FEATURES
Twelve feature screenings including Patrick Bokanowski, the Quay Brothers, Nathaniel Dorsky, Alberto Gracia, Chai Chunya, Rachel Maclean, S.J Ramir, Julie Brook, Siobhan Davies and many more. See below for the full listing, in running order, Thursday 3 to Sunday 6.
DIY & UNDERGROUND FILM, PERFORMANCE
Duncan Reekie and various artists/United Kingdom 2013/01:15:00/Not a premiere
Duncan Reekie, underground film activist and author of Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema, presents a live film-rant performance, plus a selection of films highlighting different approaches to the no-budget, anarchic spirit of underground and DIY filmmaking. The programme includes recent work from the Exploding Cinema, a voluntary common ownership collective which runs London’s longest running open access screenings, also documentary footage from the DIY scene and klassics from the clubs including work by Arthur Lager,
Grace Connor and Ben Slotover.
Duncan Reekie will be present for a Q&A
Biography/Filmography:
Duncan Reekie is an underground filmmaker, film activist and author of Subversive: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema. He has organised numerous underground film screenings and counter-cultural film events throughout the UK and Europe, including The Exploding Cinema Collective and the annual VOLCANO!! No Budget Film and Video Festival between 1996 and 1999. He initiated and co-produced the collaborative underground feature Maldoror, which toured extensively throughout Europe and America.
Links:
Maldoror
Exploding Cinema
Retrospective at London Underground Film Festival
http://www.duncanreekie.co.uk/
Venue: MAIN AUDITORIUM, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL
Tickets: £4
Screening date: FRIDAY 4 APRIL
Screening time: 10.00am – 11.30am
A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS
Ben Russell & Ben Rivers/United Kingdom 2013/01:38:00/Not a premiere
This film follows an unnamed character through three seemingly disparate moments in his life; in the midst of a 15-person collective on a small Estonian island; in isolation in the majestic wilderness of Northern Finland; and during a concert as the singer and guitarist of a black metal band in Norway. Marked by loneliness, ecstatic beauty, and an optimism of the darkest sort, this film is a radical proposition for the existence of utopia in the present. At once a document of experience and an experience itself, it is an inquiry into transcendence that sees the cinema as a site for transformation.
Biography/Filmography:
Ben Russell (b.1976, USA) is a media artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the moving image. He has had solo screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, threewalls and the Museum of Modern Art.
Dimeshow
Ben Rivers (b.1972) is a contemporary experimental film maker and artist based in London. His work has been shown in many film festivals and galleries throughout the world, and won numerous awards. His work ranges from themes about exploring unknown wilderness territories to candid and intimate portrayals of real-life subjects. His feature length film “Two years at sea” was presented in September 2011 in the Orizzonti section at the 68th Venice International Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI prize.
www.benrivers.com
http://www.aspelltowardoffthedarkness.com/
Venue: DREAMING ROOM, SECOND FLOOR, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL
Tickets: Tickets: £4
Screening date: FRIDAY 4 APRIL
Screening time: 1.30pm – 3.10pm
SONG | SPRING
Nathaniel Dorsky/United Kingdom 2013/00:45:00/United Kingdom premiere
Nathaniel Dorsky is one of the most significant experimental filmmakers of the avant-garde tradition in the USA. Deeply committed to film as a medium for the projection of light and shadow, his highly personal, lyrical and visually poetic 16mm films are experienced in silence. In this experience, we are drawn toward a kind of serenity, a different and more inward mode of seeing, both psychological and dreamlike, surrendering ourselves into the quiet luminosity of the image as projected light. We are honoured to be hosting the UK premiere of his two most recent works.
The screening with be introduced by Robert Todd
Biography/Filmography:
“The films of Nathaniel Dorsky blend a beauteous celebration of the sensual world with a deep sense of introspection and solitude. They are occasions for reflection and meditation, on light, landscape, time and the motions of consciousness. Their luminous photography emphasizes the elemental frisson between solidity and luminosity, between spirit and matter, while his uniquely developed montage permits a fluid and flowing experience of time. Dorsky’s films reveal the mystery behind everyday existence, providing intimations of eternity.” – Steve Polta, San Francisco Cinematheque.
