EXPERIMENTA 2017
10th International Festival of Moving Image Art in India Click here for EXPERIMENTA 2017 SCHEDULE
Experimenta 2017 trailer FULL PROGRAMME
DAY 1 | NOVEMBER 28 | TUESDAY 6.15pm | OPENING FILMS | LIVING ARCHIVE MONANGAMBEE | Sarah Maldoror | Algeria | 1969 | 35mm to digital | b&w | sound | 18 min MUEDA, MEMORIA E MASSACRE | Ruy Guerra | Mozambique | 1979 | 16mm to digital | b&w | sound | 75 min In person: Nicole Wolf
DAY 2 | NOVEMBER 29 | WEDNESDAY 12.15pm | ARTIST PROFILE 1 | PETER HUTTON | 56 MIN THE ART OF SUBTLE SEEING The loss of Peter Hutton in June 2016, robbed personal independent filmmaking of one of its great artists and teachers. Through nearly fifty years of 16mm filmmaking, Hutton took one of the fundamental aspects of cinema, the fixed rectangular frame, and made it his primary artistic focus, a means of exploring vision and consciousness. His elegant compositions were silent windows that documented widely divergent locations as places of mysterious activity, filled with sensual forms and subtle rhythms. The 16mm camera was Hutton’s sketchpad, and it accompanied him on his travels to many parts of the world. His sharp observational eye was critical and politically aware, and was always alert to marvels of the moment, visual details that the camera was able to record and that would normally be missed. New York Near Sleep for Saskia | USA | 1972 | 16mm | b&w | silent |10 min New York Portrait, Chapter II | USA | 1981 | 16mm | b&w | silent | 16 min In Titan’s Goblet | USA | 1991 | 16mm | b&w | silent | 10 min Lodz Symphony | USA | 1993 | 16mm | b&w | silent | 20 min Presented by: Peggy Ahwesh 2.15pm | INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 1 | 85 MIN Disintegration 93-96 | Miko Revereza | Philippines/USA | 2017 | digital | colour | sound| 5.5 min Sweet Life | Sohrab Hura | India | 2016 | digital | colour + b&w | sound | 13 min Watching the Detectives | Chris Kennedy | Canada | 2017 | 16mm | colour | silent | 36 min The Masked Monkeys | Anja Dornieden & Juan David Gonzalez Monroy | Germany/Indonesia | 2015 | 16mm | b&w | sound | 30 min In person: Sohrab Hura, Anja Dornieden & Juan David Gonzalez Monroy 4.15pm | ARTIST PROFILE 2 | CHICK STRAND 1 | 67 MIN Following her experiences in developing the independent film exhibitor Canyon Cinema with Bruce Baillie and Ernest Callenbach in the early 1960s, Chick Strand relocated to Los Angeles as a single mother of two in her mid-thirties to attend graduate school at UCLA in their ethnographic film program. An extraordinary body of work gradually unfolded, from her early experiments with image manipulation and a celebratory and poetic psychedelia, to her complex and ambiguous collage pieces, to her remarkable and rule-breaking poetic/surrealist ethnographic films. Threads run throughout, including notions of sensuality, ritual, survival, female strength and desire, morality, humanity, autobiography, what unites us, what separates us, what fascinates us, what repels us. THE ECSTASY OF EXPERIENCE Central to Chick Strand’s films is a deep engagement with a sense of being and self, expressed through her extraordinarily intimate cinematography, fluid editing, and heightened sensitivity to the tactility of images. This eclectic program spanning several of Strand’s diverse cinematic modes attempts to describe her very rich exploration of the simple intensity, beauty, and sometimes difficulty of being a feeling soul in a bound, physical world. Anselmo | USA | 1967 | 16mm | colour | sound | 4 min Fever Dream | USA | 1979 | 16mm | b&w | sound | 7 min Waterfall | USA | 1967 | 16mm | colour | sound | 3 min Guacamole | USA | 1976 | 16mm | colour | sound | 10 min Mujer De Milfuegos / Woman of A Thousand Fires | USA | 1976 | 16mm | colour | sound | 15 min Elasticity | USA | 1975 | 16mm | colour + b&w | sound | 25 min Angel Blue Sweet Wings | USA | 1966 | 16mm | colour | sound | 3 min In person: Mark Toscano 6.15pm | ARTIST PROFILE 3 | KIDLAT TAHIMIK | 152 MIN As the ultimate enfant terrible of Philippine cinema, avant-gardist Kidlat Tahimik refuses to settle on anything, whether it’s the telling of a colonial past, or any version of this film, which he’s been making and revising for nearly four decades. BalikBayan, which means “returnee” in Filipino, is partly about the homecoming of the historical figure Enrique of Malacca, a Malay who Tahimik first played and brought to the screen in 1979. As the slave of the 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan he circumnavigated the Earth, before returning home as a free man. Old footage of Enrique, played by the young Tahimik, is mixed with the fictional story of a mysterious old man, played by the present-day Tahimik, and documentary footage of a contemporary artist community in Baguio, in northern Philippines. In this version, Redux IV, Tahimik continues his quest to reconsider the Philippines’ colonial legacy. In person: Kidlat Tahimik
