Graduation Magazine Master of Film 2016

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INTRODUCTION / CONDITION OF POSSIBILITY

ELIANE ESTHER BOTS

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MAT TEO CANET TA

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with a few years of professional experience under their belt. Its ambition is to

over answers, process over product, experimentation over mere execution and long term effects over short term gain…

M I KKO KE S KI I VA R I

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contribute to the development of cinema and media culture by emphasising focus on ‘artistic research in and through film’, means privileging questions

DAWOOD HILMANDI

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international master’s course for a select group of filmmakers and artists

the need to reflect and research, experiment and exchange. The programme’s

GWEN.N

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The Master’s programme at the Netherlands Film Academy is a two-year

STANISŁ AW LIGUZIŃSKI

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A N A S TA S I J A P I R OŽ E N KO

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MARIIA PONOMAROVA

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DORIAN DE RIJK

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During the Graduation Show, the graduates do not only present their projects – their films, their installations, their proposals – but also their research. These

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lectures, performances, workshops and debates contextualize the projects and raise questions for further development.

EVENTS

46 More information about the course: www.masteroffilm.nl

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RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS 47

FORUM

ALUMNI PROGRAMME

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MARIA ÅNGERMAN FEDOR LIMPERG

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CONDITION OF POSSIBILITY

gwen.n. used a series of experiments to develop a method to translate her autobiography into fiction, freeing memories to become an archive and using the tools of art to shape and reshape that archive. In the short film ‘Broken’ she used her background in choreography and performance art to tell the story of a young woman, locked up in an apartment, haunted by her demons.

Every year I’m amazed at how different ‘this year’s’ group of graduates is compared to the one from last year or the years before that. Is it because different people applied for the programme? Did we select differently? Or is it the particular combination of unique individuals that, forced or seduced to be together in an intense environment, over time develop common interests and even a kind of ‘collective identity’?

As an Afghan living in the Netherlands, with all his family in Iran, filmmaker Dawood Hilmandi’s research journey dealt with the search for an artistic language that would be capable of addressing the complex issues of being in-between-cultures, in-between-languages and in-between-geographical spaces. In ‘Journey into Zero Space’ and ‘Dear Bob dear Baba’ he finds that language through the power of montage, which is both the power to create (meaning) and the power to resist or undermine (authority).

Crucial to the two year international Master’s programme of the Netherlands Film Academy, with its focus on ‘artistic research’, is the notion of the group and the idea of peer learning. Of course there’s a curriculum, and of course each student has his or her own mentor, but it’s with each other and in the group that the main exchange and learning takes place. The group provides continuous feedback; it’s an environment in which ideas and experiences are shared and in which help and suggestions are generously given. The group becomes in fact a repository of collective knowledge.

During the course of his research, Finnish visual artist Mikko Keskiivari’s interest in issues of scale and scaling – zooming in, zooming out – developed from a form or method to the content of his artistic work. His ongoing research under the title ‘poetry of scaling’ thus ultimately deals with questions of perception. These are also at the core of his short film ‘Rook’ and his research installation ‘Wanderers’.

The 2016 group thus share a few common and overlapping research themes.

One is the relation between autobiography and artistic practice, which also relates to the theme of memories – how to get to them, how to use them, contain them, refuse them. Another is the exploration of one’s own methods of work – to develop characters, to create intimate encounters, to find and create through experimentation. And a third is the question of research and knowledge production itself – questioning the underlying system, the forms, the metho­ dology, even allowing the method to become the content of one’s work. But what’s most striking is that for all of this year’s graduates the outcome of two years ‘artistic research in and through cinema’ is that it is absolutely clear that the research isn’t over yet… on the contrary perhaps….

Pursuing a PhD in film studies Stanisław Liguziński (Poland) questions the dominance of text over image in his academic discipline and in our educational system more generally. With his ‘FilmArcades’ he’s developing a VR environment that will not only give an insight in the contemporary practice of the video essay, by featuring some prominent video essayists, but will also allow the viewer or visitor to participate in this act of thinking visually about images.

Anastasija Pirozenko (Lithuania), trained as a photographer and starting from an interest in propaganda, focused her research on the search by the postSoviet Eastern European states for a new national identity. Like in her own Lithuania, this often implied looking at ‘the West’ for inspiration, mimicking the cultural and political forms of the West. This ‘aesthetics of mimicry’ is the subject of her short film ‘Syndromes of Mimicry’.

Condition of Possibility In that sense, the theme or title that the students decided on for their Graduation Show, Condition of Possibility, is very aptly chosen. Condition of possibility refers on the one hand to creating the conditions for a work to become possible. This is the case when the research – constantly modified by feedback and negotiation – allows the work and the respective method to emerge from the constraints set, observations conducted and experiments performed.

Mariia Ponomarova (Ukraine). As scriptwriter and director, her research dealt with finding an alternative method for the creation of characters in film. This method was found in the close collaboration between the maker and the person on whom the fictional character is based – thus creating a resonance that will hopefully resonate with the audience as well. Apart from a short documentary, ‘May 9th’, this research also resulted in a script for a short fiction film, ‘Family Hour’.

On the other hand Condition of Possibility refers to the work itself as a condition of possibilities. The work as a deliberately open framework that invites the viewer to create his or her own experience. It’s an attitude or approach that gives space to the viewer to explore freely all the possibilities encapsulated in a given set of conditions.

In the diversity of research projects of the 2016 Group, you will notice that both types of conditions of possibilities are created, sometimes even combined.

Dutch visual artist Dorian de Rijk’s initial interest in data-mining and the related issues of control and surveillance, led her to question the contemporary predominance of fear as a tool of power (leading to a video work, ‘Winging It’, that got banned in Turkey) and also to analyse the workings of the mental health care system. With her film installation ‘Valerius’ she invites the spectator to experience the subjective experience of a person who is institutionalized.

The graduates and their research projects Interested in people’s ‘inner narratives’, visual artist Eliane Esther Bots (the Netherlands), set up a kind of cinematic laboratory to study the role of intimacy and the encounter in documentary. In her work in progress, a triptych called ‘Three Studies of Nearness’, she investigates the meaning, role and dynamics of family, home and conflict by using different methods and exploring her own position as a maker.

Filmmaker Julia Sokolnicka (Poland) is interested in the interplay between realness and reality in its contemporary context, which is that of the media and technology. Technology is the space in which we live nowadays and in which we create images of ourselves that we constantly present to the world and others in that space. But how does that space relate to the real, neoliberal space outside? Her investigation and documentation of the countercultures in New York, Berlin and Amsterdam has led to ‘Digital Nomads’, a live mixed film.

Matteo Canetta (Switzerland). His background in sound design led him from an investigation of the mechanisms of continuity and discontinuity, in sound and image, to the concept of ‘profanation’, as both method and content. His ongoing research resulted not only in the film ‘Redenzione’ (‘Redemption’) but also in a spatialized proposal for a PhD, ‘Profanity: a methodological approach for the humanities’, in which he uses the method of profanation to funda­ mentally question the institutional practice of education and research itself.

