Programme 11
TRAMA (2018)
Director: Will Fredo
Germany
Experimental ǀ 8 min
English
Framed around the tumultuous history of Guatemala, TRAMA blends scenes from telenovelas, social media and news to investigate intersections between drama, trauma, politics and fiction. Central to the film are the questions of who influences whom, what is real, what is performed and how Latin American performativity has been appropriated for political ends.
Le Marché Oriental (2008)
Director: James Webb
South Africa
Experimental | 3 min
Arabic with English subtitles
This film is a two-minute intervention inside Cape Town’s disused Oriental Plaza, an apartheid-era shopping mall located in District Six, one of the most politically charged areas in South Africa. A few weeks prior to its demolition, Sheikh Mogamat Moerat is invited to perform the call to prayer inside the empty mall.
The dust doesn't want to come out of the Esqueleto (2018)
Directors: Daniel Santiso and Max William Morais
Brazil
Documentary ǀ 20 min
Portuguese with English subtitles
Four inhabitants of the state of Rio de Janeiro share their stories of the current removals happening in the Metrô-Mangueira community. These narratives stem from an encounter with images of the removal of the Esqueleto community in that same place five decades earlier.
Summer Before Springs End (2016)
Director: Terence Price II
United States of America
Experimental | 9 min
English with Arabic subtitles
A young man dreaming of a perfect day suddenly gets hit with a harsh reality that tampers with his views on the best season of the year.
How to Make an Image (2018)
Director: Eshan Rafi
Canada
Experimental | 16 min
English
Centring around a 1989 home video shot by the director’s uncle in Karachi, this film deals with questions of representation. Through acts of reading, recoding and repetition, the work asks what it means to be looked at when acts of looking are mediated by, and made possible through, relationships of power.
Radio Ghetto Relay (2016)
Director: Alessandra Ferrini
United Kingdom
Experimental ǀ 16 min
Italian with English subtitles
Radio Ghetto Free Voices is a pirate radio station that gives a voice to the dwellers of the Gran Ghetto of Rignano (Apulia, Italy), a shantytown that, until recently, housed thousands of West African migrants. Heavily exploited in agricultural work, they are able to share their experiences through the radio.
There Was Nothing (2017)
Director: Yaminay Chaudhri
Pakistan
Experimental | 15 min
Urdu with English subtitles
Set in the context of urban renewal encroaching upon one of Karachi’s most magical public spaces, Seaview Beach, the film frames a series of ‘side’ conversations with about-to-be-displaced beach vendors amid the choreography of their surreal LED-lit beach buggies, which bend the real and the present into a series of future imaginaries of aspiration.
Home Abroad (2017)
Director: Boan Wang
Belgium
Documentary ǀ 11 min
Mandarin with English subtitles
A complicated political situation drives a Taiwanese filmmaker to leave his country. Although studying and living in Belgium provides him with a sense of liberty and stability, feeling that he does not belong makes him homesick. Through self-reflection and self-questioning, he investigates his identity crisis as a Taiwanese millennial.
1991 (2018)
Director: Saif Alsaegh
United States of America
Documentary | 12 min
Arabic with English subtitles
1991 revolves around a FaceTime phone conversation between the filmmaker, an Iraqi asylum-seeker living in the United States, and his mother, Bushra Alsaegh, an Iraqi immigrant living in Turkey while she awaits approval to immigrate to the United States. The film shows how a relationship can become virtual and symbolic across forced distance.
A Vacation (2018)
Director: Deniz Eroglu
Turkey
Narrative | 29 min
Turkish with English subtitles
In this collaboration between the director and the actor Hüseyin Isçi, the director attempts to convey Isçi’s current existential conditions. The film examines the six-month imprisonment of the actor on suspicion of supporting the 2016 coup d’etat in Turkey and his fear of being indicted.
And What Is the Summer Saying? (2018)
Director: Payal Kapadia
India
Experimental | 23 min
Marathi with English subtitles
Namdeo has learnt to live off the forest from his father, searching for honey in the treetops. When afternoon descends on his small village, its women whisper little secrets of their lost loves. A strange smoke rises from the ground, like a dream of another time.