European Competition

Filmy poprzednich edycji

• Our days, absolutely, have to be enlightened / Nasze czasy, bez wątpienia, muszą być oświecone, 22'

  FRA 2011, 22’

  People are singing behind prison walls. Outside, a small crowd has gathered, because the often wistful songs are coming from loud speakers. The audience can’t see the singers, but we can watch the faces of the listeners. Their expressions mirror the emotions on both sides of the wall. The visual and the acoustic levels create an extraordinary bond. A moving concert – with applause.

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• 2000 m2 and Garden / 2000m2 mit Garten, 40'

  Two women live in one of Cologne’s largest private houses, a villa built in 1912 – with a cat, a dog and their extensive private art collection. A precise camera captures the fastidious furnishings and design of both house and garden, through which the inhabitants, their staff and visitors appear to move in orderly paths. We rarely see the protagonists in close-up, instead they blend in to an overall picture, which holds the viewer’s attention in a symbiosis between art and life. Deliberately rhythmic static camera shots allow us time to take in the myriad details. Just before it moves on, the film shows us a cross-section of this unique place, where living space and art space mingle.

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• 25572 Büttel, 5'

  Büttel, Germany. Fragments of an “empty” landscape – with its characteristic windmills, a yellow mailbox, a petrol station. Industrial, mobile homes of construction workers. The sole commentary is a poem by Ulrika Almut Sandig, where the word “Heimat” sounds foreign and empty.

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• 3 Stimmen / 3 Głosy, 13'

  AUT 2011, 13’

  Three languages: on the left side of the screen a young man seated on a chair is telling, in German, a story about migration, which a women on a chair on the right side of the screen is telling in English. A voiceover is recounting the same autobiographical story in Slovak. The split-screen technique is used so that the man, woman and the voice, though isolated, relate to each other. In this three-voice spoken round, a personal story is recovered and repeated, and becomes universally valid. At the same time the film is about the possiblity and limits of adopting language and a new culture.

   

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• A great disorder under heaven / Un gran desorden bajo el cielo, 45'

  During his excursions into the literature, archives and history of China Ivan Garcia encounters the Red Guard Zhou Xuan, the daughter of a metal worker, who was born in 1946 and later studied mathematics and mechanics,. She speaks to us with the voice of the younger Su Guangyu, leading us through Mao’s cultural revolution. But Zhou Xuan is film, she is a fiction fed by the unspeakable knowledge of the multitude. In our lives there are circumstances, truths and hells of which a single individual cannot tell. 

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• A matter of fact / Auf dem Boden der Tatsachen, 10'

  Cairo in 2011-2012, during the revolution. The camera is aimed at the ground. On a walk through the city it films feet, road surfaces, suitcases, carpets, rubbish and flyers, accompanied by the sound of traffic, scraps of conversation, people chanting. The unusually limited bird’s eye view stimulates the imagination. The footsteps and film cuts are sometimes unhurried but then there is a sense of anxiety. People are lying on the ground.

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• A story for the Modlins / Opowieść dla Modlinów, 26'

  ESP 2012, 26’

  A small role in Roman Polanski’s film “Rosemary’s Baby” was to be the high point of Elmer Modlin’s acting career. After that he leaves the USA with his wife Margaret and their son Nelson. They spend the next 30 years far away, living a quiet life in a spacious apartment. Margaret devotes herself entirely to her art. Elmer believes in her. And Nelson has to pose for the huge symbolic paintings. – Sergio Oksman reconstructs their truly gruesome fate on the basis of photos and video material that was found in a box in the street after the Modlins’ death. In doing so he achieves an interesting balancing act between fiction and reality.

   

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• ABC, 12'

  GER 2011, 12’

  After countless years of civil war, being able to read and write means a lot in Liberia. Especially because “if you educate girls you are educating for the future”, as a Liberian taxi-driver is quoted as saying at the beginning of the film. Velegai Flomo is 16 or 19 years old. Her parents are not sure any more. Her documents were lost in the war. Velegai always wanted to learn to write. Now she’s attending school with her daughter Garmai. Velegai’s voiceover story is accompanied by scenes from her daily life – and images symbolic of the experiences of war.

   

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• Abuelas / Babcie, 9'

  The grandmother’s apartment is a reconstruction. Things from a previous life bought from flea-markets in Buenos Aires. Photos of people who have vanished are imagined. Previous conversations with other grandmothers about the years between 1976 and 1983 are condensed to a poetic level. Everything is animated, but true. Only thus does the unthinkable become portrayable: 30,000 children, women and men disappeared during the dictatorship of General Videla and were never seen again. The babies born in internment camps were handed over to families in the service of the military and terror. To this day their grandmothers are still searching for them.

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• Adele 1, 5'

  AUT 2011, 5’

  This could be a classic YouTube video. A young woman is sitting in front of her laptop computer, speaking into the camera. She is going to sing Adele’s song “Someone like you”. At first she more or less manages a cover version, but soon she can’t keep up and starts singing wrong notes. So she has to listen to Adele, and is obviously moved by the song. Instead of looking into the camera, her gaze turns inward, resigned and sad. A commentary on YouTube as a platform for self-expression.

   

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• After the fire / Nach dem Brand, 50'

  The successive uncovering of trauma experienced by the Turkish family of Arslan from the German town of Mölln. An annual family and community meeting commemorating the tragic day – the day of the fire that killed 3 family members. The survivors struggle to cope in every way possible. The film shows a specific example of human cruelty and stupidity (the perpetrator is a victim himself – a victim of family violence and neo-nazi ideology); it is also a universal story of coping with unjust trauma. 

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• All day strolling / Całodniowy spacer, 29'

  UK, GEO 2011, 29’

  When Russia occupied Abkhazia in 1993, thousands of people fled to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, where they occupied hotels, university and military buildings. More than ten years later the government of Georgia sent them to remote townships – one of which is Fotskho. Built in the 1960s for the workers constructing a hydroelectric power plant, Fotskho was vacated after the break-up of the USSR. Poingnant images introduce us to some of the inhabitants of this desolate settlement. They live in poverty, have no prospects for the future and are fighting to preserve their dignity – like the old woman who walks her dog dressed in her best clothes and high heels.

  “All Day Strolling” is Sandro Kakabadze's first film made as a final project for his degree at Goldsmiths, University of London. The director has a journalistic background, for the last ten years he has worked as a video editor, cameraman and reporter with various Georgian TV companies.

