When Things Occur

PS 2016, R: Oraib Toukan, feat. Lara Abu Ramadan, Hosam Salem, Khalil Hamra, Walaa Al Ghussein, Ashraf Al Masri, 28’, OmeU

WHEN THINGS OCCUR is based on skype conversations with photographers living in Gaza, with their local assistants and drivers. The conversational partners are responsible for pictures which were shared from screen to screen and, as a result, found their way into the collective picture archive. Being a photo reportage without any moving pictures, the film looks behind the pictorial materialisation of grief and pain – considers their digital embodiment on the hotographer’s harddrives and their media circulation. It examines how the view is guided inside digital spaces and how empathy leaps over. Apart from news agencies’ demands for sensation causing pictures, the film gives rise to further ethical questions, for instance about the functioning of the documentary significants while observing sorrow. What exactly does it mean to look at sorrow “from a distance” – how many meters or kilometers of distance are necessary for this purpose? What about properties and the political economy of pictures of war? Who is “the native” in a representation of war? Also, what is the daily routine of those exposing war?

IN THE FUTURE THEY ATE FROM THE FINEST PORCELAIN

PS/DK/GB 2016, D: Larissa Sansour/Søren Lind,feat. Pooneh Hajimohammadi, Anna Aldridge, Leyla Ertosun, Larissa Sansour, 29’, OV/English subtitles

The film relates – as implied by the temporal twist in its title – the story of an intervention into the prospective perception of a territory’s political history. A self-proclaimed “narrative resistance group” buries finest porcelain which originates from an entirely contrived civilization. The group’s objective is to interfere with history and to assert claims on their vanishing territories in the time to come. When the porcelain is excavated again, it will prove the existence of a fictitious people. Creating an independent myth, the work of the group becomes a historical intervention which de facto creates a nation. In form of a fictional video essay, moving images are combined with computer-generated ones, archaeological and political aspects are entangled with science fiction contents. Staged as a voice-over conversation between a psychologist and the group’s leader and being about myths and fiction as constituent elements of facts, history and the documentary, the dialogue reveals the philosophy behind the actions of the group.

Selma Doborac – IT WAS A DAY JUST LIKE ANY OTHER IN SPRING OR SUMMER.

AT/BA 2012, 17’, no dialogue, English language version

“In IT WAS A DAY JUST LIKE ANY OTHER IN SPRING OR SUMMER., the first-person narrator explores over the course of three brief episodes the experiences of four people, all of them related to one another; the events occurred during a bomb attack in war-time Bosnia in 1992. The story is told partly through descriptions of a remembered past inscribed into the filmic image in the form of a sequential textual trace, partly through a landscape that is featured in the memories as well as seen in the present, mediated by a mise-en-scène that attempts to find a visual structure, by means of continuous tracking shots, corresponding to the narrated past on location per se. From the constant back-and-forth between what is seen and what is read an experimental set-up of representation emerges, resulting, inevitably, in an unresolved overall picture, as the textual level not only occasionally constrains the visual level but sometimes, of its own accord, even obliterates it. While the titles in which layers of memory are couched (de)construct the notion of non-communicability, the landscape images encased in rides both en-title and give away the impossibility of making a likeness of (war-like) actions.” (Selma Doborac; Translation: Thomas Brooks)

Stephanie Comilang – LUMAPIT SA AKIN, PARAISO (COME TO ME PARADISE)

CA/HK 2016, feat. music by Why Be & Sky H1, 26’, OV/English subtitles

In LUMAPIT SA AKIN, PARAISO (COME TO ME PARADISE), Stephanie Comilang uses the backdrop of Hong Kong and the various ways in which Filipina migrant workers occupy its downtown Central district on Sundays. The film is narrated from the perspective of Paraiso, a ghost played by a drone who speaks of the isolation from being uprooted and thrown into a new place. Paraiso’s reprieve comes when she is finally able to interact with the women and feel her purpose, which is to transmit their vlogs, photos, and messages back home. The film is a documentary with a terrific score interacting with the science fiction elements in it. “Sci-fi [as a genre] always has the same sort of idea—that’s also why I wanted to make the film. It’s people who are within the society looking at these outsiders, minority groups, and excluding them because of some sort of thing. They’re scared of them. The minorities usually have some sort of power that the others don’t have, and they’re pushed to the side or the outside. That theme translates really well to the migrant, immigrant experience.” (Stephanie Comilang)

Lawrence Lek – EUROPA, MON AMOUR (2016 BREXIT EDITION)

UK 2016, 14’, English OV

With the UK cast out of the EU, Dalston has degenerated into a post-apocalyptic utopia. Come and explore this drowned world of the near future: filled with forgotten nightclubs, neon-lit music venues, voting booths, Turkish snooker clubs and luxury penthouses. This site-specific  simulation brings together multiple histories of the area into a single zone. As players roam around, a voiceover extracted from Alain Resnais’  HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR speaks to them about the nature of memory. It is a gradual, but relentless sense of forgetting that comes with any form of urban transformation.

“Brexit would be a step back to the 19th century, to a world where the UK saw itself as the global superpower. Except now it would be a delusion. EUROPA, MON AMOUR is a virtual fantasy world based on this very real, but troubling, scenario. Dalston, acting as a proxy for the whole of the country, is buried under mountains of sand, luxury apartments lie in ruins, and only cultural landmarks like the Rio cinema and Efes snooker club are reminders of the vibrant life of the pre-Brexit UK.” (Lawrence Lek)