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Mieke Bernink Lector / Head of the Master’s department Netherlands Film Academy

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Stills from Tsen-nana

Part 1 TSEN-NANA documentary, 25’

CINEMATIC INTIMACY – A STUDY OF THE ENCOUNTER

An exploration of the invisible cloud of narrations present in the home of the Adajew family, who fled, over ten years ago, from Chechnya to Warsaw, Poland. How are the war, the longing for the father and the homeland still present in this warm home?

Eliane Esther Bots

director, cinematographer, editor Eliane Esther Bots with the Adajew family

One of the most beautiful aspects of our lives is encountering other people, listening to their stories, sharing their journeys of imagination and learning from this. For me, filmmaking broadens and deepens this experience. The attempt to understand the other and through this, ourselves, is at the core of what filmmaking is for me.

My research revolves around the questions: What is my position in an encounter?

How can I both record and visualize intimacy?

How can I invite the viewer to become part of the intimacy in an encounter?

With my research I aim to find ways of visualizing the ‘inner narration’ of the people I meet, the narrative world that goes beyond that which is visible at first glance, the narratives that help us to deal with aspects of life that we might find incomprehensible and that connect to our memories and imaginations.

I consider intimacy an essential condition for sharing and exchanging this inner world with others. It’s a condition for listening and observing.

Another essential element of my work is the encounter, it marks the beginning of my work process. Within my research I explore the encounter as an object of study itself. I try to learn more about my role and position as a maker and about the possibilities this presents for the viewer to become part of the encounter and thus to connect their personal narrative to the one in the film.

I want to find out how to work in different ways with the parameters or characteristics of the encounter as a basis for filmmaking.

I explore intimacy and the encounter in relation to family, home and conflict.

I understand the intimacy between family members and their homes as intimate physical and mental constructions. Family as an independent generator of narratives, but also altering these narratives over time. I am interested in conflict as an undefined presence at the horizon of someone’s life, in someone’s personal narrative about it and its influence on different generations in a family.

I have a documentary approach to filmmaking in which I treat reality and imagination as equally real; an approach I adopted understanding that for many people, the mental reality is often more real than the physical one.

Three studies of nearness work in progress

Three of my encounters grew into the project Three studies of nearness, a triptych. It’s a laboratory for my study of intimacy and the encounter. I use a comparative approach to test different methods, explore my position and look from different perspectives into family, home and conflict. When finalised, the three parts, three short documentaries, also stand on their own.

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Still from Cloud Forests

Stills from Home

Part 3 CLOUD FORESTS documentary, work in progress, 25’

Through short audio narratives, six daughters take us on an imaginative journey through the memories and images they have of the histories of their families and their families’ experiences of the war in Bosnia.

Trailer of Cloud Forests director Eliane Esther Bots with Elma Cavcic

Part 2 HOME documentary, 15’

Sapa and Hija re-enact and re-tell short anecdotes of their lives. Coming from another country, there is a quest for belonging and the (im)possibility to completely feel at home. director, editor Eliane Esther Bots cinematographer Herman van den Bosch, Eliane Esther Bots audio Matthijs Tuijn with Sapa, Hija Saleh

BIOGRAPHY

Eliane Esther Bots (1986, the Netherlands) is a filmmaker who graduated from the University of the Arts Utrecht (HKU), the Netherlands) in 2008. She studied Slavic languages (Russian) and cultures for one year at the University of Amsterdam and participated in the postgraduate program ‘Document and contemporary art’ at École Européenne Supérieure de l’image (EESI) in France in 2012. Her films have been screened at national and international festivals such as the International short film festival Oberhausen (DE), the International short film festival Curta Cinema, Rio de Janeiro (BR), Flatpack Film festival, Birmingham (UK), Kassel Dokfest (DE). In 2013 she won the BNG Bank Workspace price, a competition for experimental film of Filmhuis The Hague (NL) for the production of her film-installation The Visionary. The installation has been exhibited throughout the Netherlands.

In 2014 Eliane Bots received a production residency at the POLIN Museum Warsaw (Poland), where she produced the film We can’t come from nothing. She is part of the selection committee of the documentary section of the ‘Go Short’ film festival in Nijmegen (NL). For five years she’s teaching at the HKU (NL) where she coaches second to fourth year Bachelor students in ‘Moving image’ and ‘Times based arts’. www.cinematicintimacy.twosmallthings.com www.twosmallthings.com info@twosmallthings.com

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Stills from Redenzione

PROFANIT Y REDENZIONE (REDEMPTION)

Matteo Canetta

short film, 25’

A performative documentary constructed as a journey in literature. Classic Greek comedy, contemporary psychiatry essays and 20th century poetry are at the core of a pastiche like script. The characters encountered in the streets of a small southern Italy town explore and face the texts, while the authors are searching for forgiveness.

Coming from an advanced practice in sound design I engaged in a reflection on cinema and artistic research. This path brought me to question the idea of the production of knowledge in relation to the act of profanation.

Profanation neutralizes what it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its sacred aura and is returned to the use and property of men.

Giorgio Agamben

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What is the sacred if not any form of accepted truth? It is this untouchable network of truths that the short film R​edenzione​is trying to investigate. From this experience began a process of questioning education. Education is an accepted form of truth which has a specific function in capitalist society. The function of research is limited to a functionality in the existing socioeconomic frame. Artistic research can, and should, transform this state of subordination.

director, cinematographer, editor Matteo Canetta screenwriter Pierandrea Villa, Matteo Canetta production sound mixer Marcello Sodano grading Amaranta Pictures audio post production Riccardo Martinelli translation, subtitles MediaMix.Tre composer Sleaford Mods

Questioning possible ways to produce knowledge eventually brought me to develop an alternative form for PhD-proposals. This led to Profanity: a methodological approach for the human­ities. By profanating bibliographic research and the way texts are approached in academia, an open field is created in which it is possible to re-edit, mix and twist existing writing into something new and from which new understandings can emerge.

starring Maria Cristina Morani, Alessia Poerio Piterá, Giulia Aliprandi, Carla Pirozzi, Antonio Sodano, Guiseppe de Filippo, Francesco Tancredi, Claudio Perrotta, Sara Fiorillo, Maria Ventriglia, Ivan Sozoia, Silvio la Penna, Luigia Vita

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PASOLINI’S PROFANATION According to the official newspaper of the Vatican State (L’Osservatore Romano), The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) by Pierpaolo Pasolini, is the most beautiful film about Jesus Christ ever made. The Marxist poet of the sub-proletarians was able to reveal the new identity of the Italian society and of the catholic world, in a period of transformation of both.

