03/22/2024
EMAF 37 - Outlook on the Film programmes: International Competition +++
The film programmes of this year’s EMAF offer a broad overview of contemporary experimental film and artists’ moving image – from current short and feature-length film to historical works and Expanded Cinema. Numerous artists will be in attendance to show and discuss their work. Nearly 100 films and film performances from all over the world will be presented.
The International Competition, which features short and medium length films, is the heart of the film programmes. In this year’s selection, many films revolve around the different layers of space and time and the question of how we learn from the past for the present. They reconstruct historical events, imagine alternative histories, and read possible paths into the future from the memories of others. The relationship to land and territory is another focus. Both documentary and experimental, the works tell stories of origins and orientation, of loss and migration, of living and staying.
Messaline Raverdy’s Ôte-toi de mon soleil (2023) sensitively documents her encounters with an elderly man who lives in a labyrinthine universe of collected and accumulated things. Meandering conversations about knowledge and memory, about capturing and holding onto the world, unfold between the filmmaker and the man as they tidy up.
In I Am Also Part of the Three Turns (2024), Monica Maria Moraru reconstructs from oral accounts, roughly gridded images, and allegorical tableaux two Romanian landscapes that were simultaneously affected by natural disasters. Personal losses and the need to improvise with what is left, overlap with the state’s deliberate erasure of space and the creation of newly built landscapes.
Vika Kirchenbauer’s essay-performance video COMPASSION AND INCONVENIENCE (2023) explores the first public exhibitions of contemporary art in London in the mid-18th century. In a series of performed scenes, historical sources are re-read and given voice in relation to the institutional conditions under which art becomes visible today.
Alee Peoples’ Hey Sweet Pea takes a humorous and playful approach to the theme of disappearance. Between re-enacted voicemail messages from her own mother and borrowings from the youth’s science fiction The Neverending Story, a narrative space opens up that attempts to capture the very real progression of nothingness, the destruction of our environment, but also the loss of loved ones.
With further films by: Razan AlSalah, Tolia Astakhishvili & James Richards, Boris Dewjatkin, Carl Elsaesser, Ismaël Iken, Mira Klug & Johannes Gierlinger, OJOBOCA, Juqiang Peng, Leonardo Pirondi, Martyna Ratnik, Messaline Raverdy, Steve Reinke, Ann Carolin Renninger, Margaret Salmon & Maria Fusco, Reiji Saito, Clare Samuel, Deniz Şimşek, Jordan Wong, Xin Shen, Yu Wang, Micah Weber and Chris Zhongtian Yuan.
This year´s Artist in Focus will be Phil Collins. Please find out more about his programme and about our Expanded Cinema & Performance programme at EMAF 2024 in our next newsletter.
We look forward to your visit! Accreditations are still possible until April 19th.
Many greetings from the EMAF 2024 team!
Still: COMPASSION AND INCONVENIENCE, © Vika Kirchenbauer and VG Bild Kunst