The competition selection of the sophomore edition of Kinoskop - international festival of analog experimental cinema which I am co-curating - encompasses thirty eight films ranging from a rambunctiously psychedelic phantasmagoria to an ethereal mini-documentary on oculocutaneous albinism to mischievous experiments imbued with absurd humor. Herein after, you will find all of these offerings introduced through still shots and official synopses, and divided into eight sections. This year, Kinoskop goes online, and is set for December 4 - 6.
Selection 1 : Toward the Mystical and Fantastic Cinema
Eric Beauron – Herma, 2020 / 16mm (France)
At the edge of the world, four men live on one abandoned island. One morning, a dead man is discovered in a boat. It's the beginning of a series of catastrophes. The fish is dying, the sea is empty ... Seán Beag, the young disciple of Marcus, then seeks to restore the order of things.
Kaspar Peters – Nordic Grammar, 2019 / 16mm (Germany)
A woman goes on a journey to the north. When she comes to an abandoned house, she settles there and appropriates the lives of the former inhabitants. We do not know who this woman is, where she came from and why she left. She is an empty figure, completely permeable to the world through which she moves. The light comes and goes. A storm is coming. Everything is in the process of dissolution: identity, home, the border between inside and outside, even the images themselves.
My Selves Dissolving travels through the sensations during out-of-body experiences. Themes of dissociation are explored such as: sleep paralysis, autoscopy, and ecstatic moments. The abstracted images are visual adaptations of my own experiences, attempting to reflect the power that resides in the unexplainable.
My Selves Dissolving travels through the sensations during out-of-body experiences. Themes of dissociation are explored such as: sleep paralysis, autoscopy, and ecstatic moments. The abstracted images are visual adaptations of my own experiences, attempting to reflect the power that resides in the unexplainable.
Kyle Ryan – A Body Travels in Darkness, 2020 / 16mm (USA)
Every night, the Gods descend upon The Town by The Tracks. This is the fate of their mortician.
Michael Alexander Uccello – The Man Who Became Everything, 2020 / Super 16mm (Canada)
The last human survivor of an unknown invasion is stalked by interdimensional entities that have plotted humanity's extinction. Driven to madness, the man escapes his self-quarantine to finally face the horror of becoming everything.
Yann Pichot – See My Ghost Passing Away, 2019 / 16mm (France)
Between dreams and nightmares, Lilith sees the ghost of her lost love.
Selection 2 : Fiction - Comedy & the Absurd
Jethro Massey – Never Apply Salt to A Potential Lover, 2020 / 16mm (UK)
Francesca likes music and complex mathematical equations. She also likes Bobby.
Bobby likes salt.
A short silent comedy shot on 16mm, filmed in Italy by an Anglo-French director who doesn't speak a word of Italian.
Dmitrii Frolov – Borodino, 2020 / Super 8 (Russia)
An experimental sitcom, shot in the style of silent films of the early twentieth century. A parody of military-patriotic films. The plot of the film is the battle of the Russian army with Napoleon in 1812.
Kristián Grupač – A Manifesto of Despise, 2020 / 16mm (Slovakia)
The classical story of a poet born anew comes into existence similarly to a birth of a poem - from the bubbling foamlike blood, from the punishment and finally from the utterance of that only word, permanently sleeping under one’s tongue.
Kim Ekberg – Lebensraum, 2019 / 16mm (France)
A mysterious briefcase changes owners in the streets of Paris.
A blood thirsty vamper is roaming around the Dutch countryside. An alcoholic Erasmus student is looking for a dance partner in Bruxelles. The world is on fire, but people are looking for some peace and quiet. Semi-abstract hand developed 16mm film, with a sparse dramaturgy.
Joeri De Jongh – Inventory, 2020 / Super 8 (Belgium)
A woman has to stay inside her kitchen because of a lockdown. She amuses herself but gets bored after some weeks.
Selection 3 : Found Footage
Michael Fleming – Tik-Tak, 2020 / various formats (UK)
What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? It means to know that one is food for worms.
We emerge from nothing, we have a name, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die.
Man is out of nature and hopelessly in it: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.
Images and sounds of a vintage movie trailer are corrupted and warped into a bizarre experimental art piece of heightened intensity: the results are weird, sinister and humorous.