See a full biography and filmography here.
Links:
Review of ‘Song’ and ‘Spring’ at NYFF
Mónica Savirón reviews Song and Spring.
At Wikipedia
At Lightcone
At Canyon Cinema
Harvard Film Archive
Devotional Cinema (Book)
http://nathanieldorsky.net/
Venue: MAIN AUDITORIUM, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL
Tickets: Tickets: £4
Screening date: FRIDAY 4 APRIL
Screening time: 3.15pm – 4.15pm
UNMISTAKEN HANDS: EX VOTO F.H. Plus MASKA
The Quay Brothers/United Kingdom 2013/00:41:00/United Kingdom premiere
The Quay Brothers have consistently produced powerful, startlingly original and atmospheric films of a deeply surreal nature. With images seeming to levitate into the half light from some unseen place buried deep beneath consciousness, their animated filmic visions are truly unclassifiable. Conjuring tightly contained worlds where none of the usual rules seem to apply, and populated by puppet animations subject to endless irrationalities, we find ourselves drawn into a world of magical possibilities and eerie luminosities. Their new work, shown here for the first time in the UK, is based on the work of Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernãndez, often referred to as the father of “magic realism”.
The Quay Brothers will be present for a Q&A
Biography/Filmography:
Internationally renowned moving image artists and designers, the Quay Brothers were born outside Philadelphia and have worked from their London studio, Atelier Koninck, since the late 1970s. For over 30 years, they have been in the avant-garde of stop-motion puppet animation and live-action movie-making in the Eastern European tradition of filmmakers like Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Svankmajer and the Russian Yuri Norstein, and have championed a design aesthetic influenced by the graphic surrealism of Polish poster artists of the 1950s and 1960s. Beginning with their student films in 1971, the Quay Brothers have produced over 45 moving image works, including two features, music videos, dance films, documentaries, and signature personal works, including The Street of Crocodiles (1986), the Stille Nacht series (1988–2008), Institute Benjamenta (1995), and In Absentia (2000). They have also designed sets and projections for opera, drama, and concert performances such as Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa (1991), Ionesco’s The Chairs (Tony-nominated design, 1997), Richard Ayre’s The Cricket Recovers (2005), and recent site-specific pieces based on the work of Bartók and Kafka.
(From MOMA exhibition)
Links:
BFI – Biography and Filmography
At Wikipedia
BBC TV feature (online)
MOMA Exhibiton
At Zietgeist Films
Full biography at the European Graduate School
Venue: MAIN AUDITORIUM, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL
Tickets: Tickets: £4
Screening date: FRIDAY 4 APRIL
Screening time: 7.30pm – 8.30pm
THE FIFTH GOSPEL OF KASPAR HAUSER
Alberto Gracia/Spain 2013/01:05:00/United Kingdom premiere
Kaspar Hauser, a teenager who appeared on the streets of Nuremberg in 1828, claimed to have lived his life to date in isolation within a dark cell and with only a wooden horse, learning only small fragments of language. This film does not tell his story, but in its filmmaking eludes to an experience of being in the world without reference points, without rational frameworks, where language and meaning become highly mutable. Shot in black and white, quietly paced and contemplative, yet full of dream-like temporal shifts and ruptures, the film consistently evades our attempts to categorise and contain, to understand even. Winner of the FIPRESCI critics’ award at Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Alberto Gracia will be present for a Q&A
Biography/Filmography:
Alberto Gracia (b. 1978, Ferrol, Spain) studied Fine Arts at the University of Vigo. His work spans a variety of forms including painting, drawing, performance, video and installations. MICROFUGAS, a short film shot on 16mm in 2008, was his first venture into cinema. In 2010 he wrote the essay MICROFUGAS, TEORIA Y JUEGO DE LA PROFANACION, a book that questions reality in contemporary art. THE FIFTH GOSPEL OF KASPAR HAUSER is his first feature film.
