ALTERED STATE 2
SHORT FILM PROGRAMME
SATURDAY 16 APRIL
2.45pm – 4.15pm
Notes from the Interior
Benjamin Balcom / United States / 2015 / 00:11:00 / European premiere
Wandering through the body, puzzling out a system of symbols. The trouble is, affect resists signification outright. The inside and outside become muddled when you start to feel your body’s relation to the image.
Biography/Filmography:
Ben Balcom is film and video maker currently living, working, and teaching in Milwaukee, WI. His work in film and digital (and digital-film hybrids) investigates ordinary objects and affects through the lens of speculative realism. His films have screened at venues such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Media City Film Festival and the Festival of (In)Appropriation. In addition to making films and videos, Ben also is the curator and co-founder of a neighborhood cinema in Milwaukee called Microlights, which specializes in avant-garde film and video work (www.microlightscinema.com).
ME AND YOU
Gary Hawkins / United States / 2015 / 00:07:00 /
ME & YOU consists of a short series of not-quite-repeating loops, each a nocturnal staging of a minimal conversation between two noirish females, full of gesture and insinuation.
Biography/Filmography:
Gary Hawkins is a writer and filmmaker whose work traverses most genres — fiction and nonfiction, experimental and traditional – and finds its expression in a variety of forms – essay, prose, installation and cinema. He is the screenwriter for JOE, starring Nicolas Cage and directed by David Gordon Green, and a contributor to the Oxford American and Paris Review publications. His experimental short, ZERO IRONY premiered at the IFFR in Rotterdam in 2015, and his jazz documentary, IN MY MIND (featuring pianist, Jason Moran) screened at the National Gallery of Art, also in 2015. Hawkins is a Sundance Fellow, a winner of the Emmy Award and a professor of screenwriting and non-fiction cinema at Duke University.
STUCK IN THE DARK
Massimo Saverio Maida / Italy / 2015 / 00:10:50 / Scottish Premiere
“Seeing With The Ears” is the unusual point of view for this audiovisual project. The narrative and visual structure of the film imagines a reversal of perspective between sounds and images, in which the natural world is “shown” predominantly through the reverberation of sounds it produces in a waiting condition and surprise.
A predominantly auditory walk through the darkness, which starts as natural observation and step by step transforms into a poetic and fantastical perceptual experience, where the natural relationship of cause and effect is subverted, and the one between Fauna, Flora and Humans is reinvented.
Biography/Filmography:
Massimo Saverio Maida was born in Naples in 1972. He is a director, producer and screenwriter whose works arise from a continuous mingling of cinema, animation, documentary and contemporary art. He currently lives and works in London where he oversaw the conception, direction and design of K. A series, a Micro Art Film promoting “In The Shadow Of Kafka”, a series of documentaries and drama on BBC Radio 3. Subsequently, the concept was developed into a music video based on the original music of the London band Blue-Eyed Hawk; then selected at international festivals, such as: Film Fest 52 (USA), Hampshire Film Fest (UK), New Haven International Film Festival (USA), River Film Festival (IT), The Monthly Film Festival (UK), TOFF The Online Film Festival and to Pesaro Film Festival (IT).
With the original screenplay The White Alphabet he won the Screenplay Feature Drama Award at the Los Angels Independent Film Festival Awards; he was selected to enter The Global Script Challenge Taking Place During to Oaxaca Film Fest (MEX), and he was official finalist at the 2016 London Film Awards.
http://www.massimosaveriomaida.com/#!stuck-in-the-woods/cjlm
Koan III
Sean Martin / United Kingdom / 2015 / 00:01:53 /
The third an in ongoing series using the premise of the koan, or riddle in Zen that is designed to lead the student to enlightenment, to explore the ontology of the image.
Biography/Filmography:
Sean Martin is a director of features, shorts and documentaries. He is also the author of Andrei Tarkovsky and New Waves in Cinema (both published by Kamera Books).
http://891filmhouse.blogspot.co.uk/
Of Mutability
Helen Grove-White / Wales / 2015 / 00:03:40 / World premiere
A close up exploration of the changing states of water in a small brook.
Biography/Filmography:
Helen Grove-White, Fine Art Degree Lancaster, has exhibited throughout the UK and internationally. Specialising in sculpture as a student she quickly moved to the use of experimental photographic media in spacial installation as she explored the interface between herself and the natural world. Her work in video, photographic media, sculpture and book form continues to revolve around the intersection of land and the human. Her work is propelled by issues of archeology and climate change, the past and the future, whilst maintaining a strong abstract aesthetic.
http://helengrovewhite@gmail.com
City Crush
Mia Forrest / Australia / 2015 / 00:13:24 / World premiere
A lavish thug poaches an exotic young trophy-boy and smuggles him into City Crush. When our would be ivory concubine escapes during his own sale he must navigate the desolation, boredom, and deviant lust of the locals.
Biography/Filmography:
Mia Forrest is a young director and photographer from Brisbane, Australia. Working as a projectionist at the Gallery of Modern Art Cinematheque in Brisbane has exposed her to a myriad of auteur filmmakers, genres, and discussions on film and art – this has only strengthened her desire to develop a definitive style. In addition to working as a projectionist, Mia is a fashion photographer and music video director. Mia has directed music videos that have screened on Australia’s national broadcaster (ABC). Her most recent experimental noir inspired music video was described as “dreamlike… Lada Gaga meets Heidi Slimane”.