The Pasolini-Jesus in the film is a profane figure, distant from the merciful, clement, official image of the Christ. This is true not just in the qualities of his behaviour as a character, but even the choice of the actor (a Spanish, dark looking anti-franchist student) implies a profanatory and revealing action.

The impact of the film, the harsh critique but also the large consensus, becomes interesting if we take into consideration the encyclical letter of Pope Roncalli, Pacem in Terris (1963), ‘Peace on Earth’. The view of John XXIII

expressed in the encyclical letter, radically changed the position of the church toward freedom and the individuality of man, recognizing a new and emerging social dimension, not exclusively based on the figure of the traditional Christian believers. Using the formula ‘to all Men of Good Will’, he opened and accepted a vision of the world in which the struggle of workers, women and people of the third world, was becoming more and more central in the development of contemporaneity.

The idea itself of profanation loses its vulgar and disrespectful quality, when even the institution that should feel insulted is able to recognize and embrace the value of such an approach. We need to take into account the examples given by history, and start realizing that is possible to discover something new by challenging accepted forms of truth.

Nora Chester

Still from learning/interviews as part of Profanity: a methodological approach for the humanities

If the sacred is what we accept, the idea of profanation, the movement of profanation, becomes a revolutionary and emancipatory act. If we challenge the accepted, we can learn something about it.

PROFANITY: A METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH FOR THE HUMANITIES Installation / Spatialized PhD proposal

The profanation of the traditional form of a proposal for advanced studies and research, aims to bring the fundamental elements of such a form into a public space. Those elements (abstract, question/hypothesis, methodology, literature review, positioning) have a different relevance and weight according to the field of research. Questioning this hierarchy, I brought into a spatial dimension the most essential and relevant elements to the scope of my studies. The spatialised proposal thus is an expression of my methodology, intended as the set of critically reviewed methods used in conducting preliminary and introductory research: a visual abstract (video, 3’), an article (Goodbye Sacred), a radio play (The story of the young rich man, 2 channel video installation, 11’), a literature review (presenting a physical library), and preliminary research (learning / interviews, multi-channel reportage, 9’).

BIOGRAPHY

Matteo Canetta (Switzerland) is a filmmaker and a researcher. His background lies in sound design and digital based art, working as a video artist for indepen­ dent record labels, developing multimedia art and interactive installations. Currently he is working on an investigation of educational systems, working creatively with interviews in different institutions: a primary school in Switzerland and the Master of Film Programme of the Netherlands Film Academy.

Previous Education BSc (Hons) Audio Production (Middlesex University, London)

THE STORY OF THE YOUNG RICH MAN sound Marcello Sodano voices Diewke de Mooij (priest), Signe Tøre Karsrud (Veronica) portraits Ida Saladin, Sophie Dixon

https://modphaseseq.wordpress.com/ https://vimeo.com/redenzione

LEARNING / INTERVIEWS cinematographer Matteo Canetta sound Marcello Sodano interviewer Pierandrea Villa

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FROM AUTOBIOGRAPHY TO FICTION gwen.n I’m an outsider. I do not belong. I observe the world from a distance. The incongruity between the world and me is the subject of my work. I question the superficiality of society and the construct of human relations. I like to play with the inexplicable. I’m inspired by what looks normal on the outside but isn’t when you look beyond the polished surface. I believe that behind this mass fake appearance and accepted sets of behaviour, lies dysfunctionality. That people’s worst nightmare is actually what they try to suppress. I filter and reflect my thoughts until I capture my subjective experience in images. Making art is a process of translating the images I see in my head, literally when I close my eyes, first into words and then back into images.

My research As far back as I remember, I’ve felt the need to process life, to contextualize it in order to remember it differently and to be able to change the emotions accordingly. It was my first attempt at shaping reality.

My research at the Master was very much related to this inner need: how to place my subjective experiences into a fictional context as a tool for emancipation.

Using experimentation as my research method – allowing the outcome of one experiment to dictate the goal and execution of the next – I discovered first the importance of writing down my memories, understanding that nothing I wrote was necessarily objective or true, but that it was essential nevertheless to give words to my subjective experiences. I realized that to be able to control the content and shape the narrative into a story line with a beginning, middle and an end, you need to be able to have the freedom to make editorial choices based on the strength or fluidity of the script. So I had to find a way to create a distance between the script and myself. I had to shift from ‘I’ to ‘She’. That shift was crucial. It meant that the script no longer needed to be true to my history, and the events of my history, while remaining true to the mechanisms of my thought processes and the dialogue between my different inner selves. This gave the character in the script, Angel, space to breathe. I then created a new experiment, to figure out if I should play the role of my new protagonist myself. As a performance artist I would naturally be inclined to do so. But the experiment proved me wrong. In order to create Angel I needed to only be the director of the film.

Stills from Broken

My theme often deals with alienation and the notions of grief and fatalism, but I transform my perceptions of reality by aesthetically placing them in a different light, by changing the original timbre, content, colour and the emotional charge, in the different frames I construct. And transformed – numbed of its original emotion, but often with surreal, black and sarcastic undertones - I give it back to the viewer.

BROKEN fiction, 25’

Crafting fiction from personal memory, creating a distance, gave me control over the subject matter and allowed me to look at the created material with an artistic eye. With this artistic control, I could, and can, distill the pure essence from my memories. Memories that thus became archival material. By approaching all these memories as an archive to experiment with, my content became part of my working method.

Parallel worlds, parallel time. A woman locked up in her apartment, or is it her head, framed by her alter ego running through the woods. Entering her world you are left with the question whether the space is real or a dream? Whether it is happening now or in the past? Whether it’s memory or projection?

Processing the archive, mediating the autobiography, shaping it, proved to be a tool of emancipation. Trans­ forming the raw emotions of the traumatic events of my life into constructed frames, images and sounds and sharing it with an audience, (re)connects me to society. I offer the audience a window into a constructed world that might resonate with them; they might recognize something that is part of themselves or the society we live in. I broke out of the memory into a fictive context and from the fiction back into the real...

In this film I show parts of my inner world in relation to events of my past. My memories have been transformed, stylized and given a new body, a new space in a new time. My fascination to make this film was to shape my inner worlds and my thoughts and to bring them into tangible reality through film.

Broken The short film Broken (and the subsequent film and installation Teterinsky Pereulok 14) is the result of my experimentation during the Master’s programme. Trained as a choreographer and having worked for a long time as a performance artist, I wanted to develop myself as a filmmaker because film is the ultimate medium in which I can show my internal world and more precisely stage my perceived reality.

screenwiter Stan Lapinski, gwen.n director, producer, production design, gaffer gwen.n assistant director Anca Oproiu cinematography Danila Goryunkov production sound mixer Sergio González Cuervo sound design Gijs den Hartogh sound advice Vincent Sinceretti editor Rob Gradisen, Ulrike Mischke composer Matteo Canetta starring Vanessa, gwen.n

In Broken I played with classical film rules and opted to structure the film using the means of choreography.

