MOUNTAIN IN SHADOW – Interview with LOIS PATIÑO: “The man is only a part of a whole… a kind of transitional fade. We are no longer in a waking state, but in a state of reverie in which the ends of the identity vanish.”

Luciana Dumitru: MOUNTAIN IN SHADOW moves to more abstract images as they unfold, from the more romantic take in the most of your videos. What did you find interesting in this approach?

OUR DAYS, ABSOLUTELY, HAVE TO BE ENLIGHTENED – Interview with JEAN-GABRIEL PÉRIOT: “I really believe in the power of music as a tool to share emotions. I thought those voices, coming up from a closed place, will be enough to move the audience.”

Oana Ghera: I know that OUR DAYS, ABSOLUTELY, HAVE TO BE ENLIGHTENED started as a piece of performance art, a concert you worked out with the inmates, but I was curious to know how did you go from that to the experimental documentary that is Our Days…?

RIVER RITES – Interview with BEN RUSSELL: “I never thought about film as a tool for translation but rather as a way of conjuring, as a means for bringing the unseen out of the shadows and transforming time into a body that we all could understand.”

Luciana Dumitru: Michel de Certeau writes about the experience of a French travel writer, Jean de Léry, in Tupi, using the term “remainder” for that which couldn’t be translated (into words). In Léry’s case, the overwhelming (subjective) aural and visual pleasures, from the language he couldn’t understand and strange sounds to the visceral experiences of being surrounded by naked bodies. De Certeau says “proximity is presence without possession.”  In your experience of living within the community of Saramaccan animists can you talk about “remainders” that you wanted to pin down? If so, how did film help you? More importantly, what are the “remainders” of this film – RIVER RITES (which is different from the lived experience)?

NOT EYE – Interview with LAUREN MOFFATT: “Because of the role the camera plays as the conductor of plot in cinema, whoever is holding it essentially has the power.”

Luciana Dumitru: NOT EYE drew my attention in two directions: looking (and being looked upon) and the gaze in cinema. Some philosophers think of identity as fragmented, non-unitary, non-essentialist, unfixed. In looking and being looked upon, there is an undoing of each other, in a certain sense. You’ve said the character has a problem finding her own identity,“she sees it fragmented” because of the others’ look. Can you say a few words about the relation between the other’s look and the fragmented identity?

AS THE FLAMES ROSE – Interview with JOÃO RUI GUERRA DA MATA: “As feelings are timeless, cinema should move in the same direction, an acute abstraction of reality that takes you forward while making you look back.”

Oana Ghera: You were inspired for AS THE FLAMES ROSE by Cocteau’s “La voix humaine”, a monologue written for theater  whose theatricality you expose in various ways, from  revealing its source (by posing the book on the character’s nightstand) to the expressionist play with the lighting (to name just one of your techniques). Yet, it seems to me, AS THE FLAMES ROSE is also a declaration of love for cinema as a medium, what with all the rear projections and TV footage, for artificial as they may be, still manage to expand the enclosed space of the studio in a deeply cinematic way. Where do you stand regarding the long theorised relation between cinema and theater? Where did the influence of the play end and where did that of cinema begin in your creative process? Or are they intertwined? And also regarding the matter of theatricality, how do you relate to Fassbinder’s work?

A PLACE TO COME – Interview with Flatform – “A Place to Come is the place of paradox on the impossibility of possible worlds.”

Redefining the perception of space as M.C. Escher used to explore it in paintings, A PLACE TO COME reveals the mutual references between a plain description of a place and its concrete demonstration. FLATFORM is a group of artists founded in 2007,  based in Milan and Berlin. Their exhibitions and screenings were present in film festivals like Venice IFF, Rotterdam IFF, Tampere IFF, Nouveau Cinema IFF (Montreal, Canada), Indielisboa IFF (Lisbon, Portugal), etc.

VIA – Interview with Leonore Mercier – “To me, the sound permits a wider interpretation to the audience, as the picture leads and frames on what we have to focus on. I try to explore this dichotomy as a theme. I am writing a feature where the music is a character.”

Starring the versatile Denis Lavant (the fetish actor of Leos Carax), VIA is both a charming sample of meta-cinema and an intriguing journey of self discovery.Graduating cinema at The Paris Pantheon-Sorbonne University, and studying piano at the Bourges Conservatory, the visual artist LÉONORE MERCIER (b. 1985, Paris) has a very particular artistic background, obvious in the musical quality of her cinematic work.