(From Festivalscope)
At Rotterdam IFF
Fipresci Award
Cine Europa
http://www.zeitunfilms.com/en/gh/index
Venue: MAIN AUDITORIUM, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL
Tickets: Tickets: £4
Screening date: FRIDAY 4 APRIL
Screening time: 9.00pm – 10.15pm
OVER THE RAINBOW
Rachel Maclean/Scotland 2013/00:40:00/United Kingdom premiere
Recalling the Technicolor utopias of children’s television, Rachel Maclean’s astonishingly original works are shot entirely on green screen, using herself as sole performer. She creates bold, highly coloured and disconcerting dreamscapes, a kind of computer generated dystopian hyper-reality for her characters. In this film, we enter a shape-shifting world inhabited by rainbows, cuddly monsters, faceless clones and gruesome pop divas. A dark, comedic parody of the fairytale, video game and horror movie genres, in which kitsch dreams become colour saturated nightmares, with deep resonance for all that we might fear about the present. Shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2013.
Rachel Maclean will be present for a Q&A
Biography/Filmography:
B 1987 Edinburgh
2005-2009 BA (hons) Drawing and Painting, Edinburgh College of Art
2007-2008 Student exchange, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
My work slips inside and outside of history and into imagined futures, creating hyper-glowing, artificially saturated visions that are both nauseatingly positive and cheerfully grotesque. I am a Glasgow based artist working largely in green screen composite video and digital print, often exhibiting this alongside props, costumes and related sculpture and painting.
In recent videos such as ‘Over The Rainbow’ and ‘LolCats’ I create synthetic spaces in which Katy Perry discuses teeth whitening with an aristocratic cat, a decapitated diva dances to hip pop and a pastel blue dog sings for The Queen.
I am the only actor or model in my work and invent a variety of characters that mime to appropriated audio and toy with age and gender. These clones embody unstable identities: conversing, interacting and shifting between cartoonish archetypes, ghostly apparitions and hollow inhuman playthings. My video attempts to unify the aesthetic of The Dollar Store, Youtube, Manga, Hieronymus Bosch and High Renaissance painting with MTV style green screen and channel changing cuts.
Inspired by the Britney Spears head shaving, I explore the moment at which unified, constructed identity throws it’s self up and tips into it’s opposite. The instant of self-consumption, when the signature white smile of the teen pop sensation begins to hungrily gnaw at it’s own image.
FLAMIN – Jarman Award
At Central Station
Interview at FAD website
http://www.rachelmaclean.com/
Venue: MAIN AUDITORIUM, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL
Tickets: Tickets: £4
Screening date: SATURDAY 5 APRIL
Screening time: 11.50am – 12.50pm
FOUR WAYS TO DIE IN MY HOMETOWN
Chai Chunya/China 2012/01:30:00/Scottish Premiere
Reality, myth and fable constantly oscillate in this visually stunning feature. Structured around a story in which a girl returns from the city to her rural village, the film itself transcends political issues of rural displacement and urban ennui, leading us toward an alternative magical- realist vision of being in the world, rooted in the supernatural landscapes of Gansu province. Drawing upon performance art and Buddhist thought, its four parts correspond to Earth, Water, Fire and Wind, or ‘four ways to die’. Lyrical and meditative, this film speaks powerfully of both spiritual death and renewal.
Biography/Filmography:
CHAI Chunya (b. 1975, China) was born in the province of Longxi Gansu, in a village as remote as the place where he set his debut film Four Ways to Die in My Hometown. He studied politics and law before starting to work as a journalist and photographer for, e.g., Southern Weekend (the most liberal paper in China). He made many journeys, including through Tibet, that formed the basis for three novels and several photo series.
(From Rotterdam FF)
Links:
Time Out Shanghai
At Vancouver International Film Festival
Cine Vue review
Venue: MAIN AUDITORIUM, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL
Tickets: Tickets: £4
Screening date: SATURDAY 5 APRIL
Screening time: 2.00pm – 3.30pm
REMOTE & INTERCEPTING LIGHT:
S.J. RAMIR & JULIE BROOK/Scotland 2013/01:10:00/United Kingdom premiere
Remote follows the journey of a woman as she travels across a barren landscape. Starkly minimalist in composition, with numerous long takes, we are slowly drawn into a penetratingly meditative vision of landscape as a metaphysical state. The journey becomes a metaphor for spiritual journeys made across terrain within the human mind.