I created scenes with the actress through a process of structured improvisation. The camera, the movement of the DOP and the framing are equally choreographed; some scenes are literally approached as a duet between camera and actress. Camera techniques and lenses are just as important for me as the movement of the body through the space. Like in my performance work, I constructed the set design myself, transposing the emotions of the character onto her environment. And like in my earlier work, I used sound to tell the story of the multiple worlds and times in which my character lives her haunted life. I used the tools of cinema to light and capture the world and transform my dreamscapes and surrealist realities into work that the viewer can perhaps relate to.

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Stills from Teterinskiy Pereulok 14 Still from Broken

TETERINSKIY PEREULOK 14

short film, 9’ & multi-channel installation

A woman in a Moscow apartment. The simplicity of her everyday routine actions and motions betrays a regime to keep control; a state of acceptance despite her inner turmoil. The fish eye effect reveals her inner reflections about her physical appearance and symbolises her twisted visions of the world. It transposes this discomfort onto the viewer.

In the multi-channel installation, time in the woman’s Moscow apartment is stretched out into eternity. Her unending actions and motions, combined with her nakedness, reveal her incongruity with society. The loop symbolises the emptiness of existence, the futility of life. Her scepticism towards society and its rules of conduct, and her refusal to negotiate the challenges of daily life are captured by monotony.

BIOGRAPHY

gwen.n is a former dancer/choreographer, graduated from SNDO in Amsterdam. She specialized in performance art, combining it with video, location work and installations.

The work was shown at (inter)national dance festivals and museums, like Dancas Na Cidade and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. She also worked with Katie Duck (Magpie) on improvisation performances. Gradually she developed an eye for photography and film to finally shift her working field completely to cinema. Her main theme still is alienation, now also in relation to her research into the process of translating her autobiography into fiction.

director, script writer, cinematographer, sound recording gwen.n editor Robert Wittendorp, gwen.n colour grading Robert Gradisen starring gwen.n, Teterinsky Pereulok 14, Khram Vozneseniya Gospodnya / Church of the Ascension of Christ

www.gwen-n.com

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Dawood Hilmandi My research starts from investigating the relationship between autobiography and cinema by deconstructing the latter through an autobiographical way of making works. As an experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist I want to challenge the boundaries between these media. The short films A Journey Into Zero Space and Dear Bob Dear Baba use montage as a way to question authority from a subjective, autobiographical perspective.

Searching for a universal language When I started the Master by investigating “the zero point between silence and noise”, I was interested in both Eastern and Western cultures, based on my background as an Afghan boy coming to the Netherlands and in a way leaving all behind to start a new life. I was searching for something which doesn’t belong to any particular culture: a universal language. I started re-archiving my memories, by treating my archive of material from trips to Afghanistan, Bamyan, Iran, Turkey, US and the Netherlands, as found footage. I took a distance and reinterpreted my memories, real and cinematic, by questioning a central theme: authority.

The short experimental film A Journey Into Zero Space explores the power of cinema by assembling documentary and archival, often personal, footage into a journey into my head. To facilitate that journey and guide the viewer through different times and spaces in the film, I often use short (authorial) commentary in the form of a voiceover. In Dear Bob Dear Baba, the voice-over is an act of forgiveness, of re-connection, of release or acceptance of the past – and stems from the naked confrontation with myself and the redefinition of my self.

Stills from A Journey Into Zero Space and Dear Bob Dear Baba

MONTAGE AS AN ACT OF AUTHORIT Y AND A CHALLENGE TO AUTHORSHIP

Accepting the subjective and particular My research is strongly connected to my life, both conceptually and methodologically, which is why I use an autobiographically way of making film. Thus my life’s path directly influences my way of editing and working with the timeline. Which doesn’t mean, by the way, that my films are (merely) autobiographical. But getting back to my family and my history led me to better understand and reflect on what it means to be a human being. Carl Jung once told us that, by understanding others, you can discover yourself. This is also why my research is shaped in a paradoxical way - by trying to reach the universal it involves the subjective and the particular.

Authority Going back to my family meant a confrontation with authority. The notion of authority arises from the family, seen as a micro-cosmos of social and political behaviours, and is embodied, among others, in the figure of the father. Dear Bob Dear Baba reflects on this idea of authority by paralleling two figures of noticeable dominance, my father and the well-known theatre maker Robert Wilson. The film is based on the latest encounters with my father in Afghanistan and Iran, and on my collaboration with Robert Wilson during the Watermill Centre Summer Program in New York in 2014. Similarities and oppositions are visually reflected in the opposition of the two men by individual representations of knowledge and spirituality, which I don’t try to judge but rather to deconstruct, and so redefine my connection to them based on how I experience them. In my films I both try to embrace the notion of authority and reject it. The father is experienced as both missing and authoritarian. He is a source of knowledge and pain, but also of joy. By re-establishing the connection between son and father and by inquiring into the historical line of the family (as belonging to an Afghan society but also to a society, hierarchical and power driven), I attempt to question the cycle of repeating history and to deconstruct the notions of evil and victim.

Polyphonic cinema My view of cinema goes beyond the language of words into the realm of pure experience of sight, sound, smell, touch and different sensations of time and space – non-linear, compressed or extended. These experiences and sensations and can help me to create new experimental forms of visual language exceeding geographical borders.

Oh the sound again, hear it, coming from the corner of that mountain, the smell of the dust that comes with the wind, how wonderful when it’s mixed with the sound of the water source near the tree when I look down from the top of the mountain. Its soo deep. I hear the boy again, calling. I get closer to him. Mmm, this light is like nowhere else, red golden hour. While eating a dry piece of bread, he keeps staring calmly at his sheep. I take out my phone, there is no signal at this height. I quietly put on some music, but so that he stays wrapped up in his thoughts.

For me cinema is the perfect medium because it allows me to show such ‘polyphonic’ experiences. Unlike words that require linear time for reading and understanding, in cinema all these elements can be experienced simultaneously which, for me, is a fascinating aspect of cinema.

Montage as a tool to freedom The act of montage, for me, is an act of being, an active way of being. It’s inherent to the work and practice of montage, as we know from Godard, Chris Marker and Eisenstein who all used it to make the viewer question and become aware of the process of filmmaking itself. When you become aware, you ask questions and therefore you resist. That resistance shows the existence of the self. I try to let this happen by breaking the fourth wall in cinema and using the voice-over as a reflection method. Montage also represents for me the playfulness and ultimate freedom to deconstruct my view on the world. Thus I hope, in my films, to let myself and the audience experience a state of awareness and freedom.

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Still from A Journey Into Zero Space

Still from A Journey Into Zero Space

“Maybe I’m too far from where I should be.

Or maybe that place simply doesn’t exist.”

