Fantasy Sentences
DUTCH PREMIERE
Family home movies give way to a landscape without people: a city where humans are present only through what they left behind, and the trees are left to do the remembering.
Many years ago, the cities by the river were gripped by a contagion. Things started to change and everything slowly became something else. It was not clear if transformation was a symptom of the disease or a way to escape it. The contagion touched everything and everyone: animals and plants, stones and soil, men, women and children, their thoughts, their dreams, their memories. An old woman once told me how all memories turn into trees, I could hardly make out what she was saying. She said she could hear the trees singing: “To be a body, to be any body”. After the years of contagion ended, the cities appeared untouched. One had to look hard to see the traces of the previous time. If one could listen to the trees, what would they say? A way out, a way out?
SCREENINGS
Saturday 7 November 16:00 (Between Film and Art 2)
Director Dane Komljen will be present for a Q&A
Programme section(s): Between Film and Art
Original title: Phantasiesätze | Year: 2017 | Runtime: 17′
Country: Germany, Denmark | Language: Ukrainian | Subtitles: English
Director: Dane Komljen | Production: Zsuzsanna Kiràly – Flaneur Films | Screenplay: Dane Komljen | Cinematography: Jenny Lou Ziegel | Editing: Dane Komljen | Sound: Simon Apostolou
FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION)
Locarno Film Festival, 2017 – Fundación Casa Wabi Mantarraya Award | Toronto International Film Festival, 2017 | New York International Film Festival, 2017 | International Film Festival of Documentary and Short Film of Bilbao Zinebi, 2017 – Audience Award | Mar del Plata International Film Festival, 2017 | CPH:DOX, 2018 | Martovski Festival, 2018 | Jeonju International Film Festival, 2018 | Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 2018
DIRECTOR’S BIO
Dane Komljen was born in 1986 in Banja Luka. He has made three feature films, Desire Lines, Afterwater and All the Cities of the North, one documentary, The Garden Cadences, and numerous short films exploring notions of the body, space, utopia and being together. His films were awarded at the Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Cannes Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, New Horizons International Film Festival, Seville European Film Festival, and shown at many others. He lives and works in Berlin.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
With Fantasy Sentences, I played a game, one where you imagine a habitat where humans are only present via all the many things they left behind. What if a city consists of nothing, but coexisting traces? Family archives of black and white photos, Super 8 and Hi8 footage as repositories of memory. Housing blocks and supermarkets, bars and cinemas as repositories of memory. What about trees and bushes, birds and wolves, dust and concrete? How do they remember? What would they make of images of friends spending their time by the river? How would they read them? Who would do the translating? What would echo? And what would echo back? That was where our fantasy took us.
