Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker from California who’s been working in the intersection between performance and the moving image. This intersection, however, is specially arresting because of how she focuses on the quotidian and the political intertwined in public and private spaces, breaks up its elements and re-assembles the logical apparatus of individual and collective movement behind the camera, carefully choosing the vantage points which will connect with our perception.
Her latest medium length film, Mens (2019), was premiered last year in Rotterdam and BAFICI, with diverse positive comments. We talked to Isabelle about her experience as a student and new filmmaker, her interests and approach to her very personal work.
Experimental filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland (Argentina, UK) has been building a personal project for at least ten years, a project that expands itself in more than fifteen short films, photography, installation and object-books. Rinland’s work covers a universe of meta-fictional representations, where the image becomes an accomplice of a documentalized fiction, an eye over personal universes and cosmos that unravel under her 16mm lens.
All You Can Eat Buddha is a film alike its protagonist who spurs discomfort and captivation at the same time. The feature debut of Canadian cinematographer Ian Lagarde had its world premiere at TIFF and carried on with its European Premiere at the 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam. The plot is wrapped around Mike, a taciturn and corpulent tourist visiting El Palacio, an all-inclusive resort in an anonymous Spanish-speaking country.
Johann Lurf (Vienna, 1982) is an artist and filmmaker whose fascinating experimental short films have been shown in cinemas around the world. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and Slate School of Art in London, and graduated from Haruni Farocki’s Art and Film Studio. Besides Vienna where he is based, he lived in Los Angeles and Tokyo. His first feature film ? has been shown at Viennale 2017, and this year’s Sundance and Rotterdam Film Festivals, and has just won the main award at the Innovative Cinema programme of the Festival of Austrian Film Diagonale in Graz. At Diagonale, we sat down with him to talk about his compelling feature ? and the ideas that preceded it.
Min jung Kim is a young South Korean filmmaker whose latest work 100ft was one of the highlights in the latest edition of TIFF’s Wavelenghts section. After investigating about her fascinating work, we asked her some questions about her poetical approach to moving images and the film mechanism, throughout her work, which comprehends the films: Australian paper, FOOTAGE and 100ft. We also were curious about her influences and her relationship with language as a mean of reflection and creation. She answered us with a single long answer to our questionnaire, in her own style, which we reproduce entirely here.
Recently picking an honorable mention in the last Media City Film Festival in Canada, Jennifer Saparzadeh (MFA from the École Cantonale d’art de Lausanne) has been active for some years now as one of the most intriguing filmmakers dealing with the subject matter of personal exile. His films, extracted from the film diary genre, carry a great sense of evocation: intimate yet powerful images that speak of transculturalism and the relationship between mankind and their personal and emotional borders.
Joana Pimenta, from Lisbon, is a teacher in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard and a filmmaker with two titles to her name, the films The Figures Carved into the Knife by the Sap of the Banana Trees and the new and exceptional An Aviation Field, right from her experience in the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab. We caught her a day before her trip to Locarno, to premiere Once it was Brasilia, her last work as a cinematographer, and exchanged some words with her.
The work of Hui-Yu can be seen as an exploration of the primary erotic impulses of humanity, not only as a personal occurrence, but as a phenomena that transports itself into mass media. Super Taboo (2016), his latest work, is a dual screen diptych that explores the erotic fantasies of his lead character, which manifests themselves as a giant tableau vivant, where several “scandalous” sex acts take place.
Frank Fu is a young filmmaker living between EEUU, Australia and China. With his first film, Orange Confucius, he comes across a multi-disciplinary artist with transgressive intentions.
While most filmmakers use technique to create parallel universes or to conceive perfectly polished images, Douwe Dijkstra reveals his tools in order to demystify the art of cinema. Based in Netherlands, Douwe is an up and coming experimental filmmaker who is interested in exploring quotidian matters through the tools of mixed media. His last short film Voor Film (in English: Supporting Film) is a commissioned piece that premiered at Go Short – International Short Film Festival Nijmegen and got selected for the daring Lab Competition from the Clermont Ferrand Film Festival this year.
One of the most intriguing works we watched at the last [S8] 5° Mostra de Cinema Periférico were the short films of visual artist and filmmaker Rei Hayama. A young japanese girl, Hayama’s intuition for a cinema of memory, of child-like wonder cathartic imagery and the exploration of the subconscious mind permeated in the celluloid texture of 8mm, was a refreshing look in an already stimulating exhibition. Desistfilm tracked her down and exchanged a couple of emails, which resulted in the following interview.
