Look On the Bright Side + Dieseline Dreams + Trash The Musical
Yuyan Wang, Max Göran & Loretta Fahrenholz / France, Italy, Sweden & Germany / 71 min
Three short films nominated for the CPH:DOX Art Film Award and screened together.
Look On the Bright Side
Yuyan Wang / France & Italy / 2023 / International Premiere / 17 min
A visual essay on artificial light in an age where control, consumption and entertainment are intricately linked.
In an age of wire and string, futuristic visions anchor in lithic time. In the dark, people are driven to shine in the most spectacular ways. Light, emitted from our digital extensions, has roots traversing millions, even billions of years. Artificial light is never simply neutral or independent of the context it illuminates. Yuyan Wang’s sensory found footage montage, with contributions from an incredible number of sources, explores how light is a fundamental element in a spectacular age of control, consumption and entertainment. From enlightenment to distraction, and from the campfire to the numbing bluish glow of a smartphone. ‘Look on the Bright Side’ is a futuristic mood report from a new age of enlightenment that may have deeper historical roots than one might think.
Dieseline Dreams
Max Göran / Sweden / 2024 / World Premiere / 17 min
Life as a trucker on the road in a meditation on vigour, identity and freedom. The changing hues of the Nordic sunlight are captured on 16mm colour film for a true road score.
The road holds a promise of freedom. In this 16 mm short it acts a form, metaphor and a cinematic mythology as a phantasmagorical mixtape about being and becoming a truck driver unfolds. Two parallel stories share a drivers cabin in this film. A truck driver shares his thoughts of being a trucker while playing music from different corners of the world; cliché, romantic, rowdy music. The other story breaks in, a driving teacher instructs someone on how to drive a truck. The two stories intertwine, the truck driver turns out to also be an artist, while the artist becomes a trucker. Daylight shifts over into pink sunset. Somewhere between fantasy and reality emerges a haunted hill with a ghost fox as the truck descends into darkness.
Trash The Musical
Loretta Fahrenholz / Germany / 2024 / World Premiere / 37 min
A wild and performative, post-cinematic exploration of the porous boundaries between art and rubbish.
A work emerging from a collaboration between the artists Loretta Fahrenholz and Alicia McDaid. From Los Angeles, McDaid travels back to Philadelphia, her former hometown, to empty out her uncle’s house. During the months needed to get the chaos under control, the rooms become her daily stage for performing musical numbers and bizarre self-presentations to post on her online platforms. Surrounded by her uncle’s belongings piled up around her, she slips into the roles of celebrities and movie characters and engages her followers with makeup tutorials, TikTok dances, and social criticism. Assembled into a wild post-cinematic collage by Fahrenholz, McDaid’s performances are a radical exploration of personal anxieties and questions of aging, unfulfilled dreams, ghosting, and the difference between art and trash.