Programme I: Learning To Fly

3:00 min/sound
Péter Lichter, Hungary

Rhytmical combat of digital and chemical decay.

3:39 min/sound
Andrew Stiff, Malaysia

Using KL locations that are familiar to the filmmaker, a gradual unveiling of the city occurs. Through generated barcodes, (using the graphical programming tool processing), the familiar is rediscovered in new ways, as if visiting KL for the first time.

11:27 min/sound
Cristina Picchi, Russia

A portrait of a season – a journey through North Russia and Siberia, through the feelings and thoughts of the people who have to cope with one of the world’s harshest climates; a reality where the boundary between life and death is so thin that is sometimes almost nonexistent, where civilization constantly both fights and embraces nature and its timeless rules and rites. Physical and mental endurance play an important role as much as chance does, where life and death constantly embrace each other.

3:35 min/sound
YEO Siew Hua, Nelson YEO, YANG Vicki & Adeline Setiawan, Singapore

The earthworm is a tunnel with openings on each end where the Earth is consumed and excreted. Shot in a tunnel where the now defunct KTM railway – the tracks that once connected Singapore and Malaysia. Wormhole is a penetrating meditation on Man and orifices.

6:30 min/sound
LIM Chee Yong, Malaysia

This video is about a group of Bajau Laut and Bajau Darat people from Mabul island, off the south-eastern coast of Sabah, East Malaysia. They have no nationality and are unremarkable from world population statistics.

10:00 min/sound
Adrienne Marcus Raja, Malaysia/Canada

Soli follows the sun, symbolized by an enigmatic figure, Sole, as he explores the city and illuminates the lives of a series of lonely people. In a sequence of largely silent vignettes, it contrasts the blackness of their uncertainties with the bright light that investigates and illuminates them. Inspired by the image of Sol Invictus on the face of a Roman coin, symbolically lighting the darkness of self-destruction that we have in our own self and the pressure that forces us to make decisions in our lives.

20:41 min/sound
Christopher Rohde, Canada

A mechanized colossus created in a military laboratory is set free by a mysterious organization looking to start a civil war.

8:45 min/sound
Julia Charlotte Richter, Germany

A men‘s choir in a German village rehearsing the song “Learning to Fly” (a pop song from her own youth). In a manner as objective as it is intimate, the camera records the rehearsal ritual, from the men‘s arrival to the warm-up exercises to the singing. The song‘s narrative – a young person‘s self-perception of the process of spreading one‘s own wings, the exuberance of the youthful Icarus accompanied by hopes and doubts – turns into a mission and, in its intonation, a warning – almost a lamentation – from the ancestors. (Bernhard Balkenhol)
*From “Looking At The Big Sky” German video art programme curated by Renate Buschmann, Stiftung imai, Düsseldorf.

6:00 min/sound
Paul Bush, United Kingdom

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances’ wrote Oscar Wilde. LAY BARE is a composite portrait of the human body, revealing it as it is only rarely seen in the most intimate relationships we have with our family or our lovers – erotic and comic, beautiful and vulnerable.