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• American Dreamer, 32'

  Julian lives in a small town in northern Florida – with his mother, without a job, without a future. When he’s not hanging out with his friends he goes to the American Veterans’ Club to recite one of his patriotic poems. Once a year he leaves his scruffy home to take part in the 9/11 memorial ceremony in New York. He greets policemen with a “God bless you sir. Thank you for serving” in passing. Julian’s naive patriotism stems from his lack of personal prospects. Thomas Haley’s subtle portrait of this “poor white boy”, clinging to the American Dream, at the same time describes the inner turmoil of a society traumatised by the events of 9/11.

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• The Argentinian Lesson / Argentyńska lekcja, 56'
  Wojciech Staroń, POL 2011, 56’

  The wife of the film's author becomes a Polish language teacher in Azara, Argentina. The whole family – the married couple and two children – goes to South America. Azara is a modest town where it always rains. The Starońs’ eight-year-old son, Jasiek, becomes friends with Marcia Majcher, the daughter of a descendant of Polish emigrants. Marcia is mature beyond her age: her father, for financial reasons, lives on a plantation far from the family home, her mother has emotional problems. The girl tries different occupations: she tries to start a shop, works at brick production. Jasiek accompanies and helps her, for him she is a guide to the strange world of another country and another continent. His mom's contract is about to end.

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• Artifacts of the City / Artefakty miasta, 20'

  GER 2012, 20’

  The young no-budget filmmaker Florian Schneider follows the skateboarding legend Bobby Puleo around New York City. Sometimes he wishes he weren’t a skateboarder, Puleo says. Or he should get paid for it. “Just to do me.” Instead he works at a diner. Because his art – collages of notes and photographs he finds in the streets and collects in his chaotic apartment – doesn’t provide a living either. Schneider’s brief study is a very intimate portrait of the skateboarding fanatic.

   

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• Bielutine - In the Garden of Time / Bielutin w ogrodach czasu, 36'

  RUS 2011, 36’

  In semi-darkness Ely and Nina keep watch over a precious collection. Innumerable works of art, the cr`eme de la cr`eme of past centuries, adorn the walls of their Moscow apartment. Grandfather bought them, the family has preserved the collection throughout the decades and added to it, whilst renaming during the Revolution or the transcription into Russian changed the family name from Bellucci to Bielutin. Ely was once a painter and was ostracised for formalism. Nina was an art historian who says she has written a hundred books. Vodka flows freely, toy figures appear haunted, poltergeists approach, Nina’s Master Raven speaks and for Ely everything is a comedy. Art can be neither owned nor copied.

   

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• Cities / Miasta, 27'

  GER 2012, 27’

  Names of rivers are mostly feminine, of mountains masculine and cities neuter. The photo-film Cities discovers in Berlin, Budapest and New York a whole series of other cities hidden behind mirrors and fissures, and gives them women’s names. Beneath the surface it discovers our behaviour, both human and inhuman. It compresses urban addictions and dangers until we viewers from all over the world recognize ourselves as those portrayed. We are at home in the cities hidden beneath the real ones.

   

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• Croissant / Rogalik, 17'

  With calm concentration the camera tracks through modest homes in a remote village in rural Poland. People are watching TV, listening to music, playing computer games. The inhabitants don’t seem bothered, are not addressed directly. Now and then the camera closes in on their faces. Otherwise it makes the transition to the next home through a close-up of a radio or a TV screen. Then our gaze can continue to roam. Like voyeuristic, weightless divers we comb through the moving tableau, and are permitted to look into living spaces that normally lie beyond our perceptional horizon.

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• Dad's Stick, 5'

  Rich in colour and content, minimal in its form, a story about a father who painted. His colour preferences changed during the long years of practising his art. He only ever painted in the evenings, as he was an accountant during the day. He never liked to throw things away. He was not fond of corporal punishment. The story of a man, realised through the objects he made use of and for which he came up with applications of his own.

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• Decembers - Narrating History, 14'

  The history of December 1970 and August 1980. Creating the Solidarity movement presented through the story of a hypothetical activist; rich in private and social emotions, emanating with the spirit of Polish opposition of the '70s and '80s. The offscreen narration accompanies the archival photographs. Basing on the recollections of many women, Maj Hasager created one cohesive narrative, whose key dramaturgic moments are: the cold asphalt before the shipyard gates, and a procession of men led by the story's heroine.

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• Democratic Locations (Version Deutschland) / Miejsca demokracji, 6'

  GER 2011, 6’

  Berlin: Potsdamer Platz on 17 June 1953, outside the Deutsche Oper on 2 June 1967, on Alexanderplatz on 4 November 1989. Brief, truncated original sound bites are superimposed on the black and white images of the historical sites as they appear today: big cars and tourists. The camera pans and zooms. Searching for the spirit of democracy. Outside the Federal Chancellery we see splashing fountains and lost bleating sheep.

   

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• Dragooned, 45'

  Paratroopers landing in Provence. The images are commented on by a voiceover typical of WWII propaganda newsreels. Battle sequences are interwoven with footage of soldiers resting. The newsreel ends, the film's frames withdraw. Once again we are watching paratroopers in Provence, but the commentary is different – now in the convention of a TV documentary on a history channel. Dragoon, an airborne operation of the allied forces, began in August 1944 with a landing in Provence.

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• Dusty Night / Pylista noc, 20'

  FRA 2011, 20’

  Sand and dust sweepers roam like ghosts through the streets of night-time Kabul. They go to work at dusk and clean the city streets to make them passable. The moon shines over Kabul, the neon lights within it. Constantly breathing in the dust, the sweepers talk: about the good old days when one could make one's way working at a gas station; about the bad new days when not everyone has electricity, and the Taliban are not giving up. “God should not create poor people!”

   

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• Edward, 11'

  A heap of rubble from buildings bombed in wartime rises like a green forested wall outside the city which Edward has refused to acknowledge for 22 years. The hermit has built his shack and paths out of the bricks he digs nonstop from the ground and constantly handles. He can sell the metal he unearths in the process. He has no objections to the film about himself.

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• On Hard Art of Strolling / O trudnej sztuce spacerowania, 48'

  ESP 2011, 48’

  Five travelogues will be shown, or we are told at the beginning of the film. Travelogues are early travel films from exotic countries and cities, and were popular in the first half of the 20th century: Shanghai before Mao, Paris between the wars, the Soviet Union during industrialisation, Japan before the invasion of Manchuria, Barcelona at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. The film takes us into the past, on a journey where everyday details play a more important role than touristic highlights – a virtual saunter through cinematic reality in black and white. See and be amazed, without a commentary.

