sculpture and performance art. The piece explores the expansion of both the boundaries and capacities of the human body. Through the addition of an organ (the third leg), a fantasy, a daydream metamorphoses into a character that appears in time and space. The work raises questions of gender, desire, freedom and human diversity within the art context and is presented both as a live performance and in a recorded form.
Wilawan Wiangthong (1990) is a Thai performance artist. She applies the performance art to present “ imaginative identity ”, arising out of synthesis
between performance and sculpture. The created identity has been characterized by fantastic and weird character as recognized realistically in situation and space. The identity of women in society as it has been obvious in various media such as female characters in online games, literature, or fiction, was examined and analyzed. The creativity and reinterpreting were adopted to produce the weirdness in the identity and gender status as well as produce artworks in live performance, photography, moving images, and Installation. Her works have been exposed in various exhibitions and international performance Art Festival domestically and internationally like Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Laos, France, and the USA.
04
It’s Easier to Raise Cattle (2017)
Amanda Nell Eu, 17min
Two teenage outcasts form an uncanny friendship in their remote village. As one discovers the other’s dark secrets, she observes the changes in her new friend to the point of violence, monstrosity and affection.
Amanda Nell Eu has directed short films based in the UK and Malaysia, which have been shown in festivals such as Venice, Locarno and Clermont-Ferrand. She is an alumna of Berlinale Talents Campus and Locarno Filmmakers Academy. Her debut feature Tiger Stripes will be released in 2023. In her work, she likes to explore the female body and identity within the context of South East Asia.
05
I Have Sinned a Rapturous Sin (2018)
Maryam Tafakory, 8min
Maryam Tafakory works with images, words, and feelings to create textual and filmic collages that stitch together poetry, documentary, performance, archival, and found material. She is interested in depictions of erasure, secrecy, and the violence of invisible regulatory bodies.
Her research-based projects, look at what is often neglected and discarded as trivial, excessive, or unscientific. She has an ongoing body of video essays in dialogue with post-revolution Iranian cinema.
Based between Shiraz and London, she studied her MFA at Oxford University, and her work has been exhibited internationally including; MoMA, IFFR; True/ False; EIFF; IKFF; ICA London; BFI London; HKW Berlin; M HKA; Ji.hlava IDFF; and Anthology Film Archives amongst others.
06
The Sublime of the Rectum (2017)
Trương Minh Quý, 14min
A visual exploration on one of the most intimate homosexual body contacts.
Trương Minh Quý was born in 1990 in Buôn Ma Tuột, a small city in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Quý lives and works here and there in the vibrancy of memories and present moments, his narratives and images, lying between documentary and fiction, personal and impersonal, draw on the landscape of his homeland, childhood memories, and the historical context of Vietnam. In his flms, he has experimented with combining abstract concepts-images with realistic improvisations during shooting.
He is the alumnus of 2012 Asian Film Academy (Busan International Film Festival) and 2016 Berlinale Talents (Berlin International Film Festival). His flms have been selected for international flm festivals and exhibitions such as Locarno, New York, Clermont-Ferrand, Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Busan, Les Rencontres Internationales Paris&Berlin.
He won the main Art Prize at the 20th VideoBrasil (Sao Paulo) in 2017.His second feature film, The Tree House, premiered in 72nd Locarno Film Festival (Filmmakers of Te Present Competition, Swiss Critics Boccalino Award), where it was called as “Tree of the festival's best premieres” by Mubi and “a singular entrancing ode to memory and filmmaking” by Te Film Stage. Te film continued to screen in 57th New York Film Festival (Projections), Viennale, Festival Des 3 Continents (Competition), Rotterdam International Film Festival (Bright Future Main Program), CPH:Dox (Artist &Auteur), Goteborg International Film Festival, among others. Currently Quý is taking his research on analog and new media at Le Fresnoy - National Studio of Arts in France.
