Tangled

The title of the film is the date on which the editorial staff of the Hungary´s largest opposition newspaper, Népszabadság, was fred. The filmmaker tore up copies of that day’s issue, layered them, and then turned them into an urgent collage expressing his yearning for the free expression of opposition viewpoints. The visible edges of the film emphasize the impossibility of presenting information in a complete context. “Our film is a simple political statement. It was made in two days, right after the shut-down of Népszabadság.” B. Máté, P. Lichter

A digitally distorted seascape brings out the horizon, which together with the rolling waves creates a visually hypnotic abstract composition of horizontal surfaces, moving in time to minimalist piano music and electronically manipulated ocean sounds, in a seemingly continuous observation of the shore. “Each line with its own intrinsic ‘intuition’ metamorphoses my perception, exploring how all these personal, inner experiences, both illusionary and tactile, shift and transform into a visual poem.”

Through the use of animation, the backlit photographs blend with the director’s aunt’s memories of the mountains, the local views, and the inside of the home from which she was forced into exile. The fragments of memory offer insight into life in the diaspora through architectural projects by which the aunt has recreated her native Tajikistan in her new home in Darmstadt.   "Film is grounded in found footage through the photographic, constructing an assemblage from fragments of exile. I focused on colour, texture, and materiality in both image and sound, resuturing diasporic time and space through the slowed-down gesture of animation." K. Friesen  

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   

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.”

Memories of sounds, everyday artefacts, fragments of situations, visual traces of gestures along with fleeting expressions of inner movements bring about in a gentle way the blanks and losses in this diary essay on the paramount importance of space and behaviour, duration of (un)happiness and focus on the present moment as a means of defence against exhaustion. “A film about absence/bereavement; trying to remember "her" gestures and presence through scattered fragments of memories, reminiscences of sounds and a decaying silence.” V. Guilbert     

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  

A frozen frame of a ten-lane boulevard lined by skyscrapers comes to life with past (or future?) movements, cars, advertisements, and people whose distinct as well as subtly visible traces struggle with the image’s punctum for an urgent actuality and the non-linearity of time, which moves forwards and back. Korean director Yi Myun (1973) studied musical composition. He lives in Seoul, where he works as a composer and video artist. The Jihlava IDFF previously showed his short film Field (2014), which explored themes of urban ecology. His films often combine traditional music-based soundtracks with melancholy views of urban landscapes that seem to live their own lives independent of human beings.“적 is the Korean title of this film and the sound of the word has diverse meaning in Chinese characters. It means: target, enemy, be right, build, trace, silence, advance, achievement, tread, watch, expose, angry, meet and fear.”

An exploration of the place, plants, stones, and buildings in a village located in a rocky bay in northeastern Catalonia near the French border, where Walter Benjamin died and is buried. A tactile encounter with a place, made using a prototype haptic camera that records the objects its user touches from unexpected perspectives. Agata Mergler is a postgraduate student of the humanities at Canada’s University of York, where she is involved in developing apparatus that record what their users touch. Cristian Villavicencio Ruiz (1984) is from Ecuador and is studying at the University of the Basque Country in Leioa. His work explores the relationship between tangible and visible perception and how it changes during the digital transfer of stimuli using modern technologies.“In our collaborative work using DIY digital prototype ‘haptic cameras’ provides us with opportunity to question the hegemony of the visual and the role of touch in moving image production.”

Consistent manipulation of found footage showing people and faces in an urban landscape dissolved their movements into visual echoes. The melancholy remnants of the original film are subjected to the digital poetry of blurriness and the loss of meaning, gestures, and physical movements. “Producing a film includes the process of creating copies. Duplication is built into the medium itself. The change in to new form creates a different experience, though nothing has changed in the content.” S. A. Fruhauf

Images originally from the tests of spotlights are inserted into models where they evoke the phases of the Moon and in regular intervals combine to hint at a harmonic line of bright reflections. A fleeting arrangement of the traces of humans and machines forever trapped in the depths of the night.  "The Moons of Palaver had to be short, quiet, with soft light, gently mechanical, edited late in the night, a paradox and a mystery. It had to be a poem that I couldn’t possibly write." E. Gaucher  

Working with the principle of concrete music, the filmmaker layers and meticulously overlays images into such a mightiness that it creates abstract compositions of memories, thus exploring how they progressively change thanks to the selective nature of memory and the possible resolution of the digital medium. The work of Japanese filmmaker and programmer Makino Takashi (1978) is influenced by London’s Brothers Quay, and is marked by an eclectic approach that makes use of video art and a diverse range of cinematic techniques. Takashi sees the image and musical soundtrack as equal components in his work. His film Generator (2012) won the Tiger Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.“The challenge was to start from the concrete, go to the abstract, and then use the abstract to create a concrete abstractness.”