Fascinations: Exprmntl.cz

This lyrical introspective work, which straddles the line between fiction and documentary, tells the story of a train travelling through time and across the landscape, from the present to the past, from the reality of a hospital ward to a merciful timelessness bathed in the raw colours of autumn. It is also the story of a woman who, in a silence underscored by a sense of impending tragedy, is fleeing somewhere from something, inwards and outwards, back and forth. “Although my films deal with serious subjects, I also want them to have light.” — Ema Hůlková, mujRozhlas

Four students who lived for financial reasons in the UMPRUM building try to pack up and take away as much sentiment as possible, painting over and rebuilding memories of their temporary home. Using photogrammetric recordings, the animation assembles and dismantles the face of the historic building, which the students are leaving behind for a new, modern one with a smooth, austere glass visage. “Apartment Number is not only a documentary but also an ode to a building that some of us were able to call home for a time.”

A critical environmental essay and a spellbinding meditation on the landscape uncovers the secrets behind the recycling of toxic electronic waste in the European Union. The non-profit organisation Arnika has found that “responsible” Europe has solved the problem by shifting it to developing countries. The consequences of European policy are piling up on the shores of Thailand. Waste, the disposal of which poses a health risk, ends up there. “If I were only making art, I’d be terribly ashamed, because it simply isn’t enough.” — Vladimír Turner, Artzóna

This delicately shimmering nocturnal impression treads the line between the abstract and the concrete. Through light and shadow, it explores new facets of branches, trunks and elusive folk traditions. Female choral singing from the past meets the technologies of the modern world and transforms into an ambient soundscape.

Thousands of single-celled slime moulds dance in a frenetic whirl to a track by Joshua Borin from the album by British pianist Hannah Watson Emmrich. Scientific microscope footage is transformed into an artistic artefact, drawing us into a musical-microbiological ecosystem of cells that come together to form a coordinated, slug-like structure known as a grex. “Science often generates hidden beauty long before we realise it may resonate far beyond the laboratory.” — Jitka Čejková

We are like snails on the railway tracks, waiting for a train to run us over – but that doesn’t have to involve any existential drama. This languid, ambient, montage-driven illusion about fragments and the passage of time is tailored to the fragmented attention span of the contemporary viewer. Instead of narrative and context, it presents an associative stream of being in the here and now, in which a kitchen sink is just as important as a lunar eclipse. “What seems familiar to us may in fact be completely unknown, and what seems strange to us may, on the contrary, be something we know intimately.”

Sixty years after the Great October Socialist Revolution, a Soviet nuclear-powered icebreaker set sail for the Arctic Circle to mark this momentous historical occasion. Drawing on Galina Chubakova’s popular-science film To the Top of the Planet (1978), this work of docu-fiction engages in an imaginary dialogue with the creator of this new film, who is caught between the concepts of the past and the future. “Communism has always seemed terrifying, and it still does. Not only did it not end, it never truly existed. It was only a spectre.”

A poetic experimental film about memory, violence and the heavy legacy of post-war ethnic cleansing in Czechoslovakia returns to the area surrounding Buková Mountain in the Broumov region, where women, children and the elderly were murdered or beaten to death in 1945. Through animation, archive footage and observational shots, it explores how the trauma of ethnic violence persists both in people and in the landscape. “There are places where mistakes were made. The war ended, and the tables were turned. Those who had been at the bottom quickly gained the upper hand; pleas for mercy went unheeded; retribution took precedence over everything else.” Source: etc. galerie

What happens when we give artificial intelligence absolute creative freedom? It will produce a cinematic meditation on the insignificance of humanity, or on the longing for life. The AI agent, which Franz Milec tasked with creating whatever film it wished, generated digital images of poetic structures, grotesque swirls of matter and the dance of molecules that rearrange and transform themselves uncontrollably. The virtual mind recited its poem about matter and movement, teetering on the edge of kitsch. “My intention is always to uncover the complexities of what we commonly perceive as banal, bland, and unimportant.” — Franz Milec, dokweb

An experimental disaster thriller drawn from a family archive explores the coexistence of the microcosm and the macrocosm, of mundane human everyday life and the magmatic hell bubbling beneath the Earth’s surface. Every system will eventually collapse; it is a biological constant. We will know it when the cry of Beethoven’s symphony rings out. “An anthropocentric world, in which the only reminders of the underworld are cracks, is losing its relevance. This state of fragile equilibrium is inevitably heading towards ruin.”

The first landscape we come to know is a landscape of sound. The low frequencies of a heartbeat and the flow of fluids in the womb create a world that is loud yet safe. The sounds that surrounded us before birth may remain etched within us as a memory of closeness and calm. They give us our first sense of home. Yet low tones carry another memory. For most of human history, they belonged to the forces of nature unleashed: earthquakes, storms, hurricanes, as well as large animals that posed a threat. The very frequencies that can lull a newborn to sleep can therefore also awaken unease, anxiety, and fear. The Liminal Hum inhabits the space between these two poles, suggesting that our relationship with drone sounds is ambivalent from birth. Through the eyes of innocent children, it explores moments of intense joy and imminent danger, searching for the point where these two states begin to merge.

The human being as a metabolic process: the human entrails take centre stage in a video essay that examines the digestive tract through the lens of contemporary philosophy and art theory. Named after a phrase that spontaneously emerged during a retreat of the CÉN choir, the film explores questions of how we relate to tradition and to a past we have not experienced ourselves, yet which continues to shape us. “If tradition consists of honoring the past and keeping it alive, never letting it die.”

A breakup as a beginning, the closeness of someone drifting away, or a sense of freedom as we lose someone. An intimate, existential act of soul-searching immerses itself in the chaotic materiality of objects. Analogue footage, the clatter of a projector, a running strip of film and an empty room dance through a visual collage, caught in a swirl of feelings and thoughts in the wake of a breakup. “It was such a strange feeling: one moment we were breaking up, and the next I felt closer to him than ever, as though we were only just starting to date.”

An animated portrait of solitude amidst a crowd and a longing for closeness, it speaks without words through the folds of dancing fabrics. The bold intimacy and shy sensuality of flowing hair, the shimmering fibres of a ball gown, the soothing whiteness of bed linen and the texture of bare human skin venture into realms where words fall short. “If only we could get to know each other without having to speak.”