(Dear Bob Dear Baba)

BIOGRAPHY

Dawood Hilmandi (1987) is an experimental filmmaker, multimedia artist and photographer. He graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie VAV in Amsterdam (2010) and from The London Film Academy (2012). His first film Bekhawy was screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2009 and his two shorts Arvacska and 2087 at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011 and 2012. He recently worked on the award winning films De Waarneming / Perception (director Frank Scheffer) and Angelus Novus (director Aboozar Amini). Dawood Hilmandi lives and works in Amsterdam and Kabul.

A JOURNEY INTO ZERO SPACE

DEAR BOB DEAR BABA

director, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor Dawood Hilmandi sound design Matteo Taheri / Pastelle Music location assistants and guides (Bamyan) Sadeq Naseri, Baqir Tawakoli assistant Claudia Christern with Mustafa

director, writer, cinematographer, editor Dawood Hilmandi sound design Matteo Taheri / Pastelle Music location assistants and guides (Bamyan) Sadeq Naseri, Baqir Tawakoli with Mustafa, Najiba Noori, Kaveh Ayreek, Eid Mobarak thanks to Robert Wilson and the Watermill International Summer Program 2014, New York (participants, collaborators and staff)

experimental documentary, 20’

experimental documentary, 18’

www.dawoodhilmandi.com dhilmandi@gmail.com

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For both films thanks to my family, friends in Tehran, Rowena production Bamyan, Aneta Lesnikovska, Eyal Sivan, Mieke Bernink, Albert Elings, Patrick Minks (external advice), Cristina Buta, my colleague students.

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Mikko Keskiivari They say that a good magician never reveals his secrets. I agree with this of course but at the same time I claim that a good magic trick amazes also by the way it’s done.

I look through an eye piece lens of a microscope. I’m not sure what magnification I’m using at the moment. I’ve lost my sense of scale and I don’t understand the size of the living beings I’m looking at.

Every time I change the magnification or the position of the sample I see something new and unexpected appearing in front of me. Even though I know that I’m seemingly in control of these few thousand organisms that I collected for my test shoot, what I’m experiencing makes me feel very small. In a drop of water - from a small pond, in a park nearby my home - I find things that I never saw before. I try to convince myself that the wriggling creatures can’t really suffer or feel emotions. I fail in this and the smell of dying plankton makes me feel slightly ill.

Poster for the experimental documentary Rook

POETRY OF SCALING

ROOK

experimental documentary, 9’

My artistic research ‘Scaling - an Attitude to Artistic Practice’, is made mainly through audiovisual experiments, which can work as individual pieces but which are also connected and blended together through the narrative of my research. My online Vivarium (www.keskiivarivivarium.com) works as a platform for presenting my archive of material produced during the research but also as a virtual space for exploring the interaction of the different elements I’m dealing with.

In a small village in the Finnish countryside there’s a TV-tower that resonates in the wind, in three different frequencies. This landmark plays a central role in Rook, a short documentary video, exploring ideas of scale, distance and perception through a dialogue between two different perspectives in two different times, connected through the physical space and the family relation of the main characters.

In the beginning of my research, I was treating the idea of scale and scaling in a very functional manner.

I believed that scale based and spatial thinking could be used for building immersive narratives and zooming into a character or a story. I was inspired by scale, similarity and recurring structures in nature.

I explored the possibilities of scale based visual abstraction and similarity, and the spectator’s experience of cinematic distance. I did experiments with the interaction of shot size and film structure while being interested in meditative, cinematic experiences. I was pursuing a cinematic method that can be used to lead the viewer into a relaxed but concentrated mindset in a seductive and interesting way. At the same time I was exploring cinematic devices to express this movement and asking myself: How is it possible to get closer than an extreme close-up? Gradually, during the course of my research, the thematic meanings of scale and zooming in and out became clear: they were no longer only structures for narration but also the content for my artistic work and a way of looking.

director, cinematographer, sound designer, editor Mikko Keskiivari performer Tuomo Keskiivari runner Leena Keskiivari-Rantanen mentoring Marcie Begleiter, Aneta Lesnikovska, Eyal Sivan special thanks to Jussi Tulander

The most crucial questions for my research can be explored in the context of cinema but also on a much more personal and existential level: How close do we have to get or how much distance do we need in order to relate to something or someone?

What can it mean to be too close to what one is looking at?

What are the limits of our perception?

What happens to us when we realize our size in relation to society or nature?

I suggest that the act of scaling is a fundamental element of reflective and analytical thinking but also that it can be a much more subconscious, subjective experience that can change our perception of ourselves or of whatever we are looking at. In order to learn from our actions and history, to build our own future, we need the capability of zooming in and out (as an ongoing process) to understand what we are actually dealing with.

We easily take things near to us for granted and we are blind for things happening right under our noses.

At the same time we also ignore the things that seem distant to us and underestimate their effect on our lives. Similarly we underestimate our own power in relation to the world. Sometimes we’re so focused on our goals that we forget to enjoy the way there. We exclude the unexpected and alienate ourselves from things that we would be able to relate to and learn from, if only we would give this a chance to happen…

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For me art is a device of poetic communication which can be used to remind us about the peculiarity in things that we think we know very well, and that often something seemingly alien is actually more familiar and similar to us than we originally assumed.

Screen shot from the online project Vivarium, which presents the narrative of Keskiivari’s research trough an archive of audiovisual experiments.

Wanderers installation reminds the spectator about her size in relation to the environment trough an spacial audiovisual experience.

BIOGRAPHY

Mikko Keskiivari (1987, Heinola) is a Finnish media artist and filmmaker, currently living and working in Amsterdam.

He graduated from the Tampere University of Applied Sciences in 2011 (Bachelor of Fine Art), focussing on cinematic media art. In his research at the Master of Film Program he explored the ideas of scaling, distance and perception as practical artistic tools but also as existential subjects. He is also interested in the differences and similarities between cinematic, physical and virtual spaces and the spectator’s position in these structures.

WANDERERS

research installation

Silent communication, the meaning of a subjective individual in a community and emotional charge in architectural space are recurrent themes in his work. Keskiivari makes cinematic video works that are often exhibited in form of an installations, but also as short movies at film festivals.

He works continuously on his independent audiovisual experiments, but also on short movie based film projects with film crews and artistic collectives.

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The installation is founded on the simple idea of a very direct scale based switch, but in its simplicity it encapsulates some of the core elements of my research. Wanderers is a monument which main purpose it is to remind us about the significance of the things that have a huge impact on our lives even though we don’t normally notice them or pay attention to them.

