Pastoral

This view of a city, its houses, the seashore, and orange groves – all of it transformed into colors and shapes – was created by digitally enlarging 35mm footage of Madrid in order to create abstract graphic patterns that were printed, like photograms, onto transparent strips and pasted directly onto 16mm film. Spanish filmmaker and photographer Klara Ravat (1986), lives and works in Berlin. Her films explore the interrelationship between memories and the present day, address the way in which archetypal patterns affect human behavior, and work with the concept of landscape as a painted canvas. Her installations (such as Connected Smells) explore the ability of smell to mediate hidden experiences and memories.“The grain of one image originates airy particles that impregnate our vision. The images become the smell of night at the coastal town...”

An algorithmic composition of 531,441 photographs taken over the course of three decades since 1985 place personal and societal events into various contexts to create a minimalist study of informational value, comprehensibility and memory of events. “After all: what is the nature of these moments/events : 9/11, Hiroshima, Buchenwald, political/economic conditions, art, family, coffee, tea, being here/there. After 531,441 pictures 1985–2015 a sum.” T. Mohr T. Mohr

The texture of minerals meticulously stacked one on top of the other emphasizes solidity but also the changes wrought by time. Some of the patterns are absorbed by others; undestructiveness is lost in transparency. The animation of the earth’s non-living surfaces and subsurfaces condenses geological transformation that in real time take millions of year.The gap between stones slowly grows, a rock is transformed as if were an organic body, a fault is quickly covered in another layer, the original colour is absorbed to create new matter.

Diary collages combine the emotions from important events such the interrogation of prisoners at Guantánamo, the Challenger disaster and the putsch in Chile with personal memories from the same points in time to create an interplay of large and small history. “I used footage of Chile’s Tancazo in my previous film. I later discovered the story behind that footage and was compelled to weave it into this film, originally intended to be a piece only about Omar Khadr.” C. Araneda

A re-construction of the illegal smuggling of a family across the border from East to West Berlin in 1988. Told in photographs, the film shows a chilling story of escape in the trunk of a car and an encounter with agents of the East German secret police. The images’ unknown origin adds a sense of the universal and calls into question the course of events.  "While researching my first feature, I stumbled across these photos in the Stasi archives and decided to try to make a story around them. I was shocked when I found out the true identity of the people " S. Calonico  

This inventive experiment with a stereo 3D image follows a train track ending at a ruined bridge and then back again through the forest. The focus is on the spatial perception of diverse depictions of the journey laid side by side, captured with a film camera and confusing the eye of the viewer with various overlays and inversions of time levels. “Stereo3D films shall be done such a kind that they make no – or another – sense if they where only in mono2D. What we know from flat filmmaking is no help. So filmmakers have to start from scratch again and spectators too.”

Minor irregularities are transformed into an elemental disorder of growing, jumping, decaying and reappearing bubbles, only to become focused into a circle of changing colors. Using digital tools, the author depicts the simple process by which water boils and cools again. Japanese experimental filmmaker, producer, and computer artist Yoshiki Nishimura has shown several of his films at previous editions of the Jihlava IDFF. In Fascinating Moments (2014) he followed the choreography of snowflakes, An Observation (2013) is a composition of upside images of the sea, and Orbiting (2015) explored the changing light of the moon as it shines through a visually manipulated digital image.“By using different media, we have great possibilities of expanding our views of reality into various directions.”

An image of the sea that comes close to the boundaries of abstraction, set against a backdrop of fishing nets mounted on stilts. Birds disrupt the peace of the salty air with their unpredictable trajectories of rapid flight during which the camera fights to find a focal point, so that within the limits of its automatic functions it creates an engagingly lyrical scene. In his films, Mikhail Basov (1977) explores the interaction of consumer goods and materials in the landscape and their metaphorical implications. His works have been presented at a number of international festivals and shows such as International Video Art Biennial VIDEOAKT in Barcelona, Experimental Film Festival Portland, and Festival Art Deco de Cinema in São Paulo.“A short story about the unrequited love of a videocamera for a bird.”

The filmmaker’s personal conversation with Canadian author Stephen Andrews about living with HIV is an intimate look at extreme situations and difficult-to-describe states of body and mind. The openness of the conversation reveals the maturity of meditations on sharing, isolation, the relationship to physical changes, and the subtle boundary between life and death. Footage from various sources and periods in the filmmaker’s life is complemented with hand-written titles that emphasize the film’s diary-like nature with a sense for detail, with the sensitive inclusion of self-reflection when describing relationships or counting pills.

A view of the landscape of the American Southwest, where the largest organism on Earth grows – a 60,000-year-old colony of quaking aspens – was filmed with a digital camera through the take-up reel of a 16mm projector in order to emphasize the characteristic effect of projected film material which rhythmically warps the space in front of the projector. Patrick Tarrant (1969) is originally from Melbourne, Australia and teaches at London South Bank University. He is the author of meditative films, that draw on the atmosphere of cities and urban peripheries.“My repurposing of a 16mm film projector warps space in three dimensions in order that we might reflect on our journey from a people who feared the natural world to people who must now fear for the natural world.”

Using the typical method of breaking the image down into digital elementary particles and their subsequently rearrangement, the filmmaker erases and recreates trees in the village of Les Moutiers in western France. The originally lush green and glowing yellow colours are transformed and set in motion until the viewer is unsure as to when the image is real and when it is a parasite that has attacked the digital imprint. The crowns of the trees are illuminated by the radiance of a cloudless sky. The leaves reflect the light, but after just a few seconds the image freezes and dissolves into a mesh of colour fields hinting at the falling leaves in the early autumn.

Fragmentary images reflect the ability of the neural network to preserve an imprint of what we see (even if as a mere flash) and provide a strong visual experience from specific found motifs that dissolve into their constituent parts, while encouraging moments of intense introspection and leaving room for our imagination, all of it presented as a provocative dialogue with immediate memory. Daïchi Saïto hails from Japan but studied literature, Hindi, and Sanskrit in the USA. He first started working with film in Montreal, where he co-founded the Double Negative art group. He is an author of many short films and video installations. Jihlava IDFF screened his rees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (2009).“My films d on’t talk about so cial or political issues, but instead it is important for me to think about the mode of filmmaking as having so cial and political implications.”