13 Aug 2019
EFS @ Coletivo 111 @ Cinemateca de Curitiba
Two programmes of Experimental Film Society films will be screening at Cinemateca de Curitiba in Brazil on 27th and 28th of September 2019. This project is kindly organised and presented by Coletivo 111, which is an art collective led by filmmakers working in independent experimental cinema circuit in the southern part of Brazil.
Programme One:
Phantom Islands (2018) By Rouzbeh Rashidi / 86mins / Ireland
Phantom Islands is an experimental film that exists at the boundary of documentary and fiction. It follows a couple adrift and disoriented in the stunning landscape of Ireland’s islands. Yet this deliberately melodramatic romance is constantly questioned by a provocative cinematic approach that ultimately results in a hypnotic and visceral inquiry into the very possibility of documentary objectivity.
Programme Two:
1_Bogna Kirchoff By Chris O’Neill (2019) / 6mins / Ireland
Bogna Kirchoff takes imagery from a 1970s espionage thriller and warps the imagery into a surreal abstract film focussing on one supporting female character.
2_ Homo Sapiens Project (161-170) (2013) By Rouzbeh Rashidi / 8mins / Ireland
Rashidi’s Homo Sapiens Project (HSP) is an ongoing series of personal film experiments that range from cryptic film diaries and oneiric sketches to fully polished features. Installments 161-170 link a formally aggressive repurposing of Hollywood reels with an idiosyncratic appreciation of the wonder of science fiction.
3_Olive (2019) By Michael Higgins / 11mins / Greece – Ireland
Although clearly filmed in our time, Olive uses the scratchy beauty of hand-processed celluloid to help evoke a mood of ancient ritual. A group of people gathered in the remote countryside are absorbed into frames that often resemble the hand tinted colours and decaying textures of unrestored early cinema. Cinema is made to haunt the present like a ghostly vision from the past.
4_Brine Twice Daily (2015) By Vicky Langan / Maximilian Le Cain / 20mins / Ireland
Brine Twice Daily is a film that came from the sea, from the depths, and it never truly escapes its salt-encrusted origins. A bizarre romance that is at once an absurd comedy, a horror/adventure B-movie, a cryptic home video and a fading seaside postcard stuffed into a bottle and cast adrift on the ocean, Brine Twice Daily marks a new departure in the Langan/Le Cain filmmaking partnership.
5_The Underworld (2019) By Jann Clavadetscher / 17mins / Ireland
This hallucinatory trip through the psychedelic recesses of science fiction begins in the flickering bowels of the earth. An explorer played by Cillian Roche undergoes a bizarre mutation in which cinema itself might possibly play a part. Clavadetcsher’s gorgeous 16mm colours and dazzlingly intense editing are underscored by a characteristic lightness of touch.
6_Antler (2018) By Atoosa Pour Hosseini / 15mins / Ireland
Pour Hosseini’s work with Super-8 conjures a mysterious territory that exists between memory, subjective perception and the objective materiality of the filmed image. Antler pushes deeper into this realm, seamlessly combining archival footage of animals and reptiles in their habitats with newly filmed material of the artist and an assistant at work in a botanical garden.