Category: ARFF Barcelona – Best Experimental Film

Original Film Title: Camping Paraíso** Über das Sterben

Director’s Name: Daniel Schüßler

Writer’s Name: Dirk Roß

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming: Germany, Netherlands

Language: German

Runtime: 45 minutes

Film Description:

In 2020, the Essen-based comedy writer Dirk Roß experienced an accident with serious consequences: he was on his scooter and an SUV took the right of way. Weeks and months of fighting for life and death followed. ANALOG accompanies Dirk Roß through the course of his fight for survival, traces the process of hovering between life and death and the persistence in intermediate worlds. Texts developed from interviews create scenic, choreographic and musical arrangements of restlessness and in-between worlds and become condensed into an abstract film level.

Original Film Title: SHE

Director’s Name: Emil Dam Seidel

Writer’s Name: Dorotea Saykaly

Producer’s Name: Dorotea Saykaly, Emil Dam Seidel

Country of Origin: Sweden

Country of Filming: Denmark

Language: English

Runtime: 7 minutes 35 seconds

Film Description:

Caught in a room the protagonist, Clarice, unfolds a vision of her own identity through a mirror interrogator.

SHE is a cinematic adaptation of a solo dance performance with the same name. The original performance work was created and performed by Dorotea Saykaly and premiered at 5éme Salle at Place des Arts in Montréal, Quebec in 2019.
Inspired by The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, the solo revolved around identity and doubt.
Manifested through movement, distortion and an interview with a phantom interrogator, the original work proposed looking at a questioning body through a female lens.

The cinematic adaptation of the original performance work arose during the first COVID lockdown in 2020 as a collaboration between Dorotea Saykaly and film director Emil Dam Seidel.

Original Film Title: RADIX

Director’s Name: Cristiano Leone

Writer’s Name: Lucius Annaeus Seneca, transl. Tommasso Gazzarri

Producer’s Name: Cristiano Leone Production SRLS

Country of Origin: Italy

Country of Filming: Italy

Language: English, Italian, Latin, Spanish

Runtime: 12 minutes 40 seconds

Film Description:

RADIX is an experimental audiovisual project that connects dance, architecture, painting and literature. It encourages the dialogue between contemporary creation and historical heritage.
RADIX is shot in the circular Bramante’s Tempietto in Rome, at the exact point where the Martyrdom of Saint Peter took place.

Spanish choreographer Iván Pérez dances in ascending spiral movements while interacting with the text De Brevitate Vitae (‘On the Shortness of Life’) by Latin philosopher Seneca, a contemporary of Saint Peter.

The aesthetics of the short film pays homage to the painting “Liberation of Saint Peter” by Bramante’s friend Raphael, emphasizing the idea of a feast of illustrious spirits to which we are all invited.

The dramaturgy of the film highlights the desire of liberating body and mind from the social confinement during which it was shot.

RADIX is conceived and directed by Cristiano Leone, and promoted by the Cultural Office of the Spanish Embassy, with the collaboration of the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome and the Instituto Cervantes in Rome.

Original Film Title: Lock

Director’s Name: Stanton Cornish-Ward, Trent Crawford

Writer’s Name: Stanton Cornish-Ward, Trent Crawford

Country of Origin: Australia

Country of Filming: Australia

Language: English

Runtime: 21 minutes 50 seconds

Film Description:

Three individuals recall their life’s journey and how it led them towards a radical form of decentralised self-improvement therapy.

Original Film Title: Merge

Director’s Name: Silken Kelly

Producer’s Name: Renata Sheppard

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Runtime: 3 minutes 35 seconds

Film Description:

An experimental film about the outside pressures placed on us to always feel the need to do more, to be more than who you are. This film explores the opposing sides of peace and chaos within each person’s journey, and learning to accept both sides.

