AGAINST TIME + IT IS NIGHT IN AMERICA
Against Time
Ben Russell / France / 2022 / 23 min
Analogue film magician Ben Russell turns time against itself in a beautiful experiment with diaristic elements from his new life in southern Europe.
How difficult it is to find a suitable image for something as immediate as the passage of time. That it is easier to put images to the almost unnatural ambition of turning the passing of time against itself is one of the unexpected points of Ben Russell’s dialogue-free ‘Against Time’, which lets the dream come true with the intervention of an analogue film camera. A work that may be abstract even by Russell’s own standards, but is nonetheless easy to let yourself get carried away by. The double CPH:DOX award winner’s new work incorporates diary elements from the creator’s new life in Europe. A child’s face lights up the screen in a poignant double exposure during a trip through a traffic tunnel at night. Please note: The film contains strobe-like effects.
It is Night in America
Ana Vaz / Italy, France, Brazil / 2022 / 66 min
Wild animals head for the cities to avoid extinction. Are they the ones invading us? Or is it us who have occupied their natural habitat? Ana Vaz’s eco-horror film is set in an artificial twilight from which new concepts can emerge.
The wild animals head for the cities to avoid extinction. Are they the ones invading us? Or is it us who have invaded and occupied their natural habitat? Ana Vaz’s eco-horror film documents a huge and mostly invisible migration that dissolves the imaginary boundaries between the authenticity of nature and the man-made world. Invisible because – at least in Vaz’s visionary interpretation – it takes place in the cinematic twilight known as ‘day for night’: an artificial darkness conjured by a blue filter in front of the camera lens. ‘It is Night in America’ is a cinematic work so rich in ideas that even the subtitles are integrated into the process of conceptualising the ecological crisis we live in the midst of – and in the process of deconstructing a few old, false notions along the way.