In Intercepting Light, Scottish artist Julie Brook presents a remarkable collection of short films made within the Namibian desert through a visceral process of physical engagement with the landscape. Rooted in drawing and sculptural form, they explore movement, gesture, and rhythm through the observation of earthen matter, reflected light, sound and shadow.
Julie Brook will be present for a Q&A
Biography/Filmography:
S.J. Ramir:
Born in Auckland, New Zealand, 1971. Currently lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. Originally trained as a photographer, SJ.Ramir later moved to digital video – shooting scenes of lone figures moving across remote and isolated geographical landscapes. His work is primarily concerned with exploring the concept of journeys – both physical and metaphysical.
His video art has been exhibited at public and commercial galleries worldwide, including; City Gallery Wellington, The Australian Centre of Photography, Sydney, Orexart Gallery, New Zealand, Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne, ASU Media Art Center, Arizona, USA, Alsager Gallery, United Kingdom. For two consecutive years (2008 and 2009) he was a recipient of the Screen Innovation Production Fund, New Zealand. His moving image work has also been screened at some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals; including the Venice International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.
www.ramirfilms.co.nz
Julie Brook:
A multi-disciplinary Scottish artist working across film, sculpture, drawing and painting. Over the past twenty years she has lived and worked in a succession of wild and remote landscapes. Her film works include That Untravell’d World, made on the uninhabited West coast of Jura, Inner Hebrides, and Made Unmade, a major multi-channel installation work made while working in the deserts of Libya and Namibia, recently exhibited at Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh and The Wapping Project, London.
www.juliebrook.com
Made Unmade at Dovecot Studios
The Scotsman – made unmade at Dovecot studios, by Moira Jeffrey
The Land Art of Julie Brook – White Review
Susan Mansfield on Julie Brook in The Scotsman, 9 May, 2013
Julie Brook: Minimalist, Muscular, Monastic, Magical – p.134-143, Elephant Magazine
Venue: MAIN AUDITORIUM, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL
Tickets: Tickets: £4
Screening date: SATURDAY 5 APRIL
Screening time: 4.00pm – 5.25pm
UN RÊVE (A DREAM)
Patrick Bokanowski/United Kingdom 2014/00:30:00/World premiere
Patrick Bokanowski is one of the most acclaimed and influential experimental filmmakers of our era. His work is concerned with the subjective psychology of the image, rejecting the tools of conventional representation in pursuit of a painterly, dream-like and visually poetic world. His films are full of contradictions, endless experiments, uncertain territories, mutating figures, distortions and absurdities, a fluidity of spaces and categories. In this new film, his first since 2008, a sense of the surreal goes hand in hand with a pervasive quality of central luminous emanation, radiating towards the gravitational pull of subjective interiority. Magnificently scored by Michèle Bokanowski, it is an alchemically metamorphosing dream, refracted in light. A defiant, contra-logical, and ultimately transcendent piece of filmmaking.
Patrick and Michèle Bokanowski will be present for a Q&A.
Contains flicker or strobe effects.
Biography/Filmography:
Patrick Bokanowski born in 1943, lives and works in Paris. From 1962 to 1966, he studied photography, optics, and chemistry, under the direction of Henri Dimier, a painter and scholar specializing in optical phenomena and perspective systems. Bokanowski’s first true window into the world of cinema was through the animated films of Jean Mutschler and for a long time, animation remained for him a kind of predilection as well as a privileged ground for experimentation. Patrick Bokanowski, wishing to make his images more expressive, and his forms more fluid, collects rounded, blown or hammered shards of glass through which to film. Not being completely satisfied with this result alone, he then, with the help of specialists, manufactures optics and experiments with reflective surfaces, mirrors (both stable and moving), and mercury baths. His use of the technique of reflective mirrors, through which he films a completely distorted reality, is best expressed in his film, At The Edge of the Lake. The realization of this film required almost fifteen mirrors, meticulously manufactured and selected among dozens of samples.
In thirty years, Patrick Bokanowski has completed seven films, all with purely musical soundtracks composed by his wife Michele. The musical compositions play a dominant role in all of his work. He also exhibits paintings, drawings and photographs.