XO
Brian Ratigan / United States / 2015 / 00:03:30 / Scottish Premiere
Fearing her own memories, a girl begins the cerebral journey of longing for escape before completely fading away.
Biography/Filmography:
Brian Ratigan is an award-winning director and animator whose stop-motion films and music videos have screened internationally. He is a frequent collaborator with the Sugartooth Group, Lobotomix, and Kumar Pictures. Ratigan is the founder of Non Films, and is currently based out of New York City.
smart dress is absolutely essential
Slawomir Milewski / United Kingdom / 2015 / 00:07:30 / UK premiere
The film is a study for a larger work that refers to the Bataille-esque theme of transgression and retaining that which is transgressed.
Biography/Filmography:
Slawomir J. Milewski was born in 1979 in Poland. He graduated from the University of Fine Arts in Poznan, and also studied at the University of Rennes 2 in France as part of a scholarship. His films have been presented and awarded at numerous festivals and exhibitions in North and South America, Europe, and Asia including ICA, London, Currents, Media Art Festival, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, Minneapolis Underground Film Festival, Minnesota, USA.
Palace in Loci
Genevieve Lutkin / United Kingdom / 2015 / 00:05:27 / Scottish Premiere
The Palace in Loci explores the psychological space of a liquid architecture. Within it’s dissolving walls, the viewer is guided through a sentient terrain of loss, grief and impossible return.
Biography/Filmography:
Genevieve Lutkin is a visual artist based in London and a recent graduate from the Royal College of Art MA Moving Image programme 2015.
Previous exhibitions and film screenings include Offprint at TATE Modern, ‘The Lives of Others’ as part of FOTOISTANBUL at the Mimar Sinan Contemporary Art Museum, Istanbul, Two Hundred Acres at Pump House Gallery London, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival at Hawick, Scotland and Non-Knower at The Library Space, London.
She has been involved in the Tomma Rum artist residency programme in Skellefteå Sweden plus the Farringdon Factory residency in London. She is also a fine art visiting lecturer at Falmouth University, Cornwall UK.
http://www.genevievelutkin.com
The Betrayal
Susan Young / United Kingdom / 2015 / 00:05:40 /
A disturbing film about a doctor-patient relationship that goes catastrophically wrong. Legal texts and medical records interwoven with pulsing pills tell a story of addictive, emotional enmeshment.
Biography/Filmography:
Susan Young became interested in animation while at Liverpool Polytechnic, where she made Thin Blue Lines, a film documenting the Toxteth riots of 1981.Carnival, Young’s 1985 Royal College of Art graduation film, features the fluid, calligraphic line that defines much of her work. On leaving the RCA she was commissioned by the United Nations to direct The Doomsday Clock, a film about multilateral disarmament, with co-director Jonathan Hodgson. In addition to directing numerous commercials, Young has worked extensively with the music industry, collaborating with artists such as David Byrne (Beleza Tropical: Umbabarauma), record producer Alan Douglas (Jimi Hendrix: Fire), and record labels including Island Records and Island Visual Arts (Time Will Tell and Island 25 documentary titles). She has directed title sequences for sporting events, including the World Cricket Series and American Football (The Big Match/Blitz), and classical music series, including Orchestra! and the launch film for Classic FM. A hand injury in 1997 prevented Young from continuing with drawn animation. She is currently developing new ways of working, making experimental films as part of a practice-based PhD at the Royal College of Art, where she is exploring animation’s capacity as a medium through which psychological trauma can be understood and processed.
Defenestration
Bea Haut / United Kingdom / 2015 / 00:04:40 / Scottish Premiere
Mixing up film and domestic structures, this film reaches beyond the frame; testing out access and escape, aperture and portal. The letraset sound also crosses the frame boundary into the visible.
Biography/Filmography:
Bea Haut was a member of Loophole Cinema in the 1990s, a ‘Hi-tech, Lo-tech and No- tech’ circus of Expanded Cinema. More recently, as well as making 16mm films and installations, she has co-produced Analogue Recurring – a 16mm screening event and informal space for experimenting with projected film; exposing and developing ideas surrounding their mechanical processes and visceral pleasures. She has also co-founder of ‘Film in Process’, a 16mm B&W film processing service at the University of East London.
Fluchtpunkt
Kamila Kuc / Poland / 2015 / 00:01:15 / UK premiere
Many beliefs and cultures perceive circle as a pure, divine shape. Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man treats the figure of a human as a perfect measure of proportion. In Fluchtpunkt the recurring circular patterns allude to a circle of death (rather than life). The inherent (though accidental) semi-circular geometrical patterns that pervade the out-of-date film stock reinforce the ironic take on anthropocentrism as seen through the testimony of the Stutthof concentration camp.
Biography/Filmography:
Kamila Kuc (www.kamilakuc.com), Ph.D. is an academic, writer, experimental filmmaker and curator. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Assistant and Associate Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She publishes widely on the subject of film and her work has appeared in books, cultural magazines and academic journals. She has also curated programmes of experimental film for international film festivals and venues (New Horizons Film Festival, Poland; Cinephilia, UK; Experiments in Cinema, USA). Her short films have been screened at international film festivals, most recently, the Alternative Film/Video in Belgrade, Serbia (December 2014) and Experiments in Cinema, Albuquerque, New Mexico (April 2015).
