Training Fantasia: Film Program

A young woman dancer with large, flowing robes, swirls round herself quickly, making her light robe flow around her like a butterfly’s wings. This film, which opens the program, is fleeting and exciting like any screening, and the main character chooses an inhuman embodiment, mimicking a delightful insect, whose life is just as short.

Max Skladanowsky was born on April 30, 1863 in Berlin, Germany. He was a director and producer, known for Liebigs Fleischextrakt (1897), Die Serpentintanzerin (1895) and Kamarinskaja (1895).  He invented the Bioskop apparatus for filming and projection films, with which the brothers carried out commercial film screenings, approximately two months ahead of the sessions of the Lumiere Brothers’ Cinematograph.

Rainer Kohlberger´s eight-minute film keep that dream burning begins with extremely fine black-and-white particles that flutter across the screen. Coagulating into rough structures, they transform into a storm of jagged artifacts and steadily changing spots of light. With the introduction of the flicker effect, the floating electronic sound turns into a piercing rhythmic wafting and comes to rest towards the end — to the image of a black hole subtly growing deeper and deeper. Concrete object and events continually materialize from the active particles: dispersing debris, fireballs, and smoke barely evoke images of explosions familiar from action films, before…

Rainer Kohlberger is an Austrian artist based in Berlin who makes experimental films, video art and gallery installations. He combines algorithmically generated animations with live performance and often addresses the theme of human perception and spectator subjectivity. 

Райнер Кольбергер — австрийский художник из Берлина, снимающий экспериментальные фильмы, видеоарт и галерейные инсталляции. Он сочетает алгоритмически сгенерированные анимации с живыми выступлениями и часто обращается к теме человеческого восприятия и субъективности зрителя.

Thought to have been lost for decades, German filmmaker Richard Oswald‘s 1919 picture Different From the Others was eventually discovered to have survived the Nazi era. The films stars Conrad Veidt of Casablanca and centers on the oppression brought upon Germany’s homosexual men as a result of the penal code’s controversial Paragraph 175. The silent film also stars Leo Connard and Ilse Von Tasso-Lind.

Richard Oswald is an Austrian producer, director, screenwriter. At first he was interested in an acting career, which brought him to the stage of the Vienna theaters. Oswald’s directorial debut took place in 1914, when he was 34 years old in the movie Das Eiserne Kreuz. In 1916, Oswald opened a private film studio in Germany, where almost all films were directed by himself. As a director, Oswald has worked on over a hundred films.

Two decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, many of the former communist countries are taking architectural measures meant to erase the communist experience and drag them closer to an idealized inter-war past. At the same time, the “West” is witnessing a growing nostalgia for an utopian “Eastern” past that never existed. This manifests itself as a new demand for ruin porn: abandoned buildings, derelict infrastructures and abandoned ambitions.

At a spectrum opposite to ruin porn, but within the same vein, are the replicas of historic buildings. The retro-futurist ruins and the bold new retrograde Disneylands go hand in hand. Both devoid of the past meaning, they turn symbols into accessories for consumer experience. “Exile Exotic” revolves around such a building; namely Antalya, a hotel that represents an apolitical, decontextualized replica of the Kremlin. This is the pretext for a series of reflections about the historical symbols’ trajectory outside of history, the politics of borders as well as the role of architecture, place and identity in configuring the idea of motherland.

The picture of the German woman Maren Ade Tony Erdmann is a sensation of European cinema in 2016 and an Oscar nominee. Former music teacher, merry fellow and inventor Winfred decides to establish a relationship with his daughter, a successful business consultant of one of the most prestigious corporations. To grab her attention, he masquerades as the eccentric businessman Tony Erdmann. With his hilarious and shocking antics, he hopes to change her view of life and win a place in her heart. But this is just a plot.

In fact, Tony Erdmann is a picture of our subordination to social rituals that protect us from the aggression of the outside world, but do not allow us to feel free at least sometimes. Moreover, happy. Seriously, Tony Erdmann is a film about the fear of death and overcoming it. Bucharest as a place of action was not chosen by chance either. Maren Ade, not in the first film, explores the national character of the modern German, placing him in an alien environment.