WE LIVED OUR ORDINARY LIVES – Interview with Daya Cahen – “Investigating how developments of exclusion, xenophobia and fear of otherness can arise within society is the starting point for all my work.”

How does one transform during war?  Subjective and genuine childhood memories of the siege of Sarajevo are combined with excerpts from guilty pleas from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Although in 2012 it is exactly 20 years ago the siege of Sarajevo began, the story doesn’t mention the actual context, becoming timeless and universal. DAYA CAHEN was born in Amsterdam. She is passionate about photographs, videos and video installations and her artistic work revolves around propaganda, indoctrination and mass psychology.

56.700 seconds of invisible night and light – Interview with Flatform – “The germ of the story is repetition.”

Conceived as a collection of optical illusions, at a single location, twelve figures walk four identical routes in repetitive patterns, each trying to follow the movements of the person in front of them. As they move they concentrate on their steps and their rhythm and the repetition immunizes them from having to make sense of their movements. They move as if consumed by a single thought. The repetition turns them into somnambulists, as it were, in a world that seems to be outside the bounds of time. FLATFORM is a group of artists founded in 2007 and based in Milan and Berlin. Their exhibitions and screenings were present in film festivals like Venice IFF, Rotterdam IFF, Tampere IFF, Nouveau Cinema IFF (Montreal, Canada), Indielisboa IFF (Lisbon, Portugal), etc.

THE SALT BOULDER – Interview with Eliza Muresan – “For me, cinema is the only way to one’s own intimacy and to a general intimacy of each event or situation.”

Back at the beginning of the Romanian communist era, the government decides even the dimension and the way to put prefabs together. The only job left to the architects is to think how to cram the people inside. They don’t manage themselves to acquire the legal conditions to have a place to live in. They are homeless architects. Looking for a place to sleep becomes an endless wandering in a stifling space, having no borders but any expanse either. Everything is lost: the projects, the constructions, and the self. ELIZA MUREŞAN (b.1987, Bucharest) is an young emerging filmmaker and video artist, passionate about photography and experimental art. She studied at the Art Academy in Dusseldorf (2005 – 2008), then she went to Paris to continue her education in Beaux Arts.

ENRAGED PIGS – Interview with Isabel Penoni and Leonardo Sette – “We worked guided by instinct and by the feeling that things should stay simple and mysterious.”

Once upon a time the men of the Cuicuro tribe didn’t return to their village after they went out to fish. Thus their women started to worry and sent one of the younger boys to go and look for them. When he came back he was shocked, all the men had turned into crazy pigs. ENRAGED PIGS embodies only one of the many legends the Cuicuro are passing on orally from generation to generation. Theatre director, actress and anthropologist, ISABEL PENONI was born in Brazil, in 1979. She is founder of Cia Marginal theater ensemble in Rio de Janeiro, has directed the plays, “Qual e a nossa cara?” (2007) and “O, Lili” (2011).  LEONARDO SETTE attended classes in Cuba and France and obtained a degree in Cinema History from Sorbonne. Sette’s first short film, OCIDENTE (2008) won the best film award in Rio’s Film Festival, among others. His first documentary feature, THE HYPERWOMAN (2011) had its international premiere in Rotterdam.

THE CURSE – Interview with Fyzal Boulifa – “Casting is the place you have to make the most frightening leaps into the unknown.”

THE CURSE is a powerful social parable about the conflict between the personal freedom and the social conventions.FYZAL BOULIFA is a British filmmaker of Moroccan descent. He is the writer and director of several short films including BURN MY BODY, described by Sight & Sound as ‘extreme’, ‘unfortunate’ and ‘expertly directed’, and WHORE, winner of Best UK Short at London East End Film Festival and Grand Prix du Jury at Angers Premiers Plans 2010. This is a brief thought-provoking journey into his aims as a young filmmaker.  

THE MAN THAT GOT AWAY – Interview with Trevor Anderson – “It seemed like the best way to tell his the story of his life by making a musical – something he loved. It felt like a way to be true to him.”