Brittany Gravely & Ken Linehan – First Hypnotic Suggestion, 2020 / 16mm (USA)
First Hypnotic Suggestion conjures telepathic transference, hypnosis and collective dream space. Through its spectral tele-cinematic waves, the analogue horror-film protagonists participate in paranormal and fringe scientific experiments, attempting to comprehend the immaterial and incomprehensible expanses of their perception—simultaneously aided and obstructed by the temporal interventions and technological mediations of their transitory parallel dimension.
A collective hypnosis, an invisible, subliminal enemy, an impalpable energy on the verge of exploding. The gaze of the filmed subject, that of the camera and that of the spectator trigger a participatory obsession, made of eyes in action. Eyes that stare, emptiness or neighbor. Crossings. Missed encounters. Sudden starts. Between fear and desire. Is the threat out of range? If there is a subjective, it is that of whom?
Selection 4 : Experimental Documentary
Stephanie M. Barber – Another Horizon, 2020 / 16mm (USA)
the horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, a promised place where these two elements come together. a metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. a place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart.
also, here, the space between narrative and documentary, fact and fiction, is scratched between two voices. jayne love reads a text i wrote for her, short sentences on the concept of the horizon and the briefest suggestion of narrative collide with pieces of richard (oswan) williams' beautiful, rum-fueled living room sermons to me.
when i was twenty i lived in richard and his wife mary’s apartment, the site of their voodoo spiritual temple in new orleans. of course, as priests and priestesses richard and mary spoke often of death, transcendence, ethics and health. our days were slow and filled with philosophical rumination, richard a brilliant old man schooling a young wandering wonderer. i recorded most everything on cassette tapes back then and some have made it here to the present. to this horizon we’re at now.
Ivan Cordeiro – Espinado, 2019 / Super 8 (Mexico)
I met Martin Espino in 1985. Since day one I’ve had a very positive and vibrant connection with him.As a musician he inspires and makes me want to work with sound. Sound is a very crucial element for the image. Even silent films had a piano player doing the score. In 2014 I started to make a documentary about him and his art, shooting some of its scenes with a Super 8 camera.
Sarah seené – Lumen, 2019 / Super 8 (Canada)
Lumen (meaning ''light'' in Latin) is a sensory film shot on Super-8 that portrays a young girl with oculocutaneous albinism. Despite the hypersensitivity caused by this genetic disease, the depigmentation of her skin and eyes gives her an extraordinary aura.
Ella Morton – Kajanqtuq, 2020 / Super 8 (Canada)
Inuk elder Naulaq LeDrew speaks about her home in Nunavut, Canada and how Inuit lifestyles have changed since her youth. Altered Super 8mm film footage of the region illustrates her account of historical events and Inuit mythology.
Jean-Jacques Martinod – Before the Deluge, 2019 / Super 16mm (Canada)
Within the ancient Precambrian rock of Northern Canada sits one of the largest reserves of uranium on the planet. A power that has yielded the largest destructive energy known to man, also manifest in the region's harsh natural glory. A gothic travelogue that summons dialogue with ghosts of the region; abandoned mining towns swallowed within the pandemonium of extraction commerce and neglect, while also the liminal unknown forces that inhabit these lands and speak in shadow memories.
Selection 5 : Thingamijigs – Punks and Subversives
Selection 6 : Secret Diaries
Jeremy Camp – Perfect Shot, 2020 / 16mm (USA)
A model's response from a photographer's harassment.
Isabel Padilla – Roadtrip, 2019 / Super 16mm (USA)
in the middle of where, what happens?
Christian Schneider – It Was Like That in the 90s, 2020 / Super 8 (Brazil)
In the 90s, the population accesses the internet through home telephone networks, sex chats become popular, but what can happen when sex becomes virtual?
Jack Wormell – Crumbs #3 (Cinema Trailer), 2020 / 16mm (UK)
A parodic cinema trailer voiceover is paired with footage of a beach in south-west Ireland, filmed in the summer of 2019. The image and sound really have no connection with each other, which is the point, and hopefully the badly delivered bombast of the voiceover is humbled by shining banality in amateur camerawork, seaweed, surf, and sand.
Emma Cosgrove – Hammers 5$, 2020 / Super 16mm (Canada)
A manufactured creek, a candid salesperson, an irresistible river and a sacred orb collide in this flash portrait of cosmic serendipity and the life cycle of love.
