31 May 2019

EFS @ Kino klub Split, Croatia

Two programmes of Experimental Film Society films will be screening at Kino klub Split in Split, Croatia on 20th & 27th September 2019.

Address: Ulica Slobode 28, 21000 Split, Croatia.

More info here: Website and Facebook

Cine Club Split is a non-profit organization active since 1952, with the aim of developing audiovisual culture and arts and providing space, technical and production resources for educational purposes and production, screenings and presentation of cultural and artistic content.

Experimental Film Society (an Irish company dedicated to the production and screening of experimental cinema) is a group of filmmakers dedicated to the creation of uncompromisingly personal, formally challenging filmmaking. Based in Dublin, it has succeeded in forging a new and radically alternative Irish cinema. Its defiantly independent vision, both deeply informed by film history and utterly modern, has animated over five hundred shorts and features since 2000. Its films adopt an exploratory approach to filmmaking and foreground mood, atmosphere, visual rhythms, and the often-startling sensory interplay of sound and image. As EFS filmmakers experiment with cinema, they allow it equally to experiment on them, creating richly experiential works that chart an uncomfortable territory that is at once uncannily familiar and utterly alien.

Programme One / 20th September:

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 / 27th September:

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.

Total running time: 77mins