Love & Revenge • Bigger on the Inside • Cabbage

4 March 2023

Run Time

60 mins

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Inner and outer space interpolate in this series of films exploring relational dynamics between public and private worlds. Instagram filters, YouTube tutorials, dating apps and a wearable eye tracker become interfaces through which to perceive shifting notions of bodily autonomy in contemporary life.

Followed by a Q&A with Angelo Madsen Minax and Holly Márie Parnell

Love & Revenge

غرام وانتقام

A teenage girl tries to escape her reality using an Instagram filter but her desire to exist freely as an image collapses when she loses control over her avatar. Casting family and friends as fictionalised versions of themselves, Anhar, who studied computer science at the Arab Open University, stages a participatory and reflective exploration of technologies and social media in Saudi Arabia – probing the dynamics between real and virtual, public and private, space.

Programmer’s Note

Social media personas rub up against “real life” in this dislocating short film. The internet can be a place to inhabit new identities and create multiple selves, but what happens when the boundaries of these worlds start to blur and collapse in on themselves?

As Doody sleeps, her internet persona takes on a life of its own, photographing itself in the empty streets of Jeddah, a place where taking photos or videos in public is not permitted. A world composed of webcam footage, screenshots, memes and Facetime calls provides the backdrop for this exploration of what it means to live purely as an image.

~ Myriam Mouflih

Director Biography

Anhar was born in Jeddah, 1993, and has a multi-ethnic background (Yemeni and Indonesian). She has studied IT at Arab Open University and at Le Fresnoy Studio in France. As an autodidact video artist, her work attempts to explore, document, and open new public and private spaces associated with themes such as everyday life, the body, and social media. Using her camera phone, and often working collaboratively with her subjects/characters, she improvises with new forms of communication that critique video as a medium and explore processes around the marginalisation of people and their images.

Director Filmography

The Sleeping Sun Station (2019), Mami, La Moula, (2022)

Director

Anhar Salem

Countries

France Saudi Arabia

Year

2021

Premiere

UK Premiere

Dialogue Languages

Arabic English

Subtitle Language

English

Primary Contact

Anhar Salem

Duration

30 mins

Producer

Elodie Wattiaux

Cinematographer

Ansam Salem Anhar Salem

Actor

Ansam Salem

Bigger on the Inside

Outer and inner space collapse in Angelo Madsen Minax’s cosmic essay film which diffracts feelings, memories, and longings during a blurry sojourn in a remote cabin in the woods. Looking at the stars, flirting with guys on dating apps, taking ketamine (or not), and watching YouTube lecture videos, Minax draws a warped cartography of desire and distance. A humorous, psychedelic and deeply moving work, Bigger on the Inside is the latest in Minax’ transcendent cinema of trans embodiment.

Programmer’s Note

Following on from his virtual 2020 BFMAF retrospective, Angelo Madsen Minax returns to the festival with an intimate new short. A search for connection is the underlying thread stitching together some of the disparate elements of Bigger on the Inside as ripped footage, crunched gifs, screen recordings and long exposure stargazing photography coalesce with monologues and dialogues that veer from the quasi-intellectual to the overtly amorous. Climaxing with the audacious but justified steal of an iconic needle drop from nineties cinema that’ll leave you wondering if the track was actually made for this moment, Minax’s audio-visual assemblage muses on some of the many forms of desire in the digital age.

~ Dan Guthrie

Director Biography

Angelo Madsen Minax is a director based between New York and Vermont. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. His filmography spans documentary and hybrid filmmaking formats, narrative cinema, experimental and essay film. His prolific practice transgresses form, style and narrative to explore queer and trans intimacies, chosen and biological structures of kinship, cosmic, natural, and technological phenomena. His works have been screened and exhibited at Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlinale, European Media Arts Festival (Osnabrück), Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives (New York), British Film Institute (London), REDCAT (Los Angeles) and others. His third feature film, North By Current (2021), aired on season 34 of POV (PBS), was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and won the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight award, Best Writing award from the IDA and numerous festival jury prizes. Minax is currently an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont, a United States Artist Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Director Filmography

At the River (2020), Two Steps on the Water (2019), The Eddies (2018), Because of Us (2018), The Source Is a Hole (2017), Kairos Dirt & the Errant Vacuum (2017), The Bowels of the Universe (With Shining Knees) (2016), To Summon and Chase Away (2015), Separation of the Earth (By Fire) (2015), Forward into the Afternoon (2014), My Most Handsome Monster (2014), Like Some Other Men (2013), The Year I Broke My Voice (2012), Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance (2010)