Winner of the DAAD Award in Berlinale Shorts 2012 and highly acclaim in the international film festival circuit, this wonderfully entertaining musical documentary tells the true life story of Trevor’s great-uncle, Jimmy. Trevor Anderson is a self-taught, independent filmmaker. His work has screened at  many major international film festivals, including Sundance, Berlin, and Toronto.

THE GENERATION OF SACRIFICE – Interview with JEAN CHRISTOPHE – “The new generation can retrospectively understand what was wrong, but I’m not sure if we can see what is right.”

THE GENERATION OF SACRIFICE recreates the terror of communist Romania of the 80’s, when the Secret Police aparatus included even very young spies, high school teenagers, convinced to betray their own family and friends. Starting from the Secret Police files, the French filmmaker JEAN CHRISTOPHE makes a sharp and disturbingly topical X-ray of the Romanian mindsets.

THE RECALL OF THE SONGBIRD – Interview with Rossella Piccinno – “I believe a lot in working more for the ‘process’ than for the results.”

THE RECALL OF THE SONGBIRD portrays a woman who travels through her memories – while seeing herself again as a child hunting with her father, she relives the terror of the gun shots and the desire to be accepted despite the fact that she was not a boy. For the first time she also sees her father with different eyes, understanding his loneliness and weakness. ROSSELLA PICCINNO earned a degree in documentary and experimental filmmaking from the DAMS, Bologna. From 2009 to 2011 she was resident artist at LE FRESNOY where she got a degree in “Cinema and Digital Arts”.

AT THE FORMAL – Interview with Andrew Kavanagh – “We think we’ve changed – but we haven’t really.”

At first glance, the short film seems to surprise normal proceedings of a school formal. But as time goes on, the observation of uncanny moments hint that things may not be exactly as they seem. ANDREW KAVANAGH is a Melbourne based writer director and a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts. Andrew experiments with unusual formal devices to offer his audience fresh perspectives on circumstances they may already be familiar with. In his latest films he frees his stories from the constraints of historical context to create an experience where the old collides seamlessly with the contemporary.

DRAWN FROM MEMORY – Interview with Marcin Bortkiewicz – “People on the screen never die.”

A young filmmaking student sets to make a film about his grandmother, who always wanted to be a horror film actress.Questioning the border between reality and fiction, DRAWN FROM MEMORY is an intriguing self reflexive short. MARCIN BORTKIEWICZ, film and theatre director, dramatist, screenwriter and actor, was born in Słupsk in 1976 AND graduated the University of Gdańsk and the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing.

SHELTER – Interview with ISMAIL BASBETH – “I used the one shot technique, because life is one shot. We cannot go back and cut it.”

In SHELTER we witness how an ordinary mood and feeling evolves into an overwhelming spiritual vertigo, as we discover the secret of two lovers. Born  in  Wonosobo, Indonesia  in  1985, ISMAIL BASBETH studied Indonesian traditional music for a year and then moved to Yogyakarta  in  2004  to  learn  communication  science. In this city he fell in love with filmmaking. He produced  and  directed  several  films, documentaries  and  fictions,  such  as HIDE AND SLEEP (2008),  HARRY VAN  YOGYA  (2010),  and  SHELTER  (2011).  With  two  of his partners  he founded  an  alternative production  company called  HIDE PROJECT INDONESIA.

PLAYERS – Interview with Pilvi Takala – “Following social rules that were so different from my own was the biggest challenge with this project.”

PLAYERS portrays a community of 6 poker professionals who live among a larger poker community in Bangkok. While one of them, soberly explains the rules within their community, the artist herself, PILVI TAKALA, plays all the roles. Pilvi Takala currently lives and works in Amsterdam. She graduated in 2006 from Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki (MFA). Her works are narratives based on site-specific interventions and actions, sort of exceptions in everyday life.

MOVING STORIES – Interview with Nicolas Provost – “We are all part of a huge collective film memory.”

The new work of NICOLAS PROVOST tries to redesign the mentality of mainstream cinema, putting a different light on the narrative filmic process. Over seductive images of a plane flying in the sunset, we hear the off-screen dialogue between a man and a woman. Without ever seeing them, they fully appeal to our imagination. Stock footage is cheaper than shooting new material and is mainly used to fill editing gaps in a film or to illustrate a needed lacking landscape. PROVOST shows that it can have esthetic and cinematic value in itself and can tell a story. In this film, he uses nothing but stock footage of a Boeing plane, flying towards a sunset.