The various sections of the festival dealt primarily with one theme: the link between media art and journalism – under the heading “Report – Notes from Reality.” It was all about facebook data theft, interference in elections by secret services, the threat of trade war, and dubious arms exports.
On blinkvideo you can watch a selection of the following films:
In their fourth collaborative film Zanny Begg (Sydney) and Oliver Ressler (Vienna) focus on Nauru, a tiny remote island in the Pacific with 10,000 inhabitants. The title “Anubumin” is Nauruan for “night” and symbolises a certain darkness that surrounds the island.
The sleeper by Alex Gerbaulet tells the stories of two different women, ten years apart, in two newspaper articles and nearly the same words. Up to the moment of their appearance between these newspaper lines, both women were invisible, forcefully concealed by their roles as wives and homemakers. Only for a brief moment did they claim visibility. Through acts of violence.
In the short film by Johan Grimonprez, philosopher/neurologist Raymond Tallis argues that consciousness is not an internal construct, but rather relational. Through the intriguing notion that humans are physically unable to tickle themselves, Tallis explores the philosophical notion that we become ourselves only through dialogue with others.
With Imperial Valley (cultivated run-off) Lukas Marxt shows one of California´s most important regions of industrial agriculture and at the same time becoming a place that is not yet or no longer natural and thereby appears eerie. A landscape post landscape (or its medial representation) is a geometric concept of lines, surfaces, points and colour spots, regardless whether of an animate or lifeless nature.
In her film Camp, Julia Charlotte Richter shows a small group of children who have set up a temporary camp. They are inside their sleeping bags, then they get up. Obviously, they all know their ritual, as if trying to conjure up a certain kind of spirit. It is an obscure scene full of strange actions and internalised moves ranging between obsession, child's play, hypnosis and worship.
When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Collaborating together for the first time, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighbourhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labour that happens there.
Before the rehearsal of Maya Schweizer, the comedy group Slow Children Crossing meeting in a private apartment to rehearse a new sketch between a microwave and a refrigerator. After the rehearsal the actors discuss marketing strategies for attracting greater media attention to their group.
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Clarissa Thieme's film REMEPLOV / TIME MACHINE is an artistic intervention of with a video message sent out by a group of young people in 1993 from the besieged city of Sarajevo. With a lot of black humor they imagine the escape from their enclosed hometown with a time machine.