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• Factory, 11'

  A ten-minute product of a fascination with the possibility to produce pure cinematic beauty, lined with melancholy and an affinity towards industrial buildings. Sequences of factory interiors and working machinery that give the impression of 19th-century relics, interwoven with images of lamps against a green background, musty water, peeling paint, and broken windows through which sunlight beams.

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• Hysterical fantasy / Histeryczna fantazja, 3'

  FRA 2012, 3’

  The work on the last shot of Muriel Montini's film “To a Distant Land” results in a crazy documentary video. The director's mother – the protagonist of the mysterious final scene – cannot be soothed by an untrustworthy “This is the last one!” The sound engineer clumsily gets caught in the shot and the protagonist wants to attack the camera because she has had enough and feels completely numb! And the last shot goes on... and on... and on...

   

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• Finistére, 26'

  The Romans called the département in the far northwest of Brittany that today bears the number 29 “End of the Earth”. Finis Terrae. Its Breton name Penn ar Bed means “Beginning of the World”. Between these two points of view an unnamed suicidal man survives in a boat on the beach, and attributes his favourite quote to the anarchistic chansonnier Léo Ferré: Better lonely than in bad company. In death the man hopes to finally find his daughter Sophie, who died before him but still has no gravestone.

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• Grandfather Never Saw the Sea / Dziadek nigdy nie widział morza, 27'
  Christine Hürzeler, GER, SUI 2011, 27’

  The film title’s claim, grandfather’s assumed deficiency, proves on inspection of his family archive of Super 8 and other film material as a bottomless pit for our curiosity and speculation. The wistful, melancholy collage succeeds in creating a mental mirror of epoch, idyll and trauma. Thus the individual unease becomes a shared unease, and the image of the family becomes the emotional sound of a thunderstorm. Memories are the only paradise from which we cannot be driven. But at the same time they are the only hell we are damned to, even if we are innocent.

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• Hinoki Farm, 29'

  At the beginning we see Mr Kikuchi massaging his face. The precise movements prepare him for his regular daily routine, and prepare the audience to watch him and his wife as they go about their tasks. Unhurriedly the camera captures them working in the fields and in their garden. Some repairs need doing to the house, they cook and eat, do Aikido, barbecue with guests. In the evening a hot bath. A life in flow and at one with Nature. Over again the focus is on the simple things and gestures. After retirement the Kikuchis created their farm on the Japanese island of Kyushu – the fields, the garden, the buildings – with their own hands. Only the vapour trails in the sky bring back memories of their former life in the city.

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• Machine Man / Człowiek-maszyna, 14'

  ESP 2011, 14’

  Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh and also the industrial centre of the country. Day after day millions of people are engaged in the hardest forms of physical labour – to keep the city and the globalised economy running. The film gives us an insight into the daily lives of a number of men and women: a labourer who together with his colleagues produces 18,000 hand-made bricks every day, says that he sometimes feels like a machine. A woman works twelve hours a day with her baby on her back. A porter believes that people are more efficient than machines – if someone who only weighs 50 kilos can carry a 120-kilogram load.

   

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• Hurdy Gurdy / Lira korbowa, 4'

  GER 2011, 4’

  Trains, cars, aircraft, ships, people. Everything revolves endlessly around itself. But shift and tilt lenses, pseudo-macros, pseudo miniature worlds, definition levels and time lapse do nothing but making a fairy tale out of us, an illusion of cheerfulness. Our environment as a playground in which we move to and fro like miniature figures and believe not that they are us, but our toys.

   

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• I can't cry much louder than this / Viel lauter kann ich nicht schreien, 12'

  Every day we are bombarded with images from many different countries, making us feel we’re in touch with the world and understand what’s going on. Beneath TV footage of demonstrations, uprisings, exchanges of gunfire, conflagrations and floods crawls a line of text, a news ticker that speaks of the subjectivity of our perception: “There are many things I don’t know, but I see them, and what I see, am I.”

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• Into the innards / In die Innereien, 20'

  A walking comedy from Appenzell about naive and magical chasms. Mountains and echoes reflect our inmost soul. The commentary whispers and dramatises, open hate of tourists takes over and makes the camera tilt. An expressionist essay examines what mountains do to us, and what we do in them.

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• It was a day just like any other in spring or summer / Es war ein Tag wie jeder andere im Frühling oder Sommer, 17'

  A car journey through a landscape, villages, an industrial area. We are looking straight ahead, only occasionally to the side. All is silent. Here language exists only in the form of a literary text crawling across the windscreen. In three episodes a narrator considers his own experiences and those of his family during the bombardments in the Bosnian War. He tries to find connections, to make logical sense of them. But the journey into the past opens up a chasm between the images of the present and the text about what happened in 1992. The lack of soundtrack, the dead silence, takes possession of the images. From time to time the very words cast doubt the communicability of the experience, contradict themselves. The destination is not a specific place (of remembrance). 

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• Jackson / Marker 4am, 3'

  A boy is dancing in the street amidst the cars. He is probably dancing for money. His attire is bizarre – something like an ice-skating dress and puffed pants. He has no headphones on, you can't see any music player. A quote from Pushkin at the film's opening mentions a certain sound of a South-American flute that can be heard only by its player.

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• A Day on the Drina / Dzień na Drinie, 17'

  BIH 2011, 17’

  As if they were departing on an outing, a group of men board a bus that will take them to a dried up river bed. It is an excavation site. Parts of skeletons appear – those of more than 250 Bosnians who between 1992 and 1995 were killed by soldiers of the Republika Srpska in Višegrad and the surrounding area. The camera follows what is happening almost casually, and it is this neutral approach particularly, without questions or spoken commentary, that makes the film so oppressive.

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• Young pines / Młode sosny, 43'

  GER 2011, 43’

  “Young Pines” was made during three trips to Japan. The director visited the island state for the first time in 2009 as part of a film tour. “Everywhere – even in the big cities – I felt the strong connection the Japanese have to Nature. I was fascinated that there appeared to be no conflict between Nature and culture, and this seemed to link up with my own work.” (Ute Aurand) The result is a series of delicate images with impressions from many parts of Japan. In addition to young pines we see people in a hat shop, busy with the harvest, on the streets, branches moving in the wind, sparkling or smooth bodies of water, but also foaming floods, with or without sound, filmed before 11 March 2011 – and cut after that date.

