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In this seminar, Shireen Seno and John Torres will explore Los Otros’ history and the surrounding context and community of artists and filmmakers both in the Philippines and internationally. They will also discuss their working methods and strategies for production, and will be joined by Richard Bolisay, Viknesh Kobinthan and 2018 seminar leader Taylor Le Melle.
Shot in Colombia, The Magical State depicts the possession of a Wayuu woman by a 40 million year old oil demon. Framed as an interrogation, an off-screen male voice challenges the woman, who gazes back directly into the viewer’s eyes, placing a curse on ‘man’, the species who have woken it from geological time. The violence of natural resource extraction—and the resulting violation of land rights—are reflected in the demon’s iridescent-coloured rage and stroboscopic movements.
Glittering and shimmering moments: the tender touch of your child; the lumbering gait of a dancer dressed in an improbable costume; the luxury of a well-earned day off work. These glances, snapshots and memories are bound together in films alternating between the mundane and fantastic.
Q&A with filmmaker Beatrice Gibson
Shine bright. Portraits of a nomadic musician and an animatedly-perverse single father butt up against a simulacrum of the Middle East and a tactile inquiry into the natural world. Taken together, expressions of personal, political, spiritual, mystical and sexual agency provide powerful statements of either resistance to or complicity in an increasingly commodified world.
Somewhere in Burma, a forest rich in amber is controlled by the Kachin Independence Army. For most of the inhabitants, amber mining is their only means of subsistence. Working in harsh conditions under constant threat from the government army, these forest villagers live in fear and despair, with a future as dark as the end of the mining tunnel. Blood Amber is a richly cinematic documentary experience.
Sensory, colourful and widescreen, the forest is already naturally cinematic.
Since the turn of this century, the forest has fascinated a new generation of global art filmmakers who have chosen the forest as a space for their creative exploration. ‘Screening the Forest’ takes nature as its point of departure by weaving together cinematic forests from India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. In some cases, the forest may even refer to nothing but a world construed as its own territory.
Like the real forest, where many genuses of trees coexist, the programme emphasizes that cinema is constructed not only culturally and aesthetically, but also ecologically or even animistically. As new strategies and interpretations of the forest emerge from a variety of Asian filmmakers, new trees can be sowed within our own imagination.
Q&A with curator Dr. Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn
An existential thriller with touches of magic realism, Jîn follows 17-year-old Jîn, a Red Riding Hood with a fierce survival instinct. She is a freedom fighter who flees her armed organisation for reasons unknown. Jîn finds herself battling bravely through dark forests, spending solitary days in the mountains, and ultimately heading towards a city where her future is still unclear. Symbolising the complex and heated conflict between military forces and Kurdish guerrillas, the film contemplates the effect this military conflict has on the forest and mountains, including their inhabitants: animals, trees and the ecosystem enfolding them all, which doesn’t have the ability to fight back.
Introduced by Dr Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn
This special screening of Jîn is kindly supported by Berwick Film Society
A couple escape from their families and flee deep into the jungle. At nightfall, a song illustrates the innocence of their love and their search for happiness. Palme d’Or winning filmmaker Apitchatpong Weerasethakul invited fellow Thai filmmaker Pimpaka Towira to shoot a 35mm film in the forest while he observed the production though his digital camera. While Worldly Desires is dedicated to Weerasethakul’s memories of filmmaking in the jungle from 2001–05, it is also a story of forbidden love and desire, loaded with poetry, metaphor and mystery.
Sophia Al-Maria discusses her diverse practice—particularly the series of moving image works shown in the ‘Temporal Vertigo’ retrospective screening and The Magical State exhibition in The Magazine—with BFMAF associate programmer Herb Shellenberger and 2018 seminar leader Taylor Le Melle. Working at the intersection of cinema and contemporary art, Al-Maria’s practice occupies a singular space within the field of artists’ moving image.
‘Temporal Vertigo’ is a wide-ranging selection of moving image work made by artist, writer and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria over the last seven years. As schizophrenic in form as it is in chronology, the ten works shown move from essay film to music video, documentary, narrative, performance and all points in between. Included are the two part ‘Gulf Futurism’ essay film The Future Was Desert, which images the desert as a place outside of time; enigmatic science-fiction/documentary hybrid Mothership; and two music videos for Fatima Al Qadiri. This program represents the first retrospective screening of Al-Maria’s formally rigorous and beautifully cinematic work, providing a view of visual and thematic cross-contaminations between many different projects.
Q&A with filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria
