This programme is inspired by Lukas Cranach’s diptych of portraits of the Cuspinians – paintings whose background is packed with miniature stories to be deciphered. Likewise, our films contain various subplots, telling nonlinear stories that meander, twist, and turn. Offering a plethora of details to be discovered, they demonstrate how varied viewing experiences can be.
One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean
Yuyan Wang / France 2021 / 11'30" / DCP / colour / French / Doc/Exp
This film reflects on the experience of not being able to see the world with depth perception. Made up of micro-events from videos found on the internet, the abstract narrative unfolds to trance and minimal music. It's about a desire for groundless waves, blended with today's inexorable entropy of our information societies.
Sun Dog
Dorian Jespers / Russia/Belgium 2020 / 19'49" / DCP / colour / Russian/English / Fic
Fedor is a young locksmith in Murmansk, a frozen city in the Russian Arctic. From client to client, he roams through alleys of concrete, animated by a fantasy that isolates him. His dreams corrode his relation to reality and open the door to a phantasmagoric universe – a second sun is rising.
Glass Life
Sara Cwynar / USA 2021 / 19'2" / colour / English / Exp
«Glass Life» is a dynamic configuration of images and video accumulated over the years on the artist’s hard drives. From her studio, she uses her computer and various studio set-ups to make sense of her visual archive – and the world outside. Luscious pictures of food, political figures, screen idols, sportswomen, Instagram models, grand artworks, cartoon characters, emojis, and self-portraits, among many other images, vie for our attention. A dizzying journey through our consumerist visual world.
6000 Lies
Simon Rieth / France 2024 / 5'4" / colour/black & white / French / Doc/Exp
The story of a detail that is missing or that never existed. The image of a child we are looking for and trying to recreate. Thousands of lies to find the truth.
Duck
Rachel Maclean / United Kingdom 2023 / 16'30" / colour / English / Fic/Exp
«Duck» is a deepfake short that follows Sean Connery’s unravelling after he witnesses Marilyn Monroe’s return from the dead. Set in the world of a British spy thriller, Connery plays the role he knows all too well: collecting clues, wrongfooting assailants, and eliminating the femme fatale – only to find that all is not what it seems. «Duck» is made entirely from deepfake video and audio, resurrecting actors via AI machine learning. Visually captivating, funny, and innovative, the film takes elements from Hollywood, video games, film noir, and sci-fi to raise questions about truth and power.
Hymn of the Plague
Philipp Ivanov/Dimitri Gorbaty/Alexander Epikhov / Germany 2024 / 12'36" / colour / Russian / Exp/Fic
In an old Soviet recording studio, a group of musicians attempt to record a composition based on Pushkin's play «A Feast in Time of Plague». A weird and frightening phenomenon disturbs the musicians — is it ghosts of the past or an echo of a war? Nobody notices what is happening around them until the very end.