Between Film and Art

words by Temra Pavlović, Between Film and Art Programmer

“Between Film and Art” is a section dedicated to experimental and artist-driven film in its many forms. This year, the focus is on two extraordinary makers, presenting from each a longer, more discursive film, and a shorter, more formal work that reveals the stakes of their larger practice.

Ewelina Rosińska and Vadim Kostrov are filmmakers whose relatively young bodies of work have already drawn much notice in today’s international film circuits. Their post-diary practices exceed the autobiographical, taking the lived personal into historical and ecological dimensions. Among the questions their films ask are those of ways of looking, the processes of meaning-making in cinema, and how it can present a reality through reality, in the encounter of viewership.

“Ashes by Name Is Man” by Ewelina Rosińska is a quietly radical work. In fragments and their resonances, it is an intimate portrait of the filmmaker’s grandparents, a formal study of the Catholic Church, and a curious eye on movement in the Polish landscape. The result is a mode of cinematic sensing that lets the world’s latent music surface, in its tempos and intensities. A subtle critique becomes palpable, of a faith that is not only practised, but that looks back – through walls, through land, its lifeforms, across generations.

“Vultures” is a single roll of film of what Rosińska calls an “encounter” with a group of birds in flight. As the vultures circle overhead to discern the humans below, the humans frame them with their camera. What unfolds is an imperfect choreography: circles in the sky, rectangles from the ground, each pursuing and slipping past the other. A vivid instance of an ecological gaze: mutual, unstable, and unresolved seeing.

“Still Free” is a defining example of Vadim Kostrov’s vision and method: a cinema of deeply intimate observation, ambient duration, and an open, unprescriptive attention to the present. At the time of filming, it was not political in the straightforward sense. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the filmmaker’s forced exile, it is now charged with historical gravity, revealing how history rewrites the ordinary. What once may have seemed light – a group of friends summer swimming – now reads as a fragile interval, already shadowed by collapse. Kostrov’s camera lingers on the changing light, drifting through the last hours of dusk before darkness. The contradictions of freedom and constraint, and our subjection to history and control, appear as regimes of time.

“Éveil” is part of Kostrov’s series of silent MiniDV shorts, made during his exile in France. What we witness is a loss of figuration – from foliage into light forms – and with that, a loss of coordinates, of subject and object. Yet the title suggests a countermovement: a dawning, a perceptual opening. The film dares to remain in abstraction, patient for it to turn into something else. What do we see at the end of the world?

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  Ashes By Name Is Man
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  Éveil
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  Still Free
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  Vultures