Jubilee 2033, the short film centerpiece, is a re-imagining of scenes from filmmaker Derek Jarman’s 1978 queer punk film Jubilee, starring Susanne Sachsse and Cassils. Jubilee 2033 follows author Ayn Rand (Susanne Sachsse) and members of her Collective, including economist Alan Greenspan, on an acid trip in 1955. Guided by an artificial intelligence named Azuma, they are transported to a dystopian future Silicon Valley. As Apple, Facebook, and Google campuses burn, Azuma reveals that Ayn has become a celebrity philosopher to tech executives, as her writings foster their entrepreneurial spirit. Amidst the wreckage, Rand and The Collective are introduced to the internet, observe techies being captured by anti-campus groupies, and bear witness to the death of Silicon Valley elite. Once inside an occupied office of Palantir Technologies, the group encounters Nootropix (Cassils), a contra-sexual, contra-internet prophet, who lectures on the end of the internet as we know it. Seeking respite, Rand and The Collective find themselves at Silicon Beach, where chunks of polycrystalline silicon mix with sand and ocean.

Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice spans moving image, computation, theory, performance, and science fiction. Blas engages the materiality of digital technologies while also drawing out the philosophies and imaginaries lurking in artificial intelligence, biometric recognition, predictive policing, airport security, the internet, and biological warfare.

Some days she imagines that by her sheer will she can make body parts fall off of people who seem vicious to her. And some other days everyone around her looks beautiful. And when she was little, she wished that flowers would grow out of her footprints.

Katharina Huber in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2012 attended at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and in 2014 at the Royal College of Art in London. In 2014 founding member of Studio Huber Casalprim.

The main character is a Berlin resident and a guide at the very beginning of the film experiences the betrayal of her beloved. She starts a new relationship, but the girl’s secrets do not disappear anywhere. Berlin at Undine is more than a scene. Descriptions of urban geography and history, scrupulous camera sliding over landscapes and numerous 3D models and layouts of the capital yesterday, today and tomorrow are an important part of the film; in one of the key scenes, Christophe refuses to embrace Undine, asking instead to read him one of her travel lectures.

Christian Petzold was born in Hilden in 1960. After studying German and Drama at the Freie Universität Berlin, he enrolled in Berlin’s German Academy for Film and Television (DFFB). There he studied film direction while at the same time working as an assistant director to Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky. Christian Petzold completed his studies at the Film Academy with the creation of his diploma film Pilotinnen in 1994, which became his feature-length debut. The film tells about two women with different ideas about life, dreams and goals, who are united by a sobering life experience. Christian Petzold belongs to the first generation of directors of the so-called Berlin School. He, like its other representatives, declared himself in the early 1990s with a special cinematic aesthetics, which is distinguished by the regularity of the narrative, few cut transitions, laconic use of offscreen music and restrained acting in a modest, sometimes stingy setting. The themes of films are often focused on everyday life, and the life of the main characters is shown without embellishment.

Having started as a festival movies look-thru, the idea of ​​making a video for friends, LUMB group, turned into an exploration of the possibilities of the movavi program and the question of whether a «genuine director» can edit his work using this application.

Overdrive, or the state of overload, is explored in the debut work of the young director Stepan Petrosyan, who uses found footage like an ecologist, believing that the production of new video material should be a necessity, not an attempt of an individualistic desire to express oneself.

Stepan Petrosyan is studying at the Rodchenko School video art workshop (the course of Ulyana Podkorytova), his debut short film will be shown at the festival.

Considered a staple of Florida tourism, alligator wrestling has been performed by members of the Seminole Tribe for over a century. As the practice has changed over the years, Halpate profiles the hazards and history of the spectacle through the words of the tribe’s alligator wrestlers themselves and what it has meant to their people’s survival.

Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk) is the Associate Director of Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program and a member of the Sundance Film Festival’s Short Film Programming Team. He is a filmmaker and co-founder of “Cousin,” a film collective supporting Indigenous artists expanding the form of film. He recently served as the Assistant Curator for Film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). His short film “Halpate”, co-directed with Adam Khalil, will be screened at Typography CCA.

Just a Guy is an animated documentary short film about love. Three women share glimpses of their affection, attraction and relationship with Richard Ramirez: A serial killer and rapist they contacted after he was convicted in the 80s. Through their perspective, we revisit exchanged letters and emotions that are as obsessive as they are hauntingly familiar.

Shoko Hara was born in Okayama / Japan. In 2012, she obtains her Bachelor of Arts in Media Design at the DHBW Ravensburg. Her graduation film Abita was screened on several festivals around the world. Shoko Hara moves on to study Motion Design at the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg between 2012 and 2016. Her diploma project, the animated short film What they believe is awarded as the best student film in Animafest Zagreb 2016. Shoko Hara is currently teaching Motion Graphics at the at the DHBW Ravensburg and works as Freelance Motion Designer and Animation Director for commercials spots and music videos.

Atmospherically shot on 16mm film, Transnistra is an intimate and vital account of love and friendship in a complex, contradictory world. Award-winning director Anna Eborn (Pine Ridge) intimately follows a group of young people as they move from a sweltering, carefree summer through an unforgiving winter in the self-proclaimed state of Transnistria, where the national flag still holds the hammer and sickle. 

