art

One of the most prominent institutions of higher learning in Nigeria is the University of Ibadan, founded during the era of British colonial rule. It now has over 30,000 students. A handful of them meet every Thursday in one of the lecture halls to watch selected works by African filmmakers as part of a film club. The films, which deal with the ever-present problems of post-colonial countries, provoke heated discussions. Thanks to the nimble handheld camera, we become participants ourselves. During the protests against police brutality, the students' passion for political and social issues, sparked by the films they have seen, spills beyond the walls of the university building. “I would say that it’s an attempt to render visible the reality of Nigerian students. I wanted to depict the ordinary beauty and intelligence they display despite the challenges they face.” — Alain Kassanda Source: New Directors/New Films

Childlike imagination, naive playfulness and an enchanted view of the world are at the centre of this poetic film. The child protagonists talk about their dreams, fantasies and experiences while touching on metaphysical questions of body and soul, life and death. Magic permeates every frame of this colourful collage. “I don’t have any imaginary friend because I’m a realist.”

Nelson Sullivan was a prominent figure in New York's queer community in the 1980s. With a video camera that he rarely let go of, he was also a chronicler of the club scene of the time. The archival documentary draws on the rich video archive Sullivan left behind. It looks at a marginalised subculture and the life of the man sometimes described as the first vlogger. “Should I talk to the camera like it's a person?”

The film was shot in a region of Turkey near the borders with Iraq and Syria, an area that is “a melting pot of those fleeing war zones, where people of different origins meet: Assyrians, Iraqis, Kurds, Arabs, Armenians and Turks”. And there are also a surprising number of children running around with analogue cameras. Their gaze, transmitted onto celluloid, transforms a space of unstable contours into a backdrop for great stories and poetic games. The titular darkroom is thus the place where everyone returns regularly to witness the miracle of an image emerging from developer solution as a result of the combined action of creativity and light. “Children roam the area, looking at the world through the viewfinders of analogue cameras, in an intimate vision of the medium as a form of play and a way to forge an alternate reality in a conflict zone.” Source: MoMA

Literally with the arrival of the first steam train, “excursionists” began to appear in the Poberouní region – weekend guests who built cottages here for recreation and began to pile new deposits onto the geological layers, this time in the form of memories captured by recording devices. The audiovisual dimension of one region's memory is the subject of this experimental documentary, assembled from found footage taken by its residents over the course of nearly a century. It is based on the memoirs of Gizela Šmidlíková, published in newspapers in the 1990s, and on various visual and ideological associations developed against a hypnotic musical backdrop. “Using a contemplative, observational 'non-documentary' approach, I processed the memory of a place, the depiction of local cultural life and the great importance of the railway to all of the Lower Poberouní region.”Source: Magdaléna Kašparová

An amateur female musician accidentally finds a set of drums on a deserted Thai island. The very unlikely situation launches the minimalist story of a film labyrinth, which turns into a journey from rehearsal to public performance. The conceptual film weaves images and sounds, often returning in reframing or recontextualisation, into the equivalent of a rhythmic piece of music. The audio-visual medium conveys intense emotions that defy superficial rational interpretation behind the recurring leitmotif of beating drums. A film unfolds on the screen before your eyes that you literally have to tune in to.

Being somewhere else is the essence of Czech camping. Fleeting glances, the charms of passing women, queues for food, skirmishes between human males, the territoriality of tent stakes and the erotica of swing music personify the subversive summer illusion of a touchingly petty and collective escape into sameness.

When we close our eyes, the world around us disappears, but a new world appears within us. Visual artist Lea Petříková follows in the footsteps of people searching for this invisible world. As a gateway to augmented reality, she uses mysterious places instead of psychadelics. A mountain where the devil resides, a stone with the footprint of Christ, a UFO landing ramp or a crypt with ancient inscriptions are shortcuts to abstract, imaginary or spiritual worlds. The medium of film is such a gateway, like the Shroud of Turin painted with light and shadow, representing a magical imprint of something greater.“The film could be something like the Shroud of Turin, by imprinting something bigger. It's not just about capturing, but capturing something that transcends us, and making it so that we can experience that transference as well.” — Ladislav ValešThe second projection will have English subtitles.

Billions of years before the origin of life, our planet was an active, evolving entity. Rocks, crystals and minerals could tell stories, and in Deborah Stratman's meditative essay, they get the chance. Before and after does not exist for them. Also, in their story of Earth's evolution, the lines between past and future blur. Images of sublime rock formations are accompanied by commentary by renowned geologist Marcia Bjornerud as well as excerpts from philosophical texts and speculative fiction. To see the world from the perspective of minerals may be to admit one's own transience. And perhaps, in doing so, to understand our place in the universe. “I fell in love with the idea that storytelling and rhythm are a sort of genetic memory of our species. The land as tape recorder. Every rock as a text.” — Deborah Stratman Source: MUBI

The Plastic People of the Universe was formed in 1968. The trial of the band members in 1976 initiated the creation of Charter 77. During the so-called normalisation period, the band was banned. The musicians started performing together again in 1997. The last concert of The Plastic People of the Universe together with the Brno Philharmonic took place on 20 November 2021 in Broumov. How did the members of the legendary band The Plastic People of the Universe experience the last concert of their career?