Cinematic video works Quiet Feast (with Diana Luganski, coming) Dolly the Duck (2015) Trench (with Diana Luganski, 2012) Lacking Limbs With Digits (2011) Strange Walls (with Martta Tuomaala, 2011) I am YouTube (2010)

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microscopy and sound design Mikko Keskiivari institutional support Ewa Gogola mentoring Marcie Begleiter, Aneta Lesnikovska, Eyal Sivan special thanks to the Netherlands Cancer Institute

www.keskiivarivivarium.com Instagram: mikkokeskiivari Youtube: Mikko Keskiivari E-mail: mikko.keskiivari@gmail.com Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/channels/ keskiivaricinematic

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FILMARCADES – THE ATL AS OF EMANCIPATORY SPECTATORSHIP Stanisław Liguziński As a film scholar and critic I was always struggling with a discrepancy between the objects of my research and the means of their analysis. I’ve been trained to analyze films – to crack them, hack them and frame as artistic, cultural, social or political… TEXTS – meaning words, sentences and paragraphs in print. I felt this practice was always closer to adaptation than interpretation and I started doubting if it was the sole purpose of my training.

Did I learn to recognize, appreciate and cherish those unique cinematic qualities simply to freeze and silence them in the process of writing?

I started with the academic practice in my mind but soon realized that the issue at hand is actually much bigger and taps into the more profound dilemma of turning passive viewers into active participants. Was it possible to modify or enrich our viewing practices, so we can actually internalize and personalize knowledge through them?

I started to investigate the form of the video essay and its potential of becoming a notebook, analytic device and legitimized self-referential form of publication. Doing so, I never treated cinematic essay as a genre, but as a particular mode of intellectual/artistic production that lets you approach audiovisual works in a manner of Max Bense’s essayist who: “Is a combiner, a tireless producer of configurations around a specific object (…)” for whom: “Configuration is an epistemological arrangement which cannot be achieved through axiomatic deduction, but only through Ars Combinatoria in which imagination replaces knowledge.”

The FilmArcades project tries to create the conditions for audiovisual literacy to emerge by inventing a special VR environment that will reinstate the model of participatory apprenticeship in a digital form. I invited leading figures of the video essay scene to work with me on a simple editing task structured around the EYE Institute’s Bits&Pieces collection. Those collaborations are being captured with multiple Kinect sensors and recreated as ‘playable’ 3D scenes, allowing users to participate in our endeavors and edit their own videos.

FilmArcades is not only an observational documentary allowing the user to follow the procedures of critical thinking through video editing, but also an enhanced participatory tutorial – enabling that user to collaborate virtually with the best specialists in the field. Last but not least, it creates a unique opportunity for the museums or archives to engage their audience in an act of collaborative curatorship and playful exploration of their collections.

On page 28-29 you can find an excerpt from the transcript of the conversation registered during one of the collaborations with Catherine Grant - an academic researcher based in East Sussex, UK. She’s one of the pioneers of the video-essay scene - both maker and a theorist - who co-founded the first peer reviewed journal devoted exclusively to that emerging form of audiovisual thinking.

Catherine is also the sole initiator of both Film Studies for Free (a pluralist, pro bono, and purely positive web-archive of Open Access film and moving image studies resources inspired by the figure of the Borgesian librarian) and Audiovisualcy (the biggest online forum and archive for video essays).

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Stanisław Liguziński: One of the main features of video essays is always already there – captured in the interface.

And that is a split screen. Almost everybody working on video essays starts with the comparison of two images, it’s a basic instinct.

FILMARCADES

FilmArcades, the Atlas of Emancipatory Spectatorship: Manual (fragm.)

director Stanisław Liguziński unity developer Kornél Varga collaborators Catherine Grant, Kuba Mikurda prospective collaborators Kevin B. Lee, Kuba Woynarowski

An atlas is not just a collection of maps, it’s a space of imaginary journeys, a thing to be touched, swiped and used. FilmArcades – the Atlas of Emancipatory Spectatorship aims to open up the land of film, the same way the original Mercator’s Atlas opened up the world’s geography.

It invites you on an armchair exploration of the creative possibilities enchanted in the film medium.

BIOGRAPHY

http://www.filmarcades.com

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SL: I assume that we’re drawn to this double-screen arrangement because it actually resembles the way we think visually. We make comparisons between the images inscribed in our memory and those seen in reality – we juxtapose them in our imagination and create associations.

With actual split-screen we no longer have to imagine this we literally see images side-by-side and let similarities and contrasts emerge. This is the moment when you can place one image here, one there and see how they respond to each other. Do you know Harun Farocki’s work Schnittstelle? It starts with a sentence: “I can hardly write a word these days if there isn’t an image on the screen at the same time. Actually: on both screens”. Those images interrogate themselves.

CG: Most people seem to be interested in the video essay format because it provides a new form of expression. It interests me too, but I’m mostly captivated by what I cannot control, which is the way viewers look at those split-screen comparisons. The things they notice can be different from what I noticed. It opens up the whole new world of possible observations where the viewers choose where to focus their attention. Especially if it’s uncut by montage. Obviously, there’s a form of montage involved in the split-screen work but it requires you to shift between the screens and then grab something from there, and notice something over here. It’s a really fast process of unfolding.

SL: You mentioned that it might be going too far sometimes, and that some things might not do justice to the particular image. But is that the real stake here? At some point those video-essays might expand beyond the films they comment upon. Instead of talking about the cinema, they can talk, through it, about more general cinematic features aesthetics or politics, the world in general.

CG: I think that’s true, but I’m interested in similarities between what I do and what an artist would do. Because there’s clearly an overlap with the way the artist might work. I don’t think I’m not an artist, because I’m an amateur. But I also think that I’m working with another set of constraints or another form of generic framework. Which is academic.

Although my work has gone into different directions since I started, almost everything I do still raises the question of ethics. About what I’m doing and how much I can change. I mean, I do change a lot, but I’m not interested in producing something so mysterious that people wouldn’t know where it is coming from. There is always some sort of function in there, although it’s often just a starting point for the work that becomes something else altogether. And one of the things I know I’m doing is exploring spectatorship. I’m exploring my own ways of watching films. The things that I’m personally drawn to. I think that when you start doing this kind of work you can either make it completely about ‘you’ or begin to wonder whether those experiences are actually much more common than that. I’m interested in ‘why’ and not just ‘why me?’ In the reasons that make those forms so ubiquitous.

Stanisław Liguziński is a film critic, doctoral student at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts of the Jagiellonian University in Poland and a budding filmmaker. He wrote for major Polish media, edited journals, curated retro­ spectives and screenings for international film festivals and cultural institutions. He is conducting research into videographic forms of thinking, teaching university courses on film history and theory and participating in several audiovisual education programmes. Aside from the FilmArcades (simultaneously developed as PhD dissertation and mixed-media installation at the Film Academy), he’s currently co-developing an archival project dealing with the notion of collaborative curatorship and artistic activism – Maagdenhuis2015 Arc.Hive.

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Catherine Grant: I think it’s a very good insight. The multiple screen effect has become such an important part of the online video essay works, partly because of the interfaces of editing programs that offer you a basic splitscreen immediately by default. It’s no longer one screen, therefore, it is no longer linear anymore. For me it is all about this basic move between those two windows. Taking images and sounds from one place and putting them onto the timeline. Using an editing environment and a pair of headphones you can do your own juxtapositions and compare things. There’s something in this possibility that completely changes the way you watch films.