(From Re-voir catalogue)
Links:
Patrick Bokanowski at Lightcone
On Mubi
Filmography at IMDB
On Wikipedia
At the Film Gallery
Venue: MAIN AUDITORIUM, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL
Tickets: Tickets: £4
Screening date: SATURDAY 5 APRIL
Screening time: 7.00pm – 8.00pm
ALL THIS CAN HAPPEN
Siobhan Davies & David Hinton/United Kingdom 2012/00:50:00/Not a premiere
Constructed entirely from archive photographs and footage from the earliest days of cinema, with a voiceover based on Robert Walser’s novella ‘The Walk’ (1917). The film follows the footsteps of the protagonist as a series of small adventures and chance encounters take the walker from idiosyncratic observations of ordinary events towards a deeper pondering on the comedy, heartbreak and ceaseless variety of life. A flickering dance of intriguing imagery brings to light the possibilities of ordinary movements from the everyday which appear, evolve and freeze before your eyes.
Siobhan Davies will be present for a Q&A
Biography/Filmography:
See the Siobhan Davies profile and the David Hinton profile on www.siobhandavies.com.
http://www.siobhandavies.com/
Venue: MAIN AUDITORIUM, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL
Tickets: Tickets: £4
Screening date: SUNDAY 6 APRIL
Screening time: 12.15pm – 1.20pm
ETTRICK DREAMING ALCHEMY FILM AND MOVING IMAGE FESTIVAL RESIDENCIES
Melanie Dutton (Scotland) Sarah Biagini (USA) Lin Li (Scotland) Sarah Bliss (USA)/United Kingdom 2014/01:00:00/World premiere
In October 2013, six artist filmmakers from around the world travelled to the remote Ettrick Valley to begin a one month filmmaking residency, exploring the landscapes, farming life, people and culture of this sparsely populated and historic valley. This screening is the first preview of films being made by four of the residency participants. They reveal the unique insight these filmmakers have brought to our familiar landscapes, exploring issues including sheep farming, the rural idyll of peace, Dolly the sheep and the religious fervour of the Scottish Reformation (in Sarah Bliss’s Gown of Repentance). Join us in seeing the films and discussing the residency experience with the filmmakers.
Melanie Dutton, Sarah Biagini, Lin Li and Sarah Bliss will be present for a Q&A
Biography/Filmography:
See the residency artists’ biographies
Venue: MAIN AUDITORIUM, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL
Tickets: Tickets: £4
Screening date: SUNDAY 6 APRIL
Screening time: 2.20pm – 3.20pm
IT’S QUICKER BY HEARSE / THE SUN IS BUT A MORNING STAR
Esther Johnson/United Kingdom 2014/00:40:00/World premiere
It’s Quicker By Hearse · The Tale of the Petitioning Housewife, the Protesting Schoolboy and the Campaign Trail Student, tells the story of Madge Elliot who, together with her 11-year-old son Kim, Harry Brown the piper and Edinburgh University Railway Society president Bruce McCartney, marched to Downing Street to deliver a petition of 11,768 signatures in1968, protesting against the closure of Hawick train station. Esther Johnson follows this film with a new work specially commissioned by Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, The Sun is but a Morning Star, in which she worked with the residents of Hawick in creating a film that explores the notion of Independence.
Esther Johnson will be present for a Q&A
Biography/Filmography:
Esther Johnson (MA Royal Collage of Art, BA University of London) is an artist and filmmaker whose research practice explores documentary portraiture through moving image, audio and photography. Her work reveals resonant stories of the everyday that may otherwise be hidden or ignored. Recurring themes include personal histories, heritage, tradition, architectural vernacular and precarious futures. Her work has been exhibited internationally including Tate Modern; Tate Britain; BFI; IDFA; LFF; ICA; NASA; Istanbul Biennial and on BBC television and radio. She has written for several arts publications, is an independent film/video curator, and is Reader in Media Arts at Sheffield Institute of Arts, Sheffield Hallam University. In 2012, Johnson won the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Performing and Visual Arts for young scholars.
http://www.blanchepictures.com
Venue: MAIN AUDITORIUM, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL
Tickets: £4
Screening date: SUNDAY 6 APRIL
Screening time: 3.50pm – 4.45pm