Nomadism today is no longer just an expression of a traditional way of life or a free choice for young people, but an imposed necessity for many seniors in the US. For them, a house on four wheels remains the only economically affordable option. In this time-lapse documentary, we follow the lives of three women on a long journey across the United States as their lives have been transformed. How do they cope with radical change? And what do loved-ones and friends have to say about their decision? These questions are also answered in the film, which anchors the philosophy of desolation in a broader political and social context.“Each fleeing a part of their past, these three reckless women criss-cross the roads in the hope of rebuilding their lives.” Source: Grizzly Films

The term eremocene describes a sense of loneliness in a time of environmental crisis and technological development and raises questions about the future fate of humanity. The film is a cross between science fiction and a philosophical essay and develops the idea of an earth shaped by artificial intelligence, digital data and blockchain, in which human organic matter no longer has a place. In this dystopian vision of the future, an inhuman being searches for its ancient roots and finds them in the figure of the film's author. The dialogue between the virtual voices and the authentic creator is complemented by analogue footage of everyday life in society before the world was taken over by inhuman actors and streams of data.“Eremocene is an epoch marked by an existential and material isolation resulting from having extinguished so many other forms of life.” — E. O. WilsonQuote from The Bitter Southerner.

A film about the friendship of musician Miroslav Wanek and artist Martin Velíšek, connected by their collaboration and especially the band Už jsme doma. It was directed by Václav Kučera, who died in 2019, and completed years later by Radim Špaček. Similarly, producer Romek Hanzlík died in 2019 and the film was completed by Petr Koza in his company KOZA Film, s.r.o.

On 8 May 2019, the Yellow Vests rehabilitate Gustave Courbet’s tomb in Ornans. Not far away, Christian Corouge, a former member of the Medvedkine group, a militant film collective, makes the painter's work his own. But “we're not going to discuss painting, everyone takes what they want, I don't care!”

A look at 40 years of subversive work by the American collective Negativland. Would you go to jail for your work? They say they never had a hit single, but they had a hit lawsuit. Negativland's media collages, which predated the web-sharing era from the late 1970s onwards, resulted in a single called U2. The group documented the court-imposed punishment in such a way as to create a spectacular artefact, and a narrative about the moral standards around copyright and intellectual property. “Media is coming into our homes: its images and sounds flow into our living rooms. So I consider them mine – and I want the right to dispose of them,” says Negativland member Don Joyce.

Families on a trip, people at work, festive parades, city streets, apartment interiors. Slides depicting everyday life in the former GDR serve as a visual basis for a reflective lyrical commentary consisting of excerpts from prose and essay works by James Joyce, George Orwell, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Virginia Woolf. Images of specific people, places and rituals – which we learn nothing of in greater detail – acquire timeless qualities thanks to extravisual reflections on mortality, fate or the imprint that we leave behind on this world, for example through photographs. “Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal. As one grows older, only youth has a taste of immortality.”

A taxi driver and his passenger drive through Cuban villages and talk about travel, heartbreak and human destiny. One speaks English, the other Spanish, yet they find mutual trust and understanding. The passenger, a Filipino filmmaker, tells the taxi driver the shocking reason why he is in Cuba and asks for cooperation in his search. A seemingly documentary prologue opens a journey into the last days of a former general of the Philippine dictator hiding on a banana plantation. The history of colonialism and political dictatorship emerges in the blazing Cuban sun in a film standing on the borderline between reality and fiction. “It is a thrillingly anticlimactic story of an overwhelming calm and a horror so absolute that it is confused with everyday life; it is immanent to it and is therefore definitive, omnipresent, absolute as the air.” — Antonio Enrique Gonzáles Rojas, Rialta Magazine Source: Rialta Magazine

Set history free. A modern history, enclosed for more than a quarter of a century in an abandoned prison in Uherské Hradiště with unique rooms preserved from the 1950s. The authors fill the emptiness of the premises with situational encounters with the building, nature and people who are united by their experience of the place and who are often divided by their life experience. A shared past as a starting point to a shared future. "I used to go to the Hradiště prison as a boy in a playgroup, without any idea, while playing in the former prison yard, of what happened there two decades ago. I perceive the emptiness of the grounds here, closed since the 1990s, as a manifestation of the historical void within us. I then see the prison of history as an opportunity to open up the site and ourselves, to meet each other as the living and the dead, despite the fact that we come from different generational, ideological and social worlds." – Jan Gogola Jr.

Emma's mother first idolized Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was then replaced by Russell Crowe, and the household’s DVD collection grew to include all the actor's films. At the same time, however, there is no real man in her mother’s world. She lives for her daughter and makes do with a few close female friends with whom she throws frivolous house parties. The apparent contradiction between the manifestation of the sex drive and its fulfilment leads the director to question the things that remain unspoken and yet define her and her mother’s coexistence. And, in deep introspection, it also leads to the painful realisation that she herself might be carrying her mother's traumas. “I see myself continuing to research between the line of art and documentary film. Letting my voice be heard in today’s society as a filmmaker who happens to be queer and female.” Source: Film Freeway

Conceptual visual artist Ján Mančuška died in 2011. However, in his short 39 years of existence, he managed to create a number of remarkable works, many of which have been exhibited in renowned galleries around the world – including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and MoMA in New York. In his homeland, however, his work reflecting everyday life, social reality or the meaning of language has never achieved comparable fame. Together with the children of an artist who was not afraid to confront the public with the question of the meaning of art, the director embarks on a journey that aims not only to get closer to Mančuška, but also to reveal him in hitherto unrecognised shades, thus filling in the gaps that are increasingly appearing in the context of the fading memory of his personality.“We are trying to make [Mančuška's] works present, to confront them again. Not to be dependent only on recollection, on memory, but to actually have the opportunity to relive it, to see these things again.” — Štěpán PechQuote from Artalk.