AV-arkki will present a distributor’s screening at International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, held from May 3–8. AV-arkki’s screening is a compilation of recent short films in distribution and takes place on Friday, May 4 at 22:00 in Lichtburg Filmpalast Star.
The films included in the screening are:
Saara Ekström: Amplifier (2017, 17:03)
Time inevitably moves from past to future, passing the present moment. Mankind encloses to time its marks, stains and ruins. On the verge of vast changes time acts abnormally.
Henna-Riikka Halonen: Placeholder (2017, 07:43)
The video Placeholder comments on a thought experiment where virtual non-living material ( i.e. objects) transform into self-aware beings capable of imitating humane action, telling stories, seducing.
Hannaleena Hauru: The Ice Hockey Film by Heidi (2017, 04:59)
Heidi’s fantasy about hockey player Lauri Mäntyvaara is continuously failing. The film studies the encounters of optical and haptic cinema, and the change in the power structures of the cinematic gaze.
Juha van Ingen: Hello Everybody (2017, 08:14)
While greeting customs are highly culture and situation-specific, they exist in all known human cultures. The greetings that form the narrative in Hello Everybody are taking the familiar ritual one step further.
Reija Meriläinen: Crush (2017, 04:44)
Made in collaboration with the popular vlog Hydraulic Press Channel, the video depicts gelatinous fleshy objects repeatedly crushed by a hydraulic press.
Jukka Silokunnas: Vanishing Point (2017, 01:01)
“When I was a kid we used to traveler a lot with my family. I used to Iook the changing landscape through the caravan window. Only older I realized: I changed, not the landscape.”
Antti Tanttu: Qualia (2017, 06:43)
Blackboard animation Qualia seeks for the essence of experience. There is no such thing as same feeling, same pain, same colour. Qualia is always subjective. The essence of universal experience is unreachable.
The screening is presented by AV-arkki’s director Hanna Maria Anttila, who is also attending the Oberhausen Seminar 2018.
Short films by AV-arkki’s artists in the competition selections
Anssi Kasitonni’s Saladdin Castique (2018) will have its world festival premiere in the international competition of International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Laura Horelli’s Namibia Today (2018), premiered in the Forum Expanded programme of Berlinale 2018, is included in the German Competition.
Kasitonni: Saladdin Castique (2018)
Kasitonni’s Saladdin Castique will be screened on Friday, May 4, at 20:00 in the International Competition 2.
In the short fairytale, a man walks in the forest and tries to find berries. He finds instead an empty French salad dressing bottle. A genie comes out of the bottle and grants the man three wishes. The man uses the wishes traditionally but he uses bad language all the time and the genie does not like it. The man is going to learn a lesson.
Laura Horelli‘s Namibia Today in included in the German Competition 1, screened on Saturday, May 5, at 12:30
In the short documentary film, seven people wait in an underground station below Karl-Marx-Allee in former East Berlin. Billboards line the walls, each combining a front page of “Namibia Today” with collaged material about the journal’s history in the GDR. “Namibia Today” was a journal of the Namibian liberation movement, which was printed and distributed by East Germany during times of military confrontation with South Africa. SWAPO’s (South West Africa People’s Organisation) editorial board was forced to operate from exile in Angola and without the ideologically motivated help of the GDR, the mass production of the periodical (1980-1985) would not have been possible. Rushing underground trains pick up the slow moving shot between the billboards and the protagonists, between fragments of image and speech. The participants, both Namibians with a past in the GDR and former East Germans with a connection to the liberation movement SWAPO, stand still in the movement. The present and the past, different locations, many unspokens and unknowns come together in the circular movement of the camera on the underground platform.
Horelli: Namibia Today (2018)
Special programme “Conditional Cinema”, curated by Mika Taanila
This year’s edition of International Short Film Festival Oberhausen marks the launch of a three-year project and special programme “Conditional Cinema“, designed and curated by Mika Taanila. The new project is an investigation of “live cinema” as a tool to explore the utopias of art after Capitalism. Taking up some of the strands Taanila addressed in his hugely successful 2014 “Memories Can’t Wait – Film Without Film” programme for Oberhausen, “Conditional Cinema” puts the emphasis on the idea of live “films” and how they respond to the decline of manual labour and the problem of obsolete humans.
The featuring works are based on a notion of moving images as an essentially fluid art form, conceived as procedural, collective or improvised – as “happening right now”. The line-up in 2018 includes Manuela de Laborde’s new work Ficciones which is a cinematic project of living-sculptures and their slow narrative in three movements. The protagonists – made out of clay, abstract, and hollow – will host an ecosystem of moss. In his works Peter Miller (Venice Biennale 2017) shifts the focus from storytelling to the magic of the projection event itself. For “Conditional Cinema” he will present an array of short films, including the premiere of his new cinema performance ST*R.
The 64th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 3.–8.5.2018
More information: ISFF Oberhausen
AV-ARKKI HAS PROMOTED AND DISTRIBUTED FINNISH MEDIA ART SINCE 1989. AV-ARKKI’S PROMOTIONAL EFFORTS HAVE MADE THE ARTISTS’ PARTICIPATION IN THIS EVENT POSSIBLE.