Single File + Silent Night + Efforts of Nature + No Exorcism Film
Simon Liu, Jonathan Schaller, Philipp Schaeffer, Morgan Quaintance & Komtouch Napattaloong / Italy, United States, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Germany & Thailand / 63 min
Four short works nominated for the CPH:DOX Art Film Award and screened together.
Single File
Simon Liu / Italy, United States, United Kingdom & Hong Kong / 2024 / World Premiere / 10 min
Hong Kong artist Simon Liu uses the big screen as canvas in an intense, compact and physical work (NB: The film contains strobe effects).
A psychogeographic sensory bombardment rooted in artist Simon Liu’s native Hong Kong, where the struggle for personal expression increasingly clashes with the dark forces of censorship. In the wake of recent political protests, Liu has created a compact work for the big screen that demonstrates with physical intensity a deep knowledge of analogue darkroom methods as well as contemporary video practices, while exploring the borderlands of a new reality of misinformation and civil disobedience. NB: The film contains strobe effects.
Silent Night
Jonathan Schaller & Philipp Schaeffer / Germany / 2024 / World Premiere / 14 min
An intelligent and acute reflection on the absurdity of religious tourism during a bus trip to Bethlehem.
A group of international tourists are on a half-day trip to Bethlehem to visit religious sites. But the city is on strike, lunch can’t be delivered as planned and the souvenir shops are closed. Their two guides – one Israeli, the other Palestinian – each have their own reasons for not telling their guests what’s going on. As the tourists visit what is said to be the birthplace of Jesus, there is a rumour among the street traders about a violent incident the day before. The town name Bethlehem brings Christmas cheer to two billion Christians, and images of a baby in a manger come to mind. But what is there to see today and what remains unseen?
Efforts of Nature
Morgan Quaintance / United Kingdom / 2023 / International Premiere / 20 min
The former CPH:DOX winner is back with a hypnotic new work.
Morgan Quaintance, winner of the 2020 New:Vision Award, returns to CPH:DOX with a new and evocative work that combines found footage, analogue 16mm and satellite imagery – not to mention loops and repeats – in an investigation of temporal processes from two radically different perspectives: the physical being of the body and the planetary, geological conditions. Change and dissolution pave the way for new becomings in ‘Efforts of Nature’, which with a rhythmic and almost pulsating force insists on perception itself as a medium for new and transcendent insights. In a short period of time and with a number of striking film and video works, Quaintance has reached a unique level of abstraction, which here is allowed to reach new and dizzying heights.
No Exorcism Film
Komtouch Napattaloong / Thailand / 2024 / World Premiere / 20 min
A hypnotic work video art with its antennae pointed towards cosmological frequencies, but with its roots anchored in reality.
Beings from Buddhist cosmology move through different incarnations, and the correspondence of robotic voices merge with glimpses of Thailand’s aggressive urban development and the country’s current youth movement. Hope, disintegration, change: ‘No Exorcism Film’ is an intense audiovisual work composed of pixels, colours and shadows that navigates through Thailand’s history and heritage in a search for meaning and resistance. Drawing inspiration from film artists as diverse as Trinh Minh-ha and Angela Schanelec, but tuned in on completely different cinematic frequencies, Komtouch Napattaloong has created an abstract and hypnotic, yet direct and sensory work.