   

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• At Least We’ve Met / Wreszcie się spotkaliśmy, 15'
  Marko Grba Singh, SRB 2012, 15’

  The camera follows homeless Zoran who wanders through Belgrade in the evening. He tries to sell an icon, asks for a cigarette. The present is the way it is. Zoran laughs to the camera. Behind his smile, the lines around his eyes and the entourage of the homeless, the filmmaker unveils a human story, entangled in this part of Europe, entangled in all the rest. A couple of economics students cheerfully comment on the bleak macroeconomic situation. For them, Zoran is a good example for such deliberation. Zoran for Zoran: “Here we are... What I am. Who you are... Here I go again...”

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• Kichot, 15'

  POL 2011, 15’

  For the eccentric Marcin Harlender the most important thing is art. And he defends himself against the outer world with it. It is thus logical that Marcin, his pregnant wife and their four children are shown almost exclusively in their grimy, littered small apartment. The film does not denounce their lifestyle, far removed as it is from conventional norms, verging on the irresponsible. At least for the compulsive hoarder Marcin, who is afraid a magician will change him into a mechanical metal kangaroo, it functions.

   

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• Kirkcaldy Man / Człowiek z Kirkcaldy, 18'

  GBR 2011, 18’

  Twenty years ago every child on the east coast of Scotland knew who Jocky Wilson was. The best darts player of all time. The world champion. A national and folk hero. But since 1995 he has been paying the price for his self-destruction. Illness, isolation, depression. The rise and fall of this working class hero, not unlike those seen in pop music, is reflected in parallel to the decline of the region and of his home, the coal-mining town of Kirkaldy.

   

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• Kreis Wr. Neustadt / Okręg Wr. Neustadt, 5'

  AUT 2011, 5’

  Almost 100 Lower Austrian traffic islands in five minutes, circled on a Vespa, its engine howling at the architectural dreariness of their surroundings. In roundabouts there is no escaping the sometimes futuristic panorama. At the start of the film the circle already closes. Silently and as if floating, the camera begins its orbit by circling an underground traffic island. 2011: A Circular Odyssey.

   

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• The white gold and other tales / Białe złoto i inne opowieści, 25'

  ITA 2012, 25’

  Water inundates a mountain village. Then we see maintenance work being done on a dam. The unspectacular, monotonous actions are in contrast to the breathtaking setting. This Alpine landscape at an altitude of thousands of metres was the scene of fighting during the First World War. Archive footage shows a battalion of soldiers climbing into the mountains through the snow, trenches being dug and guns being positioned. Finally pictures of the flooded mountain village. Fascinating images from far off places and times.

   

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• Postman / Listonosz, 27'

  FRA 2011, 27’

  A postman searches for addresses in order to deliver letters. The city is Kabul. The streets have no names, the houses have no numbers. Every inhabitant knows only his own. It takes hours, sometimes a whole day, before a letter can be handed over. And often they have to be returned to the post office as undeliverable. One family is so happy to get a letter from the USA that they are convinced the postman must be a friend of their son and has carried the letter from there personally. So he has no alternative but to tell the family over tea that their son is doing fine, except that he’s getting a little fat.

   

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• The Mysteries of Paris 1 / Tajemnice Paryża 1, 2'
  Konstantinos-Antonios Goutos, FRA, GER, GRE 2011, 2’

  A child’s shoe lies on the edge of a railway platform. An uncut video with no additional technical tricks preserves the drama of its forlornness in real time and gives it a title that is 170 years old.

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• Lux Aeterna, 30'

  POL, NOR 2011, 30’

  Indiscriminate texts and non-texts as an aggressive We in search of ourselves, whilst we conquer, overthrow and vanquish the world, whilst we reshape the earth as a moon landscape. Are gravel pits madness? Quarries, towers, tunnels? Thought, planning, action? Civilisation, revolution, making a better world? Striving for power or for harmony? Or the unquenchable fear of it? Give us, O Lord, eternal peace, and eternal light.

   

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• Man made place / Ren Zao Kong Jian, 52'

  China’s urbanisation programme is consuming up to 40 per cent of the world’s cement and steel reserves. Kangbashi is being built as an ultramodern administrative, research, finance and education centre to dwarf all its predecessors. Not far away, Yumen is crumbling hopelessly. Two manifestations of megalomania, both of them ghost towns: one post-industrial, the other obsessed by the future. Against the backdrop of the one goats graze among the ruins, and in the other the world’s largest and most beautiful fountains are all but deserted. Man Made Place is a Janus-faced opera, like a gigantic coin, not with two sides but with haunting images full of quiet mourning and painful melancholy. 

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• Man of Iron / Człowiek z żelaza, 2'
  Angelika Herta, POL 2011, 2’

  It could be a fragment of a TV report from the People's Republic of Poland. Fanaticism, toughness, complete devotion. Close-up of a workman's face: craggy, with a moustache so popular in the '70s and '80s. Work is carried out with commitment, no slacking off, although the hammer’s changing rhythm may cause wonder. The following shots uncover the convention of the situation being filmed: the workman’s hammer is hitting the air, he himself is standing in a rectangle painted on the ground. The industrial hall (the place of action) is fully authentic, with a very strong symbolic meaning. It is the hall of the Gdańsk Shipyard. The production is something in between documentary film and video art.

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• Maria, 19'

  Maria is passing away, gently and peacefully, surrounded by family and friends. The calm voices of women fill the room – a room with a television set, a tile stove, and candles lit by Maria's side. She is sleeping peacefully. Her companions are eating, laughing quietly, and talking all the time. Maria passes away amidst their friendly and cheerful voices. This documentary film, very simple both in terms of image and sound, is filled with calmness, discretion, respect for the situation and characters; at the same time it aptly captures this terminal situation and its participants.

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• tomorrow we will live again / jutro znów będziemy żyć, 20'
  Corinna Giesen, GER 2011/2012, 20’

  Corinna’s younger brother Tiemo spends his life in social isolation and consistent pessimism, he is suicidal and refuses therapy. Their parents have had enough and turn him out of the house. Since then Tiemo has been vegetating in a caravan in Ingmar’s garden and Corinna, who is getting increasingly involved in his problem, still hopes that things will improve from now on. But Tiemo’s doubts seem insuperable and his intentions deliberately unrealistic.

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• My house without me / Mój dom, 28'

  Wolves’ eyes shine in the night, surround you, seemingly multitudinous. War has many facets, abduction and displacement have opposite causes. Janina, born in eastern Poland, found herself in the Soviet Union after the German-Russian division of the country, was deported to Siberia at the age of ten and six years later to Stettin, which was now called Szczecin. This is where Annemarie lived, until Janina arrived, when she moved to the West with the Germans. Both women have ceased to weep. They have wept enough during their lives. 

