VANITAS + KILLING KIDDING COLLIDING + TIME AFTER TIME + ΔX = X_F – X_0 + DARK RADIANCE + THE WORLD IN ITSELF
Vanitas
William Andreas Wivel, Jules Fischer / Denmark / 2023 / 13 min / World Premiere
Baroque dance performance that leads its audience into a dark and dreamy world populated by queer bodies in a state of constant change.
To the sounds of a shifting collage of pop music, three dancing queer bodies move around sparsely lit spaces where fragile walls are falling apart. The transience of the walls, the vanity of the dancers, the chiaroscuro-lit images, and the title of the film take us back to the 17th century and Baroque painting, where the concept of vanitas was used for still lifes that referred to the vanity of life through elements such as fruits and flowers. ‘Vanitas’ is a musical dance work in a decaying, dreamlike world full of fragility and uncertain intimacy, in a constant alternation between being alone and being part of something.
Killing Kidding Colliding
Freja Sofie Kirk / Denmark / 2023 / 8 min / World Premiere
A fragmented narrative of glass seen through the fleeting life and subsequent death of a bird, and a mechanical examination of the relationships between architecture, image-making and power.
A bird carries us swiftly through empty lobbies and offices of a bank in Frankfurt, until it collides with a glass façade and falls to the floor. In this way, ‘Killing Kidding Colliding’ shows glass as both a material and an ideological symbol, moving between transparency and reflection, making things visible but impossible to touch. Moving mechanically between the different spaces of the bank, it draws attention to its own technique, while looking at the power and ideology of modern architecture, and how its immediate openness, transparency and smoothness also contain an underlying and invisible volatility.
Time after Time
Peter Lind / Denmark / 2023 / 4 min / World Premiere
An eight-year montage road movie on a road to nowhere, shot through the windshield of a car. The shortest film of the year, covering a time span of infinite repition.
A lot can happen in eight years. Nothing, too. But apparently something can also happen and nothing can happen at the same time. ‘Time After Time’ is the shortest film of the year. It’s also an eight-year road movie that barely moves. Told via stills taken through the wind screen of a car from roughly the same spot on the road, Peter Lind’s hypnotic film shows how one house disappears and a new one appears, while a mechanical narrator’s voice accompanies and time-stamps each frame, taking its viewer to a new land where time passes even as everything stands still.
Δx = x_f – x_0
Keiria Hissabu / Denmark / 2023 / 8 min / World Premiere
A conceptual video work from the residential area Mjølnerparken in Copenhagen, exploring the complex relationship between gentrification and marginalisation.
Based on the recent demolitions of buildings in Mjølnerparken in Copenhagen and the evictions and evictions of the families living there, Keiria Hissabu’s video work ‘Δx = x_f – x_0’ explores the relationship between gentrification and marginalisation in the residential area. With a title that analyses the complex relationship with mathematical precision, and through verbal repetitions and variations over the construction of a scaffolding, the film also becomes a compressed meditation on cinematic axioms such as movement, position, length and time.
Dark Radiance
Rikke Benborg / Denmark / 2023 / 16 min / World Premiere
An improvised meditation on optical and sonic phenomena, beautifully shot on analog 16mm film.
Percussionist Ying-Hsueh Chen is rubbing, twisting, scratching and banging her instruments. And through the unconventional attacks on her cymbals and drums, an eerie world of overtones emerges, mingling with outlandish sounds and undefined rhythms. Shot on 16mm celluloid film, kept in black and white and with constant shifts in perspective, ‘Dark Radiance’ evolves into a deep meditation on optical and sonic phenomena and documentation of a musical experiment. A place where the rays cause the poles to merge, so that glow and shadow, fear and serenity, brutality and elegance become one and the same thing.
The World In Itself
Jeppe Lange / Denmark / 2023 / 6 min / World Premiere
Colour, perception and subjectivity merge in a film in which impressionistic paintings constantly dissolve into pure colours and brushstrokes.
Hundreds of paintings flow together and replace each other one by one. The works all come from French Impressionism in the 1870s. The period is characterised by its naturalistic use of colour and light. Together, the hundreds of brushstrokes form one detailed, lifelike whole. ‘The World In Itself’ challenges photographic reality and instead offers a view without categorisation. Slowly, new patterns and motifs emerge, and the paintings create new impressions and new moods. The artist duo Jeppe Lange and Simon Brinck, from last year’s festival hit ‘Abyss’, are back with a new work about colours and gazes.