Work in Progress
Thursday 23 November at 14:15 hours, Zaal 2
In Work in Progress, emerging filmmakers and artists will present their works in development to the audience and engage in discussions with Dutch experts. After the presentation and feedback from the audience, we facilitate additional sessions with three Dutch film experts, including experienced directors, editors, and coaches, who provide one-on-one feedback and assist in elevating these projects to a higher level.
The works screened will be The Washing Waltz by Biserka Šuran, The Listeners by Misho Antadze, and Sea as a Spiritual Being by Tatjana Macić.
The panel of experts includes Albert Elings, Eugenie Jansen and Stefan Malesevic.
The Washing Waltz
The Washing Waltz is a short experimental dance film without dancers. We see an image of a completely flat, wide and extensive polder landscape, a typical Dutch Landscape. A tightly stretched washing line runs straight through the image. Then we see something moving at the bottom left and right of the image, a sleeve set in motion by the wind. The clothes are slowly moved into the frame by the wind. The clothes are set in motion by the wind, creating a dance.
Biserka Šuran (Koper, Yugoslavia, 1989) is a Dutch-Croatian film director, living and working in Amsterdam. In 2015 she graduated as a documentary director from the Netherlands Film Academy with the short Allez, Viens! Her debut film Scenes with My Father premiered at the IDFA in the Envision Competition in 2022, and won the award for Best Documentary at the Trieste Film Festival in Italy, and the FIPRESCI Award at the Beyond Borders festival in Greece. More info: www.biserkasuran.com
THE LISTENERS
In the northernmost village in Greenland and on the vast steppes of Kazakhstan, in the middle of the Australian desert and on the most remote inhabited island on earth in the South Atlantic, everyday people are in charge of maintaining sensitive listening devices that constantly monitor the world for nuclear explosions. Over 300 such stations are scattered across the globe, belonging to this network run by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, a lesser-known UN organization aiming to prevent nuclear testing. While the signals of nuclear tests are waited for, the devices register other traces of life and destruction: whales singing, volcanoes erupting, glaciers melting, and even submarines sinking. Woven in between their portraits and visually expressive representations of the signals invisible to the human eye are landscapes that come to life to reveal their painful, hidden history. A poetic, observational film about unlikely civilians who might be preventing the apocalypse and the invisible legacy of nuclear testing.
Misho Antadze (b. Tbilisi, 1993) is a Georgian filmmaker based in Amsterdam. Having received his BFA in Film/Video at CalArts, and MA in Artistic Research at the Netherlands Film Academy, he works with an observational form or found footage. Recent subjects addressed in his work include historical alligators, cows and robots, statues, landscapes, bitcoin mining, the representation of technology and science. His works have screened at IFFR, DocLisboa, Full Frame FF, Ann Arbor FF, Sheffield Doc/Fest and Viennale among others, and have been awarded at Jeonju IFF and European FF Palic.
Sea as a Spiritual Being
Sea as a Spiritual Being is a film and installation in progress, based on “conversations with the sea” during the artist’s long walks along the sandy coast of the Dutch North Sea. “Through a series of walks and conversations with the sea, I build a relationship with the immense body of water – which reveals itself to me as a spiritual being. At one moment the sea presents me with a beautiful shell of a sea creature which fits my finger as a ring. The link between the cold North Sea and warm South Sea is explored, as well as individualism versus collectivism, belonging and migration and more.
Tatjana Macić is a visual artist, writer and researcher from a country that does not exist anymore. In her artistic practice, she often blurs the boundaries between art, theory, exhibition-making, education and language. Tatjana works in a variety of media such as lecture-performances, installations, artistic archives, collages and artists’ books. Her work is shown at the Tate Modern, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Venice Biennale Collateral Events, W139, The Wrong Biennale, KunstVlaai and de Appel. She is a lecturer of artistic research at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.
MODERATED BY:
Albert Elings (1965) is a film editor and documentary filmmaker. He is also engaged as an educator at the Master Film and Documentary departments of the Film Academy and a guest lecturer at UvA, HDK-Valand (Gothenburg), Rietveld Academie, Academie v Beeldende Kunsten Maastricht and AKV|StJoost. Elings also facilitates rough-cut montage workshops at international film festivals and works as a directing and editing coach.
Eugenie Jansen (1965) is a highly acclaimed film director and film editor known for her excellence in both documentary and fiction genres, often blending the two. Her debut film Tussenland (2002) received a Tiger Award at the IFFR. Subsequent works, including Calimucho (2008) and Above Us All (2014), a pioneering 3D film, have premiered at prestigious film festivals including Berlinale. Eugenie has maintained a longstanding collaboration with Albert Elings. Together, they lead various workshops at art schools and post-academic art institutions in the Netherlands. Their joint films have been awarded and premiered at renowned film festivals such as IDFA and IFFR.
Stefan Malesevic (1989) is a film director and Head of Cinema at De Balie in Amsterdam. He earned his PhD in Liberal Arts from the film.factory program in Sarajevo. His films have received acclaim at renowned international festivals, including Visions du Reel, Karlovy Vary and Sarajevo Film Festival. As the founder and artistic director of Bicikl collectief, he orchestrated many multimedia performances that integrate cutting-edge technologies and innovative interactive applications.