Open Programme III : Overlapping Time-Scapes

03:13 min / sound
Stephanie Barber, USA

A brief, poetic 16mm film on a simple sculptural action. What becomes apparent is the humor possible in material interactions and the tender and sometimes melodramatic symbolism of cut flowers. What begins as a reverence for natural beauty ends up pointing towards the abstract expressionism and color field work of high modernism which, in many cases eschewed the banality of such ‘natural’ beauty. The collaged soundtrack suggests weightier concerns, gently insistent behind the flatness of the utilitarian sounds of ripping tape.

14:00 min / sound
Maki Satake, Japan

This summer, my beloved grandmother passed away. While I looked back on her many left records, I am trying to overcome my sadness.

08:00 min / sound
Kong Khong-chang (Kongkee), Tsui Ka-hei and Lee Kwok-wai, Hong Kong

2000 years from now, Qu Yuan, the poet and high priest who lived during the Warring States period of ancient China, believed that man can relief from pain by giving up their soul. After 2000 years, there is a guy looks like Qu Yuan, in order to uncover the truth of human soul, searches for the train to Miluo River, where Qu Yuan has immersed himself.

07:14 min / sound
Prapat Jiwarangsan, Thailand

One day in Japan, a young man found out that the place he had thought of as his only home, rejected him. Destination Nowhere is a mix between an artist’s process of making a new art work and a story of this young man. It is also a story about Thailand and Japan, and being in the in-between world.

09:45 min / sound
Adrian Garcia Gomez, Israel/USA

The film explores the intersections of memory, identity and queer desire. It recreates fragmented and romanticized stories of a childhood in rural Mexico as told by the filmmaker’s father. These disjointed vignettes are interwoven with queered reenactments of scenes from popular culture. The filmmaker casts himself in the old Mexican films and American Westerns he grew up watching with his family in California. He appears as the romantic lead opposite the male actors, including Pedro Infante, Mexican national hero and the filmmaker’s childhood crush. The animations are laid over footage of the old family home in Mexico which now sits alone, slowly being consumed by the surrounding countryside. The film challenge popular representations of masculinity as well as traditional notions of power and vulnerability by exploring family history.

13:00 min / sound
Sylvia Schedelbauer, Germany

Gushing colors. A time disjointed, yet synchronous. A transcendent turn, a quest for agency, a reunion with currents of the forest. “The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.” – J.Campbell

09:20 min / sound
Monica Duncan & Senem Pirler, USA

Surface Connection explores the concept of queer space and their relationship in an audiovisual space. In February 2018, during our artist residency at Signal Culture, we created a series of audiovisual recipes where we channeled our camp sensibility and created performative actions by “vibrating”, “deviating” and “disrupting” bodies, objects, and surfaces from their normative representations and their linear paths.

07:03 min / sound
Ayelet Carmi & Meirav Heiman, Israel

In a cultural female activism, a sphere, governed by feminine time, is created. Four women, each occupying a static frame on a screen split into 4, filmed in one shot, chant exhaling, and count inhaling, in native- Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic and English, while moving in a circular, difficult motion, with the movement of a large metal wheel, completing 49 cycles before their frame goes dark. A chaotic harmonious symphony is created. The scene is located in an old hothouse, and the accompanying music is a reference to the music of Ancient Greece’ spheres. The work refers to a Jewish ancient tradition, the “Omer Count” a 49 day count from the harvest of barley to the harvest of wheat. Women were not to be trusted with this important task. Sphere recovers women’s voice and time gains its relativity.