Films

• Eastward Go, 12’20’’

  In traditional Chinese culture, the Chinese are not afraid of death, but they do care a lot about the world which the deceased would be living in. The Chinese hold the belief that the deceased world functions same as the real word, you still need to make a living and money is the basic necessity. Hence each year the Chinese would burn fake money, a kind of notes that filled with borderless imagination. Burning the ghost money, calling their names, the money would go with the wind and be delivered to the deceased. Then they won’t suffer in that world. Meanwhile the path that bonding these two worlds is not easy to go. Not to mention burning your ghost money in Europe, how can it travel all the way to China and what adventures would it encounter?

  

  

  

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  Authors:

  • Yimeng Zhang
• HIPPOPOETESS, 53’

  Hippopoetess is an experimental animation-based film that tells the story of the American writer Amy Lowell and her desire to succeed in a world dominated by men. My personal story as an artist overlaps with that of this great poet born in Boston in the late nineteenth century, challenging space and time: her intellectual fury, her stubbornness, her ambition and the obstacles she had to face. In particular, the film deals with an unpleasant theme as old as the world: body-shaming against women; Amy was not beautiful, she was overweight, and this physical peculiarity was used to scoff her, right in the intellectual circle of the men poets she frequented. They called her Hippopoetess, so to say hippopotamus poetess.

  

  

  

   

   

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  Authors:

  • Francesca Fini '18
• The Sisters, 19’16’’

  Behind a massive 800-year-old wall, in the oldest enclosed religious orders of women in Poland – the Benedictines in Staniątki by Cracow, 12 sisters live their lives – average age 70. Regardless of their advanced age and the world changing behind the wall, in the crazy speed of the world, every day they try to subjugate their lives to the formula invented over 10 centuries ago: „ORA et LABORA.” Our protagonists – sisters Anuncjata and Benedykta (40 years in the nunnery) with great charm introduce us to the world behind the wall, they talk about their lives and the decisions they made. They show us the enclosed world with all its shades, completely rid of stereotypes, often touching and funny at the same time. This is a film about silence, with the story told in full voice.

  

  

  

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  Authors:

  • Michał Hytroś
• Taking Stock, 5’

  Using his failed attempts at creating profitable stock footage, a filmmaker reflects on the absurd, mundane and funny side of being trapped inside your own head as an out of work, self-employed freelancer.

  

  

  

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  Authors:

  • Duncan Cowles '18
• A God's Shadow, 19’33’’

  Chon, a member of the Native Mexican Wirrárika community, tells the story of his cousin Faustino, son of the shaman of an indigenous settlement in the mountains of Nayarit called La Mora. In the 1980s Faustino had proclaimed himself to be god and the community‘s spiritual leader. Together with an armed group he menaced and terrorized neighbouring villages. When Chon witnessed his cousin kill members of their own community, he escaped La Mora and reported the incidents to the police of the larger village nearby, Santa María del Oro.

  

  

  

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  Authors:

  • Bernhard Hetzenauer