Hrvoji, Look at You from the Tower

Genre conventions cleverly broken down with animations, breaking through the scenery of rural Mexico, where in the area surrounding the director’s family farm, symbols of stories of physical desire conceal a layer of idyllic childhood memories and come into conflict with the traditional concept of masculinity and identity expression.   "By centering queer desire within the story of my Mexican-American family, I validate my own lived experience as well as challenge popular representation of masculinity, power and vulnerability." A. G. Gomez  

Visual memories collected during the first year after the filmmaker’s graduation from university, altered using computer graphics to create disconnected particles of overlapping scenes showing various forms of depression from burnout, relationship crises, and a lack of physical and mental strength."Feelings that are impossible to be expressed by words can be shown through a camera or a computer." Y. Kawata

The image of a city broken down into a series of planes of view rolls towards us, its echoes enabling us to fill in the imaginary whole. This urban symphony of minimalism builds up a panoramic view into the distance while calling into question reality by visualizing the overcrowding of the urban environment.  "Life is surprisingly simple. Because all human beings are in a moment of repetition of the irreversible destiny of nature. Everything is only a trace and disappears." M. Yi

The first part of a seven-part adaptation of the influential 1990 book of the same name by American philosopher and art theorist Noël Carroll. In the spirit of cinematic philosophy (filmosophy), Lichter explores various aspects of the horror genre – in this part, primarily the position of the characters, the human bodies, and the types of gazes to which they are subjects – by directly manipulating the body of the film. “The Philosophy of Horror: A Symphony of Film Theory is an immersive meditation on genre theory, which aims to demonstrate the eternal beauty of Art Philosophy and Pop Culture’s interconnectedness.” B. Máté, P. Lichter    

A tour of botanical gardens in Bilbao, Toronto and Quito, filmed on a haptic camera as part of a project for developing a camera that will record the things its owner touches. The filmmakers explore the diversity of visual identities at a time dominated by the combination of sight and sound. “The video is a part of the collaborative ‘Haptic/Visual Identities’ project investigating ‘haptic visuality’ through film via a digital DIY prototype. The work presents ‘macro images’ of a garden in a former colonial paradise.” A. Mergler

Observing a volcanic crater opens up a narrative filled with allusions and intimations that create an imaginary city along the lines of the metropolis of Brasilia inside the Cape Verdean volcano Pico de Fogo. A projection of an urban plan creates a world of possible stories, while shots of the urban model take us on a walk along the geometry of the city where even the cloud cover has been calculated. Portuguese filmmaker Joana Pimenta (1986) lives and works in the USA and Brazil. Her films and video installations work with techniques from visual anthropology. Previously at Jihlava, she showed her film debut The Figures Carved into the Knife by the Sap of the Banana Trees (2014), in which she used invented memories to construct a dream correspondence between the Madeira islands and the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique.“There I found myself, time traveler, space archaeolo gist, trying to rebuild exoticism out of wrecks and remainders.”

Stitched-together photographs become a drama in which memories are tangled, pierced by holes, and deformed in order to hide the seams of a story of falling in love, being in love, and the end of love, and to inspire further stories in which a family picture reflects norms of behaviour and stereotypes associated with the experience of love. “Relationships with loved ones are always complicated tangled threads. Fragile and solid, addictive and lonely, forming beautiful patterns and painful collisions. The film is an attempt to transmit that vortex into an apprehensible form.” P.-R. Jaik

This essayist collage visually develops French anthropologist Marc Augé’s concept of nonplace (ephemeral places characterized by anonymity or blurred identity) and turns images of highways and rest stops upside down, thus emphasizing the difficult-to-grasp images of these worlds “Marc Augé’s essay (Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity) meets with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in some Hungarian highway rest areas.”

This ironic found-footage collage created from raw footage originally shot for the Közért (“For the Public”) retail chain, a state-run network of shops in Hungary during communism, shows the problems of eating and nutrition in state-run economies, lives and images. "35 mm reels of socialist food advertisements were put in the soil to rot and decay." P. Lichter  

Images recorded on a Lomography Supersampler, which photographs four immediately sequential moments on one frame of 35mm film, multiply the illusion of rhythmic movement and create a visual melody that hurtles forward, while the imprint of the moment remains fixed in place. The drum performance emphasizes the minimalist sharpness of the patterns. "Where do we go, in a time where borders are going to be closed again? The feeling of freedom has gone. I try to break down visual borders to rebuild a base for the spirit of freedom again." S. A. Fruhauf  

A sensitive, impressive collage of intimate reflections, detailed observations, fragments of memories, and visual and musical allusions conducts an imaginary dialogue about how memory works and identity construction with a father who died a year earlier."What is a film if not collective dreaming made by conscious minds. Symbolism and myths are present in both dreams and films and rely on our memory and imagination for relating to the produced imagery." M. Lizides   

A visually ingenious portrayal of a life story and inner world of a soldier killed in an explosion is told through hypnotically visualized allegoric scenes and objects during an imaginary encounter of views by a scientist searching for a relation to reality, a filmmaker reflecting on a role of time in art and a refugee stripped of the possibility to live in his hometown. “The film was originated from the real story that a solder was killed by bomb while greeting to a civilian. It tries to recapture that moment of contradictories and fragilities.” H. Mao