Between Film and Art
Between Film and Art presents films that fall through the cracks between regular cinema and the art world, and find their freedom there. In broader Eastern Europe that isn’t new. Experimental cinema there has its long history, still unfolding.
This year, two programmes. The first is a solo programme of Nika Autor. She calls all her films Obzorniks, after the state newsreels that used to play before the main feature in cinemas across the former Yugoslavia. That state is gone, yet Autor goes on making its newsreels, as if asking a country that no longer exists to look at what happens on the land it left: people on the Balkan route, unable to go either back or forward. She enters the forest that once hid the partisans, now flooded with the razor wire of the EU border. What life persists where the world has failed?
The second programme looks for life in the image itself, where it no longer depicts the world but becomes part of it: a living thing that can age, break and transform. Alexandre Koberidze, who shoots his films on an obsolete phone in a wondrous low resolution, zooms in on stray dogs until the image dissolves – a simple gesture that, with music by the legendary Hungarian composer Mihály Víg, opens into something far larger. Katja Novitskova works with thousands of still images made by machines that watch – microscopes, wildlife surveillance, a deep-sea camera – and animates them until the visual becomes a place where life gathers. And in Dane Komljen’s Fantasy Sentences, home movies of families by a river give way to an abandoned city where people are present only in what they left behind. A contagion has touched everything, and all memories turn into trees. A photograph’s surface tears open, and beneath it, bark.
Temra Pavlović, film programmer
PROGRAMME 1
- Newsreel – Below the Hearts Get Bigger, Above Nothing Changes
Film fragments dedicated to thousands of lost, trampled, betrayed, forgotten, humiliated, beaten, erased, invisible on the Balkan route. - Newsreel 2021 – Here I Have Picture
A glimpse into the makeshift dwellings of people in unofficial refugee camps in the forests along the European Union borders. - Newsreel 242 – Sunny Railways
A tribute to thousands of young political idealists who helped build the railway between Sarajevo and Šamac in 1947. Their hope for a better world has faded, but their idealism remains a source of inspiration. - Newsreel 670 – Red Forests
A film poem that rethinks the razor wire laid in the fields and forests along the EU’s borders. Those forests have inscribed in them different histories of secret shelters, refuge and practices of solidarity.
SCREENINGS
Friday 6 November 18:30
PROGRAMME 2
- Fantasy Sentences
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. - Pattern of Activation (Gardens of the Galaxy)
A hypnotic view of where life and technology meet. - Pattern of Activation (Plankton)
A dataset of deep-sea images comes alive at machine speed. - The More I Zoom in on the Image of These Dogs, the Clearer it Becomes That They Are Related to the Stars
A picture of dogs is zoomed into more than a thousand times over, until what’s left is soft, shining matter – and the title turns out to be true.
SCREENINGS
Saturday 7 November 16:00
Directors Dane Komljen and Katja Novitskova will be present for a Q&A