DAY 3 | NOVEMBER 30 | THURSDAY 12.15pm | ARTIST PROFILE 3 | KIDLAT TAHIMIK | 93 MIN THE PERFUMED NIGHTMARE | Kidlat Tahimik | Philippines/Germany | 1977 | 16mm to digital | colour | sound | 93 min “One of the most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies.” – Werner herzog. Kidlat Tahimik’s famous semi-autobiographical fable “Perfumed Nightmare’ is a work of rare brilliance. Raised in “a cocoon of American dreams,” the young Kidlat, a bus driver in a town near Manila, dispenses with documentary convention and himself assumes the role of protagonist on a journey of self-discovery. As president of the local Werner von Braun fan club, Kidlat dreams of Cape Canaveral and American technological prowess, but grows disenchanted with Western cultural colonialism as he travels from the countryside to France and Germany. Staged and improvised accounts of Kidlat’s seriocomic experiences commingle with newsreels of politicians, footage of puberty rituals, and lyrical interludes extolling the beauty of the Philippine landscape— creating an astonishingly original cinematic texture. In person: Kidlat Tahimik 2.15pm | INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 2 | 91 MIN Chaaya (From the Shadows) | Nundrisha Wakhloo | India | 2015 | digital | colour | sound | 23.5 min 500,000 years | Chai Siris | Thailand | 2016 | digital | colour | sound | 15 min Hijacked | Shambhavi Kaul | USA | 2017 | digital | colour | sound | 15 min Buried In Light | Gautam Valluri | India/France | 2016 | 16mm to digital | colour | sound | 7.5 min Camera Threat | Bernd Lützeler | Germany | 2017 | 16mm + digital | colour | sound | 30 min In person: Nundrisha Wakhloo & Bernd Lützeler 4.15pm | ARTIST PROFILE 4 | PEGGY AHWESH | 67 MIN Currently a professor at Bard College in film and electronic arts, Peggy Ahwesh, who once worked under George Romero and was taught by Tony Conrad, has been making films for 35 years, often collaborating with friends and colleagues. Starting out under the influence of the Pennsylvania punk scene with hand-held Super-8s constantly running, her approach to her subjects is part home movie, part documentary, and part experimental ethnography—a mix of textures that results in something entirely different and something “gloriously messy.” From Romance to Ritual | USA | 1985 | super 8 to digital | colour | sound | 20 min She Puppet | USA | 2001 | digital | colour | sound | 16 min Collections | USA | 2012 | digital | colour | silent | 6 min The Scary Movie | USA | 1993 | super 8 to digital | b&w | sound | 9 min The Third Body | USA | 2007 | digital | colour | sound | 7 min The Blackest Sea | USA | 2016 | digital | colour | sound | 9 min In person: Peggy Ahwesh 6.15pm | FEATURE FOCUS | 104 MIN PUSHKAR PURAN | Kamal Swaroop | India | 2017 | digital | colour | sound | 104 min In person: Kamal Swaroop
DAY 4 | DECEMBER 1 | FRIDAY 12.15pm | INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 3 | 92 MIN Mountain Castle Mountain Flower Plastic | Annapurna Kumar | USA | 2017 | digital | colour | sound | 3 min Landscape For A Person | Florencia Levy | Argentina | 2015 | digital | colour | sound | 8 min Sadhu In Bombay | Kabir Mehta | India | 2016 | digital | colour | sound | 15 min Lumbre | Christian Delgado & Nicolas Testoni | Argentina | 2016 | digital | colour | sound | 40 min Sakhisona | Prantik Basu | India | 2016 | 16mm to digital | b&w | sound | 26 min In person: Prantik Basu 3.15pm | ARTIST TALK | 90 MIN This event will be hosted at Gallery SKE, Berlie Street, Bangalore KEITH SANBORN One of the principal metaphors Sanborn uses to describe the gamut of his activities is translation: the strategic shift of media from one context to another. The greater part of his work has been involved with the use of pre-existing media. By shifting those media images from their original context and juxtaposing them with other images, or by re-configuring their structures using simple strategies, meanings emerge from below the surface in ways not intended by their original creators—meanings that speak to social relations of power. 6.15pm | PERFORMANCES | 90MINS Musical Four Letters (Voice and Film) by Marcus Bergner Scrambled Speech by Myriam Van Imschoot Bats of Bangalore by Till Wyler Van Balmoos & Nikolaus Witty with students of Srishti Institute of art, design & technology Till Wyler von Ballmoos’s work revolves around the interplay between audience, performative spaces and live music and sound. The choreography of unstable events in performances and narrations of paradox situations are his artistic research focuses. He studied Music Theater at the University of Music and Theater Munich/Germany from 2006 to 2011 and classical violoncello at the University of Arts Bern/Switzerland from 1990 to 2004. Nikolaus Witty is a freelance dramaturge who deals with music theatre, performance and theory. Since 2010 he has worked as lecturer and curator of performance philosophy workshops and seminars in Berlin, Munich (Germany) and at festival steirischer herbst in Graz (Austria). From 2012 to 16 he created several video installations in Munich and Stuttgart (Germany). Hemant Sreekumar is an indian artist with a background in art history, fine arts and digital media. He does performance art with synthetic audio using principles of emergence + also produces visual media including prints and light based works. His works respond to notions of decay, generative bias and loss of semantics. Ron Schneider; Influenced by Techno, Krautrock, Noise, Ambient and Drone music, Ron Schneider taught himself how to use and abuse everything he could find in rehearsal rooms: drums, bass guitar, synthesizers, amplification techniques, tape recorders, microphones or effects. Ron performs solo and with groups, like Transistors Of Mercy whose notorious real-time improvised live shows and acoustical installations span over eight hours and longer; making use of unusual instruments or self made electro-acoustic devices. The Indian Sonic Research Organisation is a collective dedicated to the proliferation of creative music and experiments in sound.