Between C & D invites viewers to explore a metaphoric world of inner dilemmas. With this film the authors make a research into new visual forms to express а human' eternal seek for a fragile balance between sensual and spiritual experiences. The title refers to the essence of the protagonist's tragic choice between two life concepts. Here "C" stays for Christian (Apollonian) & "D" for Dionysian.
Selection 6 : Secret Diaries
Alexandria L. Vicari – Something for Yourself, 2020 / Super 8 (USA)
A poetic autoethnographic film full of nuance, contradictions, neurotic behavior, and feelings of being broke and broken in the desperate attempts to find hope and solace.
Julia Zanin de Paula – My Heart, My Traveler, 2020 / 8mm (USA)
Mere Dil Mere Musaafir (My Heart, My Traveler) is a visual expression of the unknown through the eyes of different cultures and languages.
We shot Mere Dil Mere Musaafir in the middle of quarantine in NYC with a crew as big as 3 people: the director, the cinematographer, and the performer. The empty diaspora city, the quarantine, the multi-nationality quality, and the process of shooting on film gave us the core for this project: the unknown.
Trusting the images and the words over their literal meaning is what Mere Dil Mere Mysaafir is all about and bringing unknown and uncertainty into filmmaking is part of the whole crews’ coping and healing process.
Charlotte Clermont – where i don't meet you, 2019 / Super 8 (Canada)
Shot on Super 8, "where i don't meet you" is based on its own physicality by the means of a DIY hand processing technique, where the film's materiality is treated not only as a medium but also as a subject. Its narrative structure reflects a work on film deconstruction, which joins an unpredictable and experimental universe. Showing a series of figurative shots accompanied by a textual sequence, formal and psychological associations are developped between each of the images. Through a confusing poetry, a filmic atmosphere unfolds in a "non-place", which recalls a moment lost between two time-spaces.
Miglė Križinauskaitė-Bernotienė – The Bearers of Memories, 2020 / 16mm (Lithuania)
With every moment - one more memory. But memory sometimes goes blind and what is left becomes hazy.
A man seems to be following a quest that hasn't quite found its purpose. Fragments emerge from his memory as if to escape the call of the shadows.
Hogan Seidel - The Backside of God, 2020 / 16mm, Super 8 & 35mm (USA)
The Backside of God is an experimental documentary utilizing archival footage, digital glitch, chemical abstraction, and direct animation to explore the intricacies of the artist’s relationship with their late uncle, Pastor Doug Seidel. This film is an elegy for a family member who found their, and your, queerness an abomination.
Selection 7 : Experimental Animation
Asymmtry (Jonas Erler & Marian Röder) – Super (8) Skate, 2020 / Super 8 (Germany)
Skating is cool. Super 8 films too. Fuck-shit! That was dope!
Dad is Gone. Dad is Ghost. Dad is Thing… spinning on its own skin.
After finishing building his Chapel, Lorenzo suffers a depression and is locked in it for three years. When he opens the doors he calls his children to show what he did: good and evil.
The long wail of a passing train slips into the heart of the ghosts and everything explodes into silence. An experimental animated film built around a single sound recording that evokes travel, the need to communicate, solitude, fragility, the desire for freedom, the arrival of fall, and our ephemeral existence.
Three glass characters race mental and physically. Apparitions of origin and magik parents obstruct the contestants. A dove threatens their vision.
Selection 8 : Experimental Feature
Paul Keller lives in a bombed-out city in the post-war year of 1952. He did not know his father and his mother is no longer there. Paul finds one day the missing person report of a young girl. He goes to Inspector Holler and claims that he knows the girl. But in the course of the conversation, Paul always seems less credible. He is sent out by the inspector. Does Paul actually have anything to do with the missing girl or does he seek recognition in a lost world? When he meets young Ingrid and falls in love with her is produced by Frame Store Film & Entertainment Gmb, the story turns in an uncontrollable and surprising direction.
The film Paul Keller - Stille im Schrei is produced on 16mm film. Director Axel Loh focuses on the "old school" look in the style of the 50s films. For this reason, he uses Beaulieau R16 cameras from the '60s, which exactly reflect the look of this time. In addition, old footage is used, which shows street scenes and ruins of the post-war period. The scenes have emerged after extensive time research and show the world of a traumatized German post-war society at the beginning of the economic miracle time.
