Sara Pathirane’s Holding Clouds (2018), Azar Saiyar’s Monument of Distance (2018), and Timo Wright’s Ex Nihilo (2018) are screened at Rencontres internationales, held in Berlin from August 20–25. The screenings with Pathirane’s, Saiyar’s, and Wright’s works take place in Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Sara Pathirane’s Holding Clouds is included in the opening night’s short film screening “Contemporary Mythologies“, screened on Tuesday, August 20, at 19:30 and 21:30.
Holding Clouds depicts a choreography on Huangshan, the Yellow Mountain in China. The mount Huang is famous from the old Chinese shan shui – mountain-water ink paintings. Still now the landscape gathers people to witness it. The view itself is often covered in clouds, only a peak of a mountain hovering in the sight. Still a thousand photos are taken there every day. People pose for photos in front of the landscape. The rythm of the visitors’ gestures, the reaching out, pointing, holding the air and touching the mountains formulates a choreography for the mountain. Chilean composer Fernando Munizaga’s piece Mi última palabra china (My last Chinese word) binds the poses into a broken language, an attempt to get hold of tones and diftongs hidden in the grayscale of the moving clouds. The music is based on discoveries Munizaga made in the field of phonetic analysis of Mandarin language. There is a constant movement, with rather simple materials and gestures.
Azar Saiyar’s Monument of Distance will be screened on Wednesday, August 21 at 17:00 in the screening “Image-Time“. In Monument of Distance, Googoosh, a popular and loved iranian-azerbaijani singer, performs a version of the song Ayrılıq – Separation. The performance is from 1970s television show and it has been copied several times from one videotape to another. Ayrılıq could be a love song but it is told that composer Ali Salimi (who had migrated from Soviet Azerbaijan to Iran and left behind his home and loved ones) wanted to make music about his sense of longing.
Timo Wright’s Ex Nihilo is included in the screening “Post-World“, screened on Wednesday, August 21, at 19:00. Ex Nihilo is an experimental short documentary about life, death and our attempts to control them. It tells the stories of an advanced humanoid robot, a cryonics facility, where brains of deceased are held and of a seed vault, where crop seed from around the world are kept frozen.
Rencontres internationales, August 20–25 2019, Berlin
More information: Rencontres internationales