DAY 5 | DECEMBER 2 | SATURDAY 12.15pm | SPECIAL PROGRAM | 68 MIN NORTH OF 49 Circa 1967 – Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) is founded as Canada’s first artist run, not for profit film distribution centre. Michael Snow, one of the founders of the centre, creates the seminal and groundbreaking 16mm avant-garde film Wavelength, Canada celebrates it’s 100th anniversary as a colonized country. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of CFMDC, this program samples some classic Canadiana bringing together many of Canada’s greatest talents. WVLNT | Michael Snow | Canada | 2003 | 16mm to digital | colour | sound | 15 min By The Time We Got To Expo | Eva Kolcze and Philip Hoffman | Canada | 2015 | 16mm to digital | colour | sound | 9 min Explorations of an Unexpected Time Traveler (4013) | Christina Battle | Canada | 2013 | digital | colour | sound | 4:51 min This Town of Toronto… | Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof | Canada | 2012 | 16mm | colour | sound | 3:50 min Whitewash | Nadine Valcin | Canada | 2016 | digital | colour | sound | 6:20 min A Celebration of Darkness | Jaene Castrillon | Canada | 2015 | 16mm to digital | colour | sound | 6:34 min Canadian Pacific / Canadian Pacific II (Double Screen Version) | David Rimmer | Canada | 1974 | 16mm to digital | colour | silent | 9 min Saskatchewan | Brian Stockton | Canada | 2002 | 16mm | colour | sound | 5 min Music Might Have Deceived Us | Chris Chan Fui Chong | Canada | 2000 | 16mm | b&w | sound | 6 min You Rub Me the Wrong Way | Scott Miller Berry | Canada | 2015 | Super 8 to digital | colour | sound | 3 min In person: Lauren Howes & Scott Miller Berry 2.15pm | INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 4 | 88 MIN Zwielicht | Björn Speidel | Germany | 2017 | 16mm | b&w with anaglyphic filters | silent | 5 min Impressions for a light & sound machine | Colectivo Los Ingravidos | Mexico | 2014 | 16mm to digital | b&w | sound | 7 min IFO | Kevin Jerome Everson | USA | 2017 | 16mm to digital | b&w | sound | 10 mins Were Here | Oliver Husain | India/Canada | 2017 | digital | colour | sound | 13 min Beyond the One | Anna Marziano | France/Germany/Italy | 2017 | Super 8 + 16mm to digital | colour | sound | 53 min In person: Björn Speidel and Oliver Husain 4.15pm | ARTIST PROFILE 1 | CHICK STRAND 2 | 74 MIN SURVIVAL AND DESIRE Survival and desire are two very commonly recurring themes throughout Chick Strand’s work, often working simultaneously in an unusual interwoven relationship. This is most richly and brilliantly explored in her amazing film Soft Fiction, in which a series of conceptually linked episodes involving first-person narratives by various women creates a complex empathic web of thoughtful provocations and ambiguities. Further illuminating these themes are two of her most haunting and beautiful shorts. Artificial Paradise is one of the more evocative films ever created on the subject of sensual longing, while the hypnotic Kristallnacht engages in an unusual dance between the beauty of existence and its inevitable obverse, the horror of suffering. Artificial Paradise | USA | 1986 | 16mm | colour | sound | 12.5 min Kristallnacht | USA | 1979 | 16mm | b&w | sound | 7.5 min Soft Fiction | USA | 1979 | 16mm | b&w | sound | 54 min In person: Mark Toscano 6.15pm | FEATURE FOCUS | 155 MIN KALPANA | Uday Shankar | India | 1948 | 35mm on DVD | b&w | sound | 155 min