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• No Reason to Leave / Nie ma powodu by stąd odejść, 18'
  Gregory Portnoy, POL 2012, 18’

  Snow, monotonous music, trains passing by. A trip? In the scenery of a neighbourhood that could be found in any place in Europe, people go in various directions. An attentive voyeur spies on them, knowing nothing about them (?). They can be your/my neighbours. Behind the curtain: maybe it is you? Everyday beauty, boredom, bustle, anxiety, or maybe a perfectly arranged system, in this case one of a film? Should you ask great questions and build a universe? Should you count the rectangles of balconies? Focus on the patterns: of a carpet, of the curtains, of the structure of snow? Find the right detail? The beginning and the end of the trip, and what is in between.

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• God’s Lake / Niebiańskie Jezioro, 17'

  POL 2011, 17’

  Contemplative pictures of a lake and everyday activities, Orthodox rituals and songs, transmissions and news from the Euro 2012 – the world of a Ukrainian family living 550 km from Kiev in Volyn Polissya, near the Polish border, filmed a few months ago. The lake: Ukrainian Svitiaz (not to be confused with the Belorussian Svityaz, portrayed in Adam Mickiewicz's poem “Świtezianka”) is the centre of their lives, both earthly and heavenly – as the mother of the family says. And indeed, we are looking at it as if at a perfect universe taken from the descriptions of a mythical world. And Michel Platini is on his way to the airport to meet the authorities...

   

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• I‘m not dead, only asleep / Żyję, tylko śpię, 25'
  Juan Sebastian Lopez Maas, NED 2011, 25’

  An ass was the only animal upon which Jesus rode. It is a holy animal. Here a donkey wanders as if through a biblical landscape. Vultures circle overhead. The animal dies alone. Its lower jaw be comes a musical instrument. The Afro-Peruvian tap dancer and Cajun musician Amador Ballumbrosio, who died in 2009, knew that, like everyone here, he would return as a donkey. At his funeral, instead of weeping and mourning, the people danced and made music as he did. On donkey teeth.

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• Nocturne #2 | Nokturn #2, 12'
  Pieter Geenen, BEL 2012, 12’

  A static shot of an alley in Tehran. Minimal changes in brightness. A view of an empty street, at the end of which we can barely make out figures moving. The traffic lights are flashing and the absence of life becomes overwhelming. A four-lane street: luminous, full of light points: blocks of flats. The centre, apogee of the light is Azadi Tower (Freedom Tower), around which the events from the most recent history of Iran concentrated: the Iranian Revolution 1979, nationalist and patriotic demonstrations during the war with Iraq, protest following the 2009 presidential elections. The film was made with a mobile phone camera in Spring 2011. During the Arab Spring the regimes defended themselves against the protesters by cutting them off from telephone and Internet connections.

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• On the spot – Gaza, 30'

  An Israeli airstrike kills Ahmed Jabari, the leader of the Al Qassam Brigade. Amidst the chaos a young combatant gathers up flesh and an eye of Jabari in a cloth and takes them to the place where the body is being mourned. God willing, he will one day blow himself up in Israel so they will look like this too. At the same time Bissan, the daughter of the Palestinian journalist who is supervising the filming in Gaza, has three fingers blown off by shrapnel, and he fights for her to have surgery in Israel. The operation there is a success. The concept of OTS, a TV documentary series that has been a world-wide success is: Let the locals tell their stories.

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• Out of Frame / Titloi Zelous, 10'

  A poster is an image with a purpose. It informs, it advertises, it warns or entertains. Collectively, posters form a gallery in the public space. But if there are no longer any messages, if advertising is prohibited and the billboards are abandoned, they reflect only our inner void. Out of the sound of traffic in the street, voice fragments and a concert of whistles and sirens emerges a continuous ominous tone that grows steadily louder, like the sound of approaching aircraft squadrons.

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• Palau – Blue Sky, 13'

  GER 2011, 13’

  In 2009 the tiny Pacific state of Palau agreed to accept six Guantánamo detainees who in China belonged to the oppressed Muslim minority of the Uyghurs. Despite proof that they were innocent they had been unable to return to their home country after seven years’ imprisonment in Guantánamo. Johnson Toribiong, Palau’s president, talks so sympathetically of the problems and needs of the exiles that it’s difficult to believe a politician is speaking. We see images of daily life on the idyllic South Sea island, where the Uyghurs – without passports – are again to some extent prisoners.

   

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• Pale / Bledo, 21'

  A chronology of isolation: in the autumn of 2011 Banja Koviljača had a population that included 1500 illegal immigrants, who were very conspicuous in the town. They used the small spa on the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina in western Serbia as an interim stopover on their way into the EU. But the town’s inhabitants, who had previously made good money renting out accommodation to the asylum-seekers, said “no” to the immigrants. In the spring of 2012, on the initiative of the citizens of Banja Koviljača, units of special police ensured that the town was freed of immigrants. In September the inhabitants celebrated their royal carnival amongst themselves. We see a sad performance with dancers dressed as cockerels: filmed as a farce about the spa culture, now saved from foreign influence. Then a melancholy journey through a wall of fog that isolates the town from the outside world. 

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• Paperbox / Papierowe pudełko, 9'
  Zbigniew Czapla, POL 2011, 9’

  In May 2010 thousands of people were made homeless when the Vistula flooded. In the ruins of his parents’ house Czapla finds nothing but a box of old family photographs. But they too have been severely damaged by water and mud, and cannot be saved. Film as an attempt to preserve bygones eradicated by the natural course of time, unfamiliar fragments, and a catastrophe as one’s own origin and family history.

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• Little Afghanistan / Mały Afganistan, 30'

  FRA 2011, 30’

  Along the narrow three kilometres of the Qala-e Wahid, a street in Kabul, the horse-drawn cabs have a hard time amongst the cars. Sometimes there are collisions. The ancient business could fall prey to modernisation. Some shop owners would like to see that happen because the horses make a lot of mess. But despite their hectic lives, the drivers of the horse-drawn cabs still find time for fun – for the camera, but also just for themselves. The streets are Little Afghanistan – as the voice-over says – with all its conflicts and contradictions.

