Jan 1, 2019

Short(s)list 2018

When it comes to short films, I will remember last year by Rouzbeh Rashidi’s ‘night life’ magnum opus Homo Sapiens Project (created between 2011 and 2015, but released in its impressive entirety during 2018), as well as by the equally ambitious Studio Diary series by Daniel Fawcett and Clara Pais who also finished the shooting of their soon-to-be-released feature Plot Points, and not to mention the amazing VHS artifact Telekinetic Pleasures, the Super 8 wonder Espectros da Terra and their collaboration with Maximilian Le Cain on Two Storms Collide (inter alia).

Unforgettable are the moments from The Unforeseen and Alternative Film/Video festivals, with the big-screen screenings of Atoosa Pour Hosseini’s mesmerizing Antler, Kent Tate’s increasingly confounding Catalyst, Michael Fleming’s visceral Never Never Land and Scott Barley’s sensually cosmic Womb as some of the numerous highlights. Sylvia Schedelbauer’s Wishing Well flickered me into a parallel (filmic) dimension, whereas Anne Breymann’s dark stop-motion gem Nocturne (Nachtstück) (kudos to Festival Scope) provided me with one of the most mysterious experiences.

I wasn’t surprised to find Bertrand Mandico’s Apocalypse After (Ultra pulpe) – a sexy & sticky love letter to the cinema and the 80s glitz – seductively intoxicating, and David Lynch’s Ant Head ... well, as Lynchian as it gets.

Quite memorable are a violet doppelgänger nightmare of Martin Del Carpio’s I, Dreaming (for which I created the official poster), bodily disintegration and spiritual ascension of Aleksandar Lazar’s Monstrosity of the Body, primeval power and delightful glitch aesthetics of Janja Rakuš’s Poem for Loa, and modern age fears and anxieties explored in David King’s Exit. Honorable mentions go to the mystical fantasy Panta Rei, Roger Deutsch's personal documentary Fathers and Sons, a formally stoic effort Alfaião by André Almeida Rodrigues, and Dalibor Barić’s weirdly astonishing collage animations which I was introduced to by my dear friend Marko Žunić whose debut feature I’m eagerly anticipating.

For the end, a blast from the past (or rather, Oberhausen archives) - a hippy adventure set in the urban jungle, U pravcu početka (Towards the Beginning, 1970) by Dejan Đurković.

Still shot from I, Dreaming (Martin Del Carpio, 2018)

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