DAY 6 | DECEMBER 3 | SUNDAY 12.15pm | SPECIAL PROGRAM | 91 MIN OF FORGETTINGS Oral cultures memorize thousands of songs, stories, chants and poems. Today practically the whole of human knowledge is available to us on the tap of a button. The British neurologist Oliver Sacks said, ‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”, this narrative is us’. However memory in the age of information, caught in a constant stream of data seems to form more a rhizomatic structure that is disordered, non-Narrative even anti-Narrative in their fundamental organization. Touché | Lorna Collins | UK | 2013 | 16mm to digital | 3 min The Lost Head & The Bird | Sohrab Hura | India | 2017 | digital | colour | sound | 9.5 min The Story of Ones | Pham Ngoc Lan | Vietnam | 2011 | digital | colour | sound | 10 min Vietnam the Movie | Nguyen Trinh Thi | Vietnam | 2016 | digital | colour + b&w | sound | 47 min Four Windows | Pham Thu Hang, Do Tuong Linh, Khong Viet Bach, Dong Thao, Do Ha Thu, Nguyen Phuong Thao | Vietnam | 2013 | digital | colour | sound | 23 min In person: Desire Machine Collective 2.15pm | SPECIAL PROGRAM | 77 MIN FIGURES POINTING OUTSIDE THE FRAME South Asian Visual Arts Centre is pleased to present MONITOR 12 Figures Pointing Outside the Frame. The works that make up this program consider the peripheries of the image as significant as the content within. Whether film, video, or a still image, the technology dictates the parameters of the frame. Decisions an imagemaker makes regarding the composition, duration, performance, and location further contribute to a viewer’s experience. Collaboration is formed between the technology, image maker, and subjects- though this collaboration is often expanded with elements, situations, and conditions beyond that which is scripted. In this way, the program advocates for the viewer to consider the environmental, labour, historical, economical, gendered, and social conditions that influence the constructed experience. Auxiliary Mirrors | Sanaz Sohrabi | USA | 2016 | digital | colour | sound | 12 min The Rain After | Mohammad Fauzi | Indonesia | 2014 | digital | colour | sound | 12 min Speculations on India | Harkeerat Mangat | India | 2016 | digital | colour | sound | 29 min Landscape Series no. 1 | Nguyen Trinh-Thi | Vietnam | 2013 | digital | colour | sound | 5 min Alex & I: Moving Pictures | Sumugan Sivanesan | Australia/ Sri Lanka | 2016 | digital | colour | sound | 12 min Scene 38 | Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit | Thailand | 2015 | digital | colour | sound | 7 min In person: Oliver Husain, Yuki Aditya & Indu Vashisht (SAVAC) 4.15pm | ARTIST PROFILE 5 | ROX LEE | 60 MIN JUAN DEKADA Already a well-respected illustrator and syndicated comic strip artist in the early 1980s, Rox Lee discovered the potential of film and reinvented himself as a filmmaker. His first solo experimental masterpiece was The Great Smoke (1984), followed by his on-camera performative projects like Lizard, or How to Perform in Front of the Reptile (1986), and forays into documentary and diaristic filmmaking. The selection shown here focuses on the films that cemented his reputation as a singular and influential artist: the unbound and ceaseless experimentation, the irreverent humor, the playfulness and the rock ’n’ roll–all done solo or with a revolving cast of collaborators who later made their own mark in contemporary Philippine art and cinema. “Juan” or, when translated, “John” or “Johnny” is an alter ego that recurs regularly in Lee’s works. Tronong Puti | Philippines | 1983 | Super 8 to digital | colour | sound | 8 min The Great Smoke | Philippines | 1984 | Super 8 to digital | colour | sound | 6 min Kalamay | Philippines | 1988 | Super 8 to digital | colour | sound | 5 min Lizard, or How to Perform in Front of the Reptile | Philippines | 1986 | 16mm to digital | colour | sound | 5 min Spit + Optik | Philippines | 1989 | 16mm to digital | colour | sound | 15 min Moron’s Monolog | Philippines | 1990 | Super 8 to digital | colour | sound | 9 min Harajuku | Philippines | 1992 | 16mm to digital | colour | sound | 12 min In person: Rox Lee 5.45pm AWARD ANNOUNCEMENT International Competition Jury::: 6.15pm CLOSING FILM | 177 MIN LIVING ARCHIVE ORG | Fernando Birri | Italy | 1967-1978 | 35mm on DVD | colour | sound | 177 MIN In person: Nicole Wolf
TEAM Festival Director: Shai Heredia EXPERIMENTA 2017 is supported by: |