   

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• Postcard from Somova, Romania / Pocztówka z Somovy, z Rumunii, 20'

  AUT, ROU 2011, 20’

  This cinematic postcard tells not of an idyllic vacation or exciting adventures. On the contrary, time seems to stand still in the Danube Delta near Somova. Goats, a horse, dogs and cats wander about, litter lies on the ground. The camera captures the aimless movements of the animals with great attention to detail. The beauty of this “postcard” unfolds in the apparently incidental seamless observation – to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Partita for Double String Orchestra.

   

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• The Hermits / Pustelnicy, 26'

  POL 2011, 26’

  Above a not unbusy road two huts cling to the slope, not a stone’s throw apart. On the left Grzegorz serves God, complaining that his body is his worst enemy and about the proximity to the world. On the right the nasty old ragamuffin Marian threatens to chase the camera away. The neighbours reject each other, and yet each behaves like a mirror image of the other. Is there love? Life after death? Neither of them rejects the big questions. Naive village scenes painted by the elder of the two are full of police, rabble and the Pope.

   

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• Rail Blues / Kolejowy blues, 13'

  ESP 2012, 13’

  Dreamlike views from West African windows are set against the reality of a factory. Locomotive building. Train ride. Overhauling. Train ride. Cleaning.

   

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• The Conversation / Rozmowa, 16'

  POL 2011, 16’

  Agnieszka and Janusz got to know each other by letter while serving the many years of their sentences. They have established a very strong bond. Agnieszka is already allowed out on leave, having served eight years of her long sentence for premeditated murder. “The Conversation” takes place while she’s on leave. That is when she gets to see Janusz for the first time (on a monitor). The screen, divided into two parts, becomes a metaphor for their situation. Agnieszka was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment, Janusz has a life sentence.

   

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• Schurback, 29'

  GER 2012, 29’

  His personal life could have taken a different course, says Schurback, who followed in the footsteps of his father as a retail salesman. For thirty years he sold umbrellas. Maybe he was too often too “contrapuntual”, as he says. The lone-wolf tradesman sometimes advised the customers against purchase. With considerable eloquence and dotting his story with anecdotes, Schurback tells how he became unemployed, and philosophises about the digitalised and globalised world. At the Job Center the senior citizen undergoes coaching for a menial 1-Euro job. The film finds sober and often sad images to match Schurback’s narrative, showing him in his new warehouse job or in the empty umbrella shop, where he sometimes rides his bicycle in circles. A vicarious tale.

   

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• Skin feels / De huid voelt, 6'

  The bodies of parents grow old. The mind of an adult child refuses to accept these changes. Daniel Bunnik speaks about this directly in his diptych about his father and his mother. Shadow obscures the most drastic elements of the picture, the lighting is discreet. The author's mum has strategies for walking down the stairs – comical, in a way. The weight of the body is still bearable for its owner. For whom is this weight more difficult to withstand: for the parent or the child? The child keeps rebelling and the parent must accept it? The burdens of rebellion and acceptance is counterbalanced by the final scene.

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• Snowstorm / Schneesturm, 12'

  Cornelia is tense and focused. She turns her laptop on and watches long binary sequences. Her face grows tighter, while her gaze, persistently observing the screen, reveals utmost concentration. The binary sequence runs up and down underneath her fingers. “I'm ready,” says Cornelia. The zeros and ones flood the room. Cornelia Beddies' record is 2940 binary symbols memorised in 30 minutes. The code used to digitally reproduce William Turner's “Snow storm at sea” is about 2 million symbols.

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• Social Animals, 16'

  We don’t need a road here. There are more and more poachers and they drive foreign snow vehicles, with a road we’d be robbed of everything. We used to have so many elks here, now there are none left. In an endless winter landscape men feel that they and their animals are threatened by our world, until one after another they leave it.

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• Some Exercise In Complex Seeing Is Needed, 3'

  This three-minute film is marked with cultural “isms” of the past two centuries. This can be taken both as its fault and its merit. The daring swimmer submerges and emerges, alone against the water's current, but is she actually against the current of meanings produced in the audio layer? The fear of being overwhelmed by them is indeed a bother, one wishes to escape, and the current is relentless. It makes its way mercilessly into the ears with its monotonous rhythm. The framework for this performance was made with the “rhythmisms” of several artistic generations.

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• Sometimes I'm lonely / Qe skem a'malla harza - Ich bin manchmal einsam, 15'

  Dr Hans Schonger has followed in his father’s footsteps and is an expert in one of the fringe fields of science: leaf-fall research. During his field-work in the forest he comes across an unusual creature, the timid “Bigfoot”, who is on the run. The sensitive scientist gains the trust of this far-travelled individual, despite their being two seekers worlds apart –expressed in the film by the use of a split screen. A study of a unique friendship that transcends linguistic and cultural barriers. 

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• Space In Between, 25'

  The water reflects a gigantic building. One could take it for a part of an overgrown housing estate in an impoverished district. A wall separates the building from a strip of greenery – a miserable area of wilderness in the middle (or perhaps on the outskirts – we don't know yet) of town. On the wall, someone sprayed the word SPACE. There we become the invisible onlookers of an intimate, though shouted, conversation. A young woman is talking through the moat, wall, and barbed wire with her love, an inmate inside the huge prison complex not far from central Amsterdam. She is with her daughter.

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• Strobogramm, 3'
  Flora Watzal, AUT 2011, 3’

  In Flora Watzal’s rastered image surface the simple switching on and off of a ceiling light leads as if by stroboscopic deceleration and dissection to an effect that cannot fail to provoke merriment. And the click of the switch leads by super-imposition through an acoustic web to a rhythmic rattling sound.

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• Sunny Afternoon, 7'

  At first just 16 photos, dating from 1992, of a basically simple movement, combined in rhythmic variations. Each image is allocated to a note of a 12-tone scale, until the visual event of sitting down blends with the musical and becomes comical. Then blue sky, white clouds, black chairs and sensual entanglement in an earworm of a New Orleans tune and a 2D world of 25 frames per second, but full of rotation, reflection, refinement, time-lapse, pixilation, rotoscoping and illusion to the point of self-deception in this extended self-portrait that begins with a childhood photo from 20 years before the film, and ends with the drawing of an old man 20 years after it.

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• Take #2, 8'

  Two women – one mature, the other very young, positioned symmetrically in relation to each other, symmetrically dressed. The young woman talks about getting into character, about constructing a personality, about how she becomes that role's persona. She starts to speak in third person: about the actress, about the audition, about the feeling of transparency. The senior woman looks to the side. A suspenseful autothematic situation between an actress and a casting professional – played out with image, short monologue, and silence.