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SL: I think that this might be exactly what makes the work critical. Awareness and constant investigation of your position as the spectator. So, when you make a statement about something, you don’t say ‘that is how things are’ but ‘from where I stand, things look this way’. It’s not only more honest, but it also creates space for the audience - encourages them to engage in a dialogue as equals. They can always say: ‘from where we’re standing things look a bit different’. Coming back to the investigation of your position - you often seem to be doing it by selecting self-referential images that speak about the way they were made. It makes me think about your interest in dissolves, which are literally the cuts that reveal themselves to us! They shout: ‘I’m a cut, I’m here, between those two frames, that’s how I connect them’.

CG: Yeah, and they are often considered as cuts for beginners who don’t know how to edit on action or do eyeline matching. But dissolve is very pleasurable, and it’s unsettling... and then resettling. They remind me of the kaleidoscope, which gives children pleasure by forming the pattern out of preexisting things, only to dissolve it and reform another one. It’s the same with what we’re doing creating and dissolving patterns by scrolling through the footage at our own pace. And it’s literally your fingers that can take you through this - you feel as if you were touching the material itself. It involves touch in a way that writing doesn’t. Your contact with the surface of the touchpad directly translates to the footage. It’s the process of material thinking with an actual film - you not only comprehend it but feel it - skim through it, touching its surface.

SL: This feeling of touching is even more tangible with our footage from Bits&Pieces. Those scans of old reels have all kinds of textures.

CG: Yes! I was never that interested in early cinema before I could use it like this, and interact with it. Suddenly you can feel the thrill of the archivist.

SL: Speaking of early cinema, you tend to use a lot of color filters in your videos. How does that sit with your ethics?

CG: It’s very difficult to square with my ethics. I usually apply it when the material looks... inert. That’s a very important concept for me in this work. If something feels inert it’s not alive, not moving. Even if it’s the most explanatory or boring thing that I’m trying to do, it’s not working when it feels dead.

There’s something about those choices when you can revivify that material by messing with it aesthetically or add the reverb or echo to the sound. As soon as I even start talking about it, I’m in the field of memory and fantasy. Subjectivity, not documentary and responsibility for the image.

SL: We already said that it might be more honest to describe your position than to make a claim for objectivity.

So maybe it’s more ethical to admit to the manipulation and present it as your subjective take on things?

CG: Yes, maybe it’s more ethical to be in the realm of transformative work. It’s partly about showing people what I see, and where I’m situated or re-performing something that feels alive. I don’t think that what I’m producing is about how I’ve seen something or how I experienced it. But I want the spectator to get surprised in a reasonably similar way to how I’ve been surprised. Nevertheless, most of the time I’m not trying to reproduce the experience but make something that works as a cultural artifact. Otherwise I won’t see it as a video essay, but as a clip.

SL: There’s this weird feel to your works, a signature of sorts. They seem haunted. I think cinema is inherently haunted - by the presence of something that is not there anymore. Images are escaping, dying in front of us 24 frames per second and it triggers melancholy. You tend to use all those techniques to slow down this process, dissolve it.

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However, the more you want to keep them onscreen, the more you destroy the movement - the liveliness they exhibit. Taking it to the extreme, you’re being left with a still in the end.

CG: I think fundamentally you’re right, melancholia is an affect in this work. Although, the other way I’m thinking about it is with the concept of the transitional object that the children play with, creating imaginary worlds that they control. Children find objects that preexist, that are not theirs. As part of their play, they appropriate and destroy them. We work with films that are also out there and we mess with them, use them to create and play. In the process we destroy them by cutting, displacing and changing their aesthetics. What eventually happens to the transitional object is that the child wears it out. Not literally, but to use the technical term - the child decathects: the feeling they invested in the object wears away. And that happens to our pieces at a certain point too - they are products of our attachment that we invested energy in - but the feeling of their liveliness fades. When you re-watch them after some time, they mostly remind you of the process, because that’s what it is about - this investment of energy, something seizing you to the point when you need to follow through with it. That is where my works are coming from, although I don’t try to reproduce it consciously. To a certain degree it’s all encapsulated in one of my favorite stories by Adolfo Bioy Casares, The invention of Morel. A man on a desert island discovers that the events repeated in front of him and a woman he fell in love with, are all parts of a holographic movie. The only way to settle this situation is to film himself with the very same camera that killed all the other protagonists by turning them into this holographic looped image. It’s a huge metaphor of cinema and spectatorship, but it also captures the nature of those little pieces that I make retelling my versions of that story using other people’s materials.

SL: It’s funny because we frame that holographic situation right now with all those Kinects - it’s going to feel a bit like that.

CG: I know and it was one of the things that was interesting for me about this experience. You were filming me before in a much more conventional way and then I watched one of your Kinect videos and it reminded me of that world of Morel’s invention again.

SL: I cannot predict how this experience is going to feel like, but it has this uncanny quality. The viewers will be able to physically realize this fantasy of spatial exploration, but, in a sense, we will remain holograms to them. And the only way for them to really embody this situation would be to pick up the same task that we have at our hands now.

That’s why I want those holograms to serve as the intermediary support structure. But the backend of this experience – its final destination - is the material that we’re working with. Accessible both to us and whoever is going to come here virtually. So anybody can choose the right moment, this one for example, pause and go explore this remarkable collection with provided tools.

Scan this QR code to see the video dossier

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THE AESTHETICS OF MIMICRY THE CONTEMPORARY CONDITION OF THE EMERGENT EASTERN EUROPEAN STATES Anastasija Piroženko I was searching for a way to apply different visual aesthetics to film: from the grotesque via pop-culture to propaganda. Unable to relate these visual strategies to my work, I eventually came across the idea of non-genuine aesthetics, which I call ‘The Aesthetics of Mimicry’. I wanted to explore the way how mimicry can create a paradoxical cycle where originality is driven by imitation.

Coming from a photography and media art background, I developed a visual taste for motionless films with a monumental structure and composition, minimalist visual styles, and slow, non-linear narrative content focusing on time, routine and ritual. Memories or personal dilemmas generally act as the starting point for developing a piece, and the disorders in human lives and society have become recurring themes in my work.

I came to the Master of Film programme questioning the reality aspect of non-fiction film. Curious about the idea of a manufactured reality in documentary, I decided to explore the boundaries between reality and fiction, in order to create a hybrid film. This led me to investigate the device of propaganda in film and mass media, and eventually I settled upon the subject of national identity and its problematic nature in the former Eastern Bloc countries.

