“To look at cinema’s past and at its possible futures at the same time, is there any better prospect?” concludes curator Xavier García Bardón in his text for this year’s International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. Such an invocation could serve happily as a thesis for the festival itself, a contemporary commentator via the significant hindsight of its […]
Curated by Annett Busch and Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, the theme at this year’s Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Synchronize! Connections, References, Encounters: Pan-African film networks, surveyed African filmmaking past and present, rooted and diasporic, via eight film programmes and three discussion sessions. Memory, cultural and personal, defined by the extent of its volition and presence, threaded through much […]
Migrations in New Cinema, an intriguing combination of book and film programme, presents artists’ writing and moving image work around the central theme of its title. Organised in two sections, ‘Returns’ gives way to ‘Endotic Investigations,’ which sounds alarmingly medical but here signals a shift from looking without to within. The first ‘return’ is, as […]
After the death of God, there was no return to earth or radical re-imagining: our secrets and fears stayed skybound. Now data is ‘served’ to us magnanimously, ‘pushed’ down to we leaden receptacles, we mute receivers. ‘On earth’ – whatever that may mean now – we search for meaning in barren soil under the beneficent […]