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• Taxi Sister / Siostry Taxi, 30'
  Theresa Traore Dahlberg, SEN 2011, 30’

  Five years ago the Senegalese government offered ten women the chance to obtain a driving licence and buy a car on credit. Today, of the 15,000 taxi drivers in Dakar 15 are women. The film shows one of them, Boury, in a disagreement started by a man confronting her with medieval arguments, and through the rest of the day – to her dream: her own taxi company, employing men and women. The company will be named Malaou, after the horse of a Senegalese hero. Boury’s father died three years ago in a car accident, so she believes she became one of the Taxi Sisters for him and to take over his role within the family.

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• Warmth / Ciepło, 21'

  BLR 2012, 21’

  A poetic documentary story, mainly using pictures with scarcely any colours (which are the more effective in the otherwise gloomy surroundings), tells of a felt factory for valenki. The whole technical process – from the “bathing” of the wool fibres in water, to the cutting of the boot shape from the prepared material – is depicted in the form of a trance-like visual sequence, accompanied by the sound of working machines. The close-ups of the workers are like counterpoint. Everything around them is steaming with heat. The valenki factory in Smilovichi in Belarus has been operating since 1929.

   

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• The Bull Laid Bear, 24'

  An analysis of modern-day capitalism, definitely surpassing everyday media coverage. The authors have interviewed economy experts, offenders, and activists fighting for change. The analysis is aggressive – due to its content, which can be an unpleasant surprise for the meek (the economic news receivers unskilled at analysing modern capitalism – most of us, that is), as well as its grotesque form. The absurdity and horror of economic reality wittingly presented through animations and talks taking place in a virtual pub.

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• The Centrifuge Brain Project / Projekt Wirówka Mózgu, 7'

  GER 2011, 7’

  In the 1970s Dr Nick Laslowicz studied the effects of playground roundabouts on the learning curve of four-year-old children. Larger and more powerful machines had to be constructed to study the effect on adults. “The early tests were a catastrophe. When we reached 6 g everything broke down. We lost our academic status.” But Dr Laslowicz and his partner found a way to continue, and developed the craziest rides to overcome that error of Nature, gravity. Archive photographs provide proof. A tongue-in-cheek film designed like a – too short! – TV documentary, about the abstruse extent of science. Even the viewer loses all sense of proportion.

   

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• The Devil, 7'

  For a long time Jean-Gabriel Périot wanted to make a film about the Black Panther civil rights movement. But this was not possible until he met Boogers in Tours and heard his song “The Devil”, which, in the version of the time, faded into a Jeremiah Wright sermon. Périot’s footage loops of violence in a bar and on a sidewalk are not a video clip, they describe the relentlessness of racism. Wherever it reigns there will be not just one blow, kick or shot, but this will happen again and again, the moment a victim shows up in the “wrong” place, answers back or stands up for himself.

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• The experimental forest / Foret d'expérimentation, 22'
  At the beginning we see, between black branches, a section of sky with white clouds passing. These grow darker and the silhouette

  -like image turns black. We plunge into a visual experiment with the forest. Sounds become distorted, just as the images become increasingly abstract, then almost psychedelic. The outside of civilisation has apparently ceased to exist. The film’s title is ambiguous: it seems to be in the nature of forests to experiment with the observer too. After all, they have been the inspiration for countless paintings and tales. At the end a view across a lake to the edge of a forest. What at first looks like a drawing becomes a film shot that seems somehow familiar. Then the aesthetic adventure is over.

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• The High Price of Gold / Wysoka cena złota, 15'

  GBR 2012, 15’

  A documentary brings us face to face with women from the province Orientale in the Democratic Republic of Congo. If we stay, we have to listen: to how many times, for how long, and how the women and their small daughters have been raped; what they go through afterwards at the hands of their husbands, the community; to stories of murdered husbands, gold, and justice. Their men speak last. In Congo the situation has been unstable for years. The rebels (offenders against the village farmers), supported by neighbouring countries, get rich from the illegal mining of natural resources, mainly coltan – which is used in electronics, weaponry and space travel (the UN forbade its excavation because of the civil war) – and the proverbial gold. In some eastern regions people live on 18 cents a day.

   

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• The imprint / La huella, 18'

  The Peruvian civil war lasted two decades (1980-2000) and cost the lives of 69,000 people, 70 percent of whom belonged to the Quechua-speaking rural population. Terrible crimes were committed not only by the left-wing rebel groups, but also by the military and the police. In addition to its final report, Peru’s Reconciliation Commission compiled an archive of 1500 photographs, on which the film draws. Using selected photographs the director develops a poetic narrative, which is augmented by statements from the forensic specialist José Pablo Baraybar. This is a film about the power of images waiting to be viewed, but which later continue to resurface, as if they were part of one’s own memory.

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• The princess and the wall / Księżniczka i mur, 15'

  “Most of all I'd like to work in a... where women walk around in fashionable dresses. I'd like to be an actress. And I'd like to be pretty. And for all the boys to love me, and for everyone to know me” - Kasia confesses. She is 6 years old, has a vivid imagination, lots of energy, dreams, and plans. She carefully observes the world around her and is not naive. Kasia, her siblings, parents, and neighbours are separated from the “better” world by a high wall. Kasia lives in Central-Eastern Europe, in Poland. She dreams of dancing lessons, but knows that you need to pay for those, and her parents must first and foremost feed the family.

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• The race / La course, 4'

  A motion picture about Eadweard Muybridge, who analysed the movement of a galloping horse with the use of photography in the 1870s. Jean-Michel Rolland rhythmically repeats two shots of the Marseillais race track. The beauty of gallop is gone here. The crack of overcoming an obstacle brings to mind meaningless effort and pain, and the connotations with Muybridge give rise to a variety of questions regarding technology, ideology, analysis, evolution, and activism.

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• The red carpet / La alfombra roja, 12'

  The Garib Nagar slums, Bandra district, Bombay, India. Adjoining houses, colourful garbage. Twelve years old Rubina likes this place: “Life here is nice, really. (…) There are eight-ten kids in every house in the neighbourhood.” For Rubina and her friends, the slums are one huge playground. They can bathe in the rain. Rubina knows, however, that each house can drift away, and each grownup or child can get very sick. She wants to be an actress but is unsure of the future. Rubina Ali is a genuine slum-dweller. She has played in two movies; her first one was “Slumdog millionaire.”

