Nest, Den Haag | Thursday 21 November | 19:30 hours

The ENFF’s new festival segment, Between Film and Art, launches next Thursday, November 21, at Nest, The Hague, with a special screening of five outstanding films that push the boundaries of cinematic language with bold artistic vision.

Join us for a special evening of films and a discussion with the makers afterwards!

Projekt depicts the site of the International Trade Fair in Lagos as a transhistorical conglomerate of different perspectives by becoming a space of encounter and collaboration.

From 1974 to 1977, a huge trade fair centre was built in Lagos. It was meant to be a place of trade, exchange and sharing. Now there are flooded rooms, flowers and weeds and snails and birds, cut fruit and cut wood, cooks and carpenters, an artificial lake and football fields, Ema’s memory of what once was here and Kendo’s view of what one can see.

FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION) –  DOK Leipzig 2023 – Premiere | New York Film Festival | Viennale, Vienna International Film Festival | Valdivia International Film Festival | Underdox | Autorski International Film Festival | Human Rights Film Festival Zagreb | FILMADRID International Film Festival

Xitana

With a gestural, almost musical style, Xitana captures the unpredictable persistence of an ancient horseback racing ritual that resists the pressures of modernity. In Georgia’s Tusheti mountains, life remained largely unchanged since medieval times until the recent introduction of Wi-Fi ignited a clash between past and present. This tension is most palpable during the traditional summer festival, Atengenoba, where old customs and new desires converge. The traditional bareback horse race across a pebbled river valley becomes a symbol of local masculinity as well as the vulnerability of a remote community struggling to preserve its cultural identity against the forces of globalization.

FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION) – TATE Modern, London, 2022 | Beursschouwburg, Brussels, 2023 | Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, 2020 | LUX, London, 2019

Hinkelten

Svetlana Romanova, 2023
15 min | Russia

From the Republic of Sakha, south of the Arctic Circle, a poem of fragments, yearning for a particular tint of color and tone of language to express its cultural sovereignty.

Hinkelten is a carefully woven narrative exploring love in its many forms—romantic, platonic, intimate, and maternal. The film contemplates these forms through visualization and manifests performances of communal history, heritage, and memory.

FESTIVALS/SCREENINGS & AWARDS (SELECTION) – ImagineNATIVE – Special Screening, Toronto, 2023 | Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, 2024 | Skabmagovat Film Festival, Inari, 2024

Gaze Is a Bridge

Katarina Zdjelar, 2023
22 min | Croatia, The Netherlands

Gaze is a Bridge uses improvisation and visual layering to create an intimate dialogue between past and present, where two contemporary artists and a historical painting forge connections through the act of looking.

The film interweaves the bold 1912 self-portrait of Nasta Rojc (one of Croatia’s most important artists) with an improvised exchange between two present-day artists, Ana Opalic and Martina Zvonic. Against the backdrop of the biographies of these women, set in two different eras a century apart, a web of associations, figures and music develops. It opens up a space wherein a complex gaze does its multidimensional work. A gaze in the intimate atmosphere of home; a gaze of understanding that connects autobiographies, but also that challenges us to reach across between the known and the unknown, the present and the past, me and you—to recognise ourselves in our fragility, in the struggle for places that belong to us all.

FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION) – Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Gropius Bau, Berlin

Both Ears to the Ground

Naïmé Perrette, 2021
29 min | France, Russia

An experimental documentary that explores both above and beneath the ground in Berezniki, a mining town in the Urals plagued by sinkholes.

“The city of Berezniki is sinking into the earth,” declares the press about this industrial town, built atop salt mines. While the sinking buildings offer sensational images for journalists, they are a daily reality for residents whose livelihoods depend on the very mining industry responsible for the town’s instability. The sinkholes, a rapid consequence of slow, unseen processes driven by both human and natural forces, present a stark conflict between dramatic, visible events and their invisible causes. In Both Ears to the Ground portrays Berezniki’s inhabitants as they confront these challenges, each deciding for themselves where to place their faith in an uncertain landscape.