Original Film Title: Smoking

Director’s Name: Luisa Gherdaoui

Writer’s Name: Luisa Gherdaoui

Producer’s Name: Alors on Tourne Asbl

Country of Origin: Belgium

Runtime: 11 minutes 10 seconds

Film Description:

“I like cigarettes”, says a creed by this woman whose name we do not know but who smokes compulsively.
We understand that there is a police investigation to find out the killer of this innocence or nonchalance.
Dance of death with its addictions including self-image, narcissism, alcohol and cigarettes.
La cigarette who is the lover who will lead this young woman to illness, as if for a voluntary suicide.
Attention danger, but at the same time everything seems very pleasant, fluid, because this dancer with black stilettos is anesthetized by flowers, alcohol and pseudo-success.

Original Film Title: Made With Love

Director’s Name: Calum Macdiarmid

Writer’s Name: Calum Macdiarmid

Producer’s Name: Calum Macdiarmid

Country of Origin: United Kingdom

Country of Filming: United Kingdom

Language: English

Runtime: 9 minutes 15 seconds

Film Description:

The incredible (true) story of a young dancer’s kidnap and subsequent escape from two criminals who wanted to learn how to dance.

Original Film Title: Skin/Out

Creator and Performer: Gloria Dorliguzzo

Director’s Name: Enzo Coluccio

Producer’s Name: Enzo Coluccio

Country of Origin: Italy

Country of Filming: Italy

Runtime: 9 minutes

Film Description:

Skin/out presents an aesthetical reflection on the themes of threshold and rebirth. To re- turn to the world and to make oneself into the world are the experiences here identified in the organic support of the skin, in its mutation, its developing itself and constructing space, after appearing from an unknown darkness.
Skin is what defines the boundary that separate each subject from their environment: the idea of replacing it coincides with an attempt to adopt a new form, one that is more suitable to its surroundings.
This process undergoes a phase in which old and new coexist, adhering to one another; crystallized and dry, strewn with cracks, the fractured skin becomes an organic drapery. A drapery that is made up of kombucha, a macroscopic solid mass that has the ability to produce an organic membrane, with which it attempts to entirely cover the surface of the water that hosts it. By doing so it creates a habitat around itself, a uterine cavity, and becomes the guardian of its own microclimate.
The performer Gloria Dorliguzzo, through the interactions with this barrier, turns the need for a personal revolution into something concrete, materic and viscous. She resembles a Nymph, as fluid as those described by Didi-Huberman, though here depicted inside a bathtub, in an anonymous bathroom: another threshold, which becomes an uncanny the- ater where this transformative urgency manifests through silence and brutality – opposites poles that officiate every metamorphosis.

Original Film Title: Moving Barcelona

Director’s Name: Jevan Chowdhury

Co-director: Laura Obiols

Writer’s Name:Jevan Chowdhury

Producer’s Name: Catherine Allard, Antoni Gutiérez-Rubí

Country of Origin: United Kingdom

Country of Filming: Spain

Language: Catalan

Runtime: 6 minutes 21 seconds

Film Description:

Moving Barcelona is a magical realist dance story about the Catalonian capital, an autonomous region in the Spanish State contending with an identity crisis. A city with everything going for it is still haunted by the ghosts of its past and despite much progress, it finds itself unearthing old wounds. Narrated by celebrated actor, Pep Munné, who appeals for calm, there is a sense of reassurance that all is okay. The movement of the city however tells a different story, and he is resigned to the fact that things inevitably, are the way they are. Barcelonians, in pursuit of happiness, find themselves on a treadmill  to nowhere in a tale of modern day life. Moving Barcelona is the eighth film in an award-winning collection of works by the London-based film-maker, Jevan Chowdhury to capture the world as a stage. Life on the street in London, Paris, Brussels, Dallas, Prague, Yerevan and Athens have all been recorded in this growing canon.

Original Film Title: Entangled Animal

Director’s Name: CHRISTIAN HOLM-GLAD

Writer’s Name: CHRISTIAN HOLM-GLAD, THOMAS SEEBERG TORJUSSEN

Producer’s Name: CHRISTIAN HOLM-GLAD, MAGNE LYNGNER, JO RØISLIEN

Country of Origin: Norway

Country of Filming: Norway

Language: English

Runtime: 1 minute 30 seconds

Film Description:

We humans need to take care of nature as we have nowhere else to go.