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• The thinker in the supermarket / Mislilac u supermarketu, 7'

  Anonymous consumer products on a shelf. Nonstop staccato from the small and large print from the packages, catalogues, consumer information and world history. In the foreground Auguste Rodin’s “Thinker”, posing as he does in countless copies the world over, sitting and thinking and thinking and depicting for all time Dante Alighieri. But this Thinker is made neither of bronze nor plaster, but of flesh and blood. Here and now a Serb contemplates human behaviour, until the infernal fire turns his supermarket too into the gates of hell.

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• The Verdict / Presuda, 11'

  According to Clausewitz, war is the continuation of politics by other means. 16 years after the war the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague sentences the Croatian general Ante Gotovina to 24 years’ imprisonment for war crimes against Serbian civilians. On the streets people sing a fervent a love-song for their hero, then are stunned when the loudspeakers announce his sentence. They weep, defiantly, angrily, and one declares war. The crowd chants “Fight, fight, fight! Fight for our people!” A year later the Tribunal reverses the verdict and finds him not guilty on all counts. Ante Gotovina is a free man and is given honorary citizenship of the city of Split. Since Roman times it is said that before the courts and on the high seas we are in God’s hands.

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• Tonia and Her Children / Tonia i jej dzieci, 57'

  Wera and Marcel’s mother came as a Jewish communist to Palestine. From there she was deported to France. Her husband Sioma fought in Spain, was interned in France, handed over to the Gestapo and murdered in Auschwitz. In 1941 Tonia voluntarily registered as a Jew in France, but was arrested there in 1945 as an illegal immigrant. With her children she returned to Poland, where in 1949 she was again arrested. For five years she suffered humiliation and torture, and then, despite having been released as innocent, continues to insist that she was an accomplice of Noel Fields. She remains a communist until the end of her life in Israel. Wera and Marcel hum a left-wing children’s song that has stuck in their memory.

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• Torque, 7'

  The intersection of two straight lines, not only in the acrobatics of formulae but also as far as perspective in concerned, lies at infinity. If we stood on rails and looked along them, optical illusion and lack of experience would help overcome the mathematics. But what if, right at our feet, there were countless intersections of countless rails, and what if they looked anything but straight, and the whole tangle began to revolve? We wouldn’t trust our senses, wouldn’t know which way to turn, and that would be the end of all our infinity. No train would ever get through unscathed.

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• Trantor Chronicles, 60'

  A man in the subway talks about his fight with corruption, about the corporation people who killed his family and now want to silence him forever. Images of a modern city, scenes from the life of an ordinary Chinese family, and archival footage are accompanied by Tibetan and Western music, including “Lacrimosa” from Mozart's “Requiem,” as well as themes from the “Foundation” cycle by Isaac Asimov. A universal tale about civilisations.

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• Two Islands, 6'

  A metropolis pictured from the perspective of a cemetery located on Hart Island in New York. Since 1689, the 18-hectare area served as a burial ground for the homeless, children, newborns. The images of the island – a deserted, cluttered place ideal for a population of wild birds – are accompanied by a dry report on the number and headcount of the transports of the deceased, and on the system of arranging bodies in mass graves. Metropolises and civilisations have their cemeteries bereft of plates or memorials, and their junkyards – literally and figuratively.

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• An Archipelago / Archipelag, 11'

  FRA 2011, 11’

  On 22 October 2010 HMS Astute, the Royal Navy’s largest and most modern nuclear-powered submarine ran aground off the Scottish Isle of Skye. Shortly beforehand, the commander had proudly told the BBC about the fully-electronic navigation system.– In badly-lit, wobbly and grainy takes and with brief intertitles, the film recounts the events of two years ago, feeling its way into the depths of the human psyche. To this day the former commander has not spoken about the incident.

   

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• Under the pillow / Bajo la almohada, 9'

  “In Tivim there’s a street, in the street a house, in the house a staircase” ... The voice of a little girl leads us into the rich and colourful images of this animated documentary, created together with HIV-infected children in a hospital in Tivim (Goa, India). The drawings and voices are from the boys and girls themselves. They talk about their time in the hospital, their everyday lives and their dreams – with the fantastic logic of children.

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• Five Fragments of the Extinct Empathy / Pięć fragmentów wymarłej empatii, 7'

  FIN 2011, 7’

  A fair-haired girl with an idyllic plain and a folk-song in the background. The girl turns to the camera: a pretty face, a big bruise around the eye. The 1950s, Finland: a woman brutally murdered, a crowd of people at the funeral; another crime: two girls buried in a shallow grave... The creators of the film have gathered drastic examples of crimes and violence against women throughout the years, from the 1950s until present times. With the 1990s, the law and social rules changed in regard to domestic violence: marital rape is qualified as a crime. The pro women’s lobby is trying to surmount the glorification of home and family in all its manifestations: good, bad, criminal. A fair-haired girl, a modern city, an idyllic folk-song...

   

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• Viva Paradis, 17'
  Isabelle Tollenaere, BEL 2011, 17’

  Carthage, a suburb of Tunis, in March 2011, in the centre of the Arab Spring battlefield: a luxury hotel. Empty beach, empty pool, empty lobby. Everywhere deserted. Just two or three older tourists stayed on during the fighting. Or came back afterwards. Looking at them you wouldn’t guess. They are lying in the sun. As usual. Table tennis. Bar. Nightclub. The dancers come on stage in uniform, and outside a revolutionary graffito says thanks to Facebook. Sunshine, health and fitness, entertainment, internet, revolution, entertainment, health and fitness, sunshine.

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• Waterscope / Obserwując wodę, 22'

  GER 2012, 22’

  The film essay combines water images with sound clips from cinematic history. Water-falls, locks, dams, baths, sewage plants and more. Often we don’t immediately see what contains or directs the water: dreary architecture. At one point the superimposed images are compressed into a flashing montage with a worrying undertone. With no explanations given, the film collage illuminates mankind’s relationship to water: devotion, subjugation, utilisation, pollution, dependence, worship…

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• Whateverest, 15'

  First the musician Todd Terje speaks: YouTube clips of someone called “Inspector Norse” inspired his dance track of the same name. In real life, Inspector Norse is Marius Solem Johansen. The 27-year-old lives with his sick father in a dismal little Norwegian town, where he runs a tanning studio. Marius hoped to make the big time with his music, but had to accept that no-one was interested: “Whateverest” represents the huge pile of his unfulfilled dreams and plans. A life in the superlative of whatever. The camera is watching when this lonely nerd dances round the supermarket, or when he rampages, completely stoned, through the night-time town dressed as a Christmas tree. An exemplary tale of a lost generation, as only life could write it?

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