Digital rituals in the analogue cloud. They gather here every day. They come from far and without purpose. They don’t know each other and they won’t come to know each other. They carry their gadgets to optimize the experience. They engage with the world through a small frame. They believe that this moment will remain unforgotten. Music video for track Batagur Baska by Guido Möbius.

Bernd Lutzeler graduated in 1998 in Visual Communication from Universität der Künste, Berlin, with the experimental video The Suspect Usual. Since then he has been living and working as a film, video and media artist in Berlin and Mumbai. His films have been shown at venues and festivals worldwide including Centre Pompidou, International Film Festival Rotterdam, San Francisco Cinematheque, Views from the Avant-Garde and many more. Bernd is an active member of the artist-run analogue film lab LaborBerlin.

Aykan Safoğlu takes his artistic friendship with Nihad Nino Pušija as the point of departure for Touching Feeling. Their friendship began in 2014 in the nGbK, an artists’ association in Berlin, where Pušija has been active since the 1990s as an artist, curator, activist, and photographer. Pušija has been recording the world around him for years with his camera: queer life in Kreuzberg, the life of the Romani in the former Yugoslavia and in German refugee shelters; everyday occurrences, but also scenes of flight and migration. Pušija’s photographs form the basis for the film; mark by mark, Safoğlu uncovers them on the black screen. The scratches on the picture’s surface turn into contours and fragments: prompting Safoğlu’s reflection on his role as observer, the defiant beauty of everyday life, and the terrible rupture that war and destruction left in their trail in the 1990s across the Balkans.

Aykan Safoğlu received his MFA in Photography from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, NY. Safoğlu was an artist-in-residence at institutions such as Akademie Schloss Solitude, Ashkal Alwan, and Rijkakademie van beeldende kunsten between 2014-2018. Recipient of the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen at the 59th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2013), Safoğlu is currently a PhD-Candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Siberia is a new film by the American director Abel Ferrara, which took part in the 2020 main competition of the Berlin Film Festival. According to the director, the picture is inspired by the writings of Carl Jung and black magic. Willem Dafoe, who played the main role, went to psychotherapy sessions for the sake of filming, the script was born from the recordings of these meetings. Siberia, given in the title, is the endless space of the hero’s consciousness. Siberia is not just a designation for something distant, in this concept there is a theme of exile, because people were exiled to Siberia. Such a magical and mystical space hostile to man, where people are sent by force. But what is important, sometimes they return from there.

Born in the Bronx, Ferrara started making amateur films on Super 8 in his teens before making his debut with violent exploitation films such as ‘Driller Killer’ and ‘Ms.45’. Good reviews for the latter helped create his cult reputation, leading to larger budgets, studio funding and ‘name’ actors (Christopher Walken, Harvey Keitel), but he still likes taking his camera out onto the meanest streets of New York, as the ultra-cheap, highly controversial ‘Bad Lieutenant’ demonstrates.

The film, collected from various views and shrunken feelings, is our common space for collectivity and queer kinship. We are all there, scrambling out of the cinema form and once again slipping away to there. The collage method of gluing us together: a mutating, holding, non-solidifying form of people. We refuse to panic. It is difficult for us to maintain a critical distance from the intimate, extracted, and repackaged in relation to other material. Film as a message, film as a community, film as a form of interaction at a distance. We are led by Zhuzha, devices, and touch, which we were so lacking in quarantine.

A queer-feminist affinity art group “Unwanted Organisation” is a grassroots initiative founded by a group of artists, activists, and feminist social researchers from St. Petersburg, Russia, at the end of 2015. Their main goal is to promote queer-feminist agenda, and support Russian artists and activists, who share our views and approaches, through developing, organizing and leading art-projects and educational programs. Regardless of Russian conservative internal politics and dismantle of social solidarity, we want to demonstrate the possibility for self-organization, self-sustainability and horizontal organization of cultural and art productions.

Following the director’s debut short A Wider Screen, this film continues the exploration into virtual embodiment presenting an electric and heartfelt portrait of exotic dance club, Club Zodiac. Alongside the bustling scenes inside VR dance clubs, this film hears from users learning fitness pole dance using full body tracking technology. Club Zodiac was shown at London Short Film festival 2021.

Joe Hunting is an independent filmmaker focused on directing works inside Virtual Reality (VR) app VRChat, with interests in virtual production and immersive VR / AR storytelling. Most known for his award winning short film A Wider Screen, he explores documentary storytelling inside virtual reality app VRChat sharing the whimsical and intimate human connections possible with growing VR technology.