Post-Soviet Context & Lithuania as a Case Study For my case study I chose to focus on post-Soviet Lithuania – my motherland. To properly understand the subject matter, some historical context is required: after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lithuania found itself in a complex new position; marked by uncertainty and confusion. Social structures were undefined, institutions became dysfunctional, moral norms unreliable and outdated. In response to this, Lithuania began to orient itself towards Western political and social models.

Imitating an English song - still from Syndromes of Mimicry

What do we call authentic, specific, our own?

One of the ways that this voluntary Westernization manifested itself was in mundane mimicry. In the post-Soviet space, mimicry did not focus on a past master, but instead on the Euro-American beast, in a desire to reestablish our Western roots. “Western” modes of life were implemented in cultural and political forms, against a backdrop that rejected the previous social order’s values.

Mimicry as a Non-Genuine Aesthetic This mimicry became the main focal point of my research. Initially, I explored this subject from the standpoint of post-colonial studies in relation to the Baltic post-colonialism. The common view is that mimicry carries a negative connotation – for the colonized; imitating the colonizer causes a loss of identity. In the case of the Baltic post-colonial states, it wasn’t Russia, as the former colonizer that was being mimicked. On the contrary, references to the Soviet past were considered disgraceful and unwanted. Instead Europe became the cultural, political and social norm.

SYNDROMES OF MIMICRY short film, 18’

In this particular case, mimicry stems from a desire to be equal, accepted and recognized. But my take on mimicry is slightly different. Because it does not bring us closer to the essence of the original source, but instead creates a unique replica, a metonymy of presence.

This film-satire stands as cinematic critique on the Westernization of Eastern European states.

With this film I explore the manifestation of mimicry in mundane life in Lithuania.

I introduce the concept of ‘the aesthetics of mimicry’ as a possible coping mechanism in the search for authenticity. Meaning that this mimicry is not merely a facsimile or simulacrum of an entity, but rather a method of deconstruction and a means to create a distinct identity. In order to be effective, such mimicry must continually and consciously deviate from the original in order to develop its own authenticity. If we appropriate mimicry as our own aesthetics, it might become a method for creating a national identity.

director, screenwriter Anastasija Piroženko cinematography Edgaras Kordiukovas editor Anastasija Piroženko, Stella van Voorst van Beest sound design, foley Ronnie van der Veer music Matteo Canetta script advisor Aliona van der Horst

Cinematic satire To investigate the subject of mimicry through film, I developed a script. The result of that is Syndromes of Mimicry, a short film with a satirical approach to the manifestation of mimicry in day-to-day life in Lithuania. Set on the eve of Lithuania becoming an E.U. member, can a pompous light show bring happiness and prosperity to the lives of the people?

starring Aleksandras Aniukštis, Dainius Juzva, Toye Samson Abiodun, Rimas Morkūnas, Darius Saženis, Denis Senin, Eugenija Stakėnienė, Laima Užurkaitė

While the state is busy preparing to celebrate a momentous historical event, the working class is drowned in the mundane boredom of routine. Enthusiasm has long-since vanished, now only a feeling of apathy remains.

Syndromes of Mimicry puts forth a criticism of the blind Westernization processes and the lack of authenticity in post-Soviet Lithuania. With this film I attempt to illustrate a dissonance between the state’s politics and its citizens, and I invite the viewer to consider the hollowness of the Eurocentric Lithuanian society.

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Stills from Syndromes of Mimicry

The making of Syndromes of Mimicry

BIOGRAPHY

Anastasija Piroženko is an audio-visual artist and film­ maker from Lithuania, who is currently based in Amsterdam.

Coming from a photography and video art background has heavily influenced Anastasija’s cinematic language, resulting in films intended to reward patient viewers with an exploration of slow narratives, the passage of time, absurdity in routine and beauty in banality. Her films have been screened at several international film festivals, including Vilnius International Film Festival (LT), and ZubrOFFka, International Short Film Festival (PL).

Her film Temporarily became a laureate of the Inter­national Contemporary and Video Art Festival Waterpieces (LV) and was part of a Retrospective of Lithuanian Experimental Cinema at the Irish Film Institute – ‘In the Mouth of the Volcano’. Additionally, Anastasija coordinated Wrong Titled Films, a platform for young filmmakers in the Netherlands and Lithuania, which included multiple screenings in both countries.

Previous education BA of Audiovisual Arts (Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania) Filmography Syndromes of Mimicry (short, 2016, work in progress) A Hamlet (documentary, work in progress) God’s Eaters (documentary, 2012) Temporarily (documentary, 2011) www.pirozenko.net vimeo.com/pirozenko anastasija@pirozenko.com

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Singing men on the Military cemetery of Kyiv. Still from May 9th

BUILDING A CHARACTER IN FILM – FINDING AN ALTERNATIVE METHOD Mariia Ponomarova As a director and scriptwriter, I’ve made three short fiction films, but I wasn’t fully satisfied with them. The stories were memorable enough, but my characters were rather flat and weak. Why? I was curious. After all, I’d read a lot of professional literature as a “good film student” in the Ukraine and know a lot of rules about strategies for character-building.

During the course of the Master’s programme my research focused specifically on the possibility to make a fictional character more vivid by bringing the maker closer to the fictional character and his or her story. I formulated my question as: “How can I create a non-autobiographical fictional character through which I, as a scriptwriter and director, can express my feelings and experiences?”

The Eternal Fire and a kid on the celebration. Still from May 9th

Poster for May 9th

The discovery of a new way of building a character in film started with a revision of the relationship between a maker and a character. I challenged it in an autobiographical short documentary May 9th. The film explores the contradiction between the perception of the rituals of my family during Victory Day – the celebration of the end of WW2 – and my personal perception of May 9th, my birthday. Being both the main character and the maker in May 9th, it gave me an opportunity to experience and also to reflect on my emotional connection to the subject of the film.

This method I called ‘Conditioning a Resonance’. The term ‘resonance’ comes from physics: it’s the tendency of a mechanical system to respond at greater amplitude when the frequency of its oscillations matches the system’s natural frequency of vibration. Resonance occurs when a system is able to store and easily transfer energy between two or more different modes of storage.

The emotional resonance that I’m referring to in my research, means an enhanced emotional response caused by recognition. Building a condition for emotional resonance - creating, evoking and maintaining it - makes it a tool that can be useful for different projects in which the emotional charge of the artwork is one of the crucial elements.

The approach of using the events and locations as an extention of a character and building a narrative through the emotional perception of a character are presented as tools for the practical scriptwriting and development of a character for film.

This method focuses on establishing a mutual connection between the subjects of interaction: between me as a maker and a real person in order to create a fictional character; and between a fictional character and a spectator in order to evoke empathy. It provides a different perspective on the position of the narrator and gives an insight into the creative process of the collaboration with the person as the source for the creation of a character. It explores the relevance and use of the maker’s personal connection to a character.

MAY 9TH director Mariia Ponomarova cinematography Oleksii Kuchma, Mikko Keskiivari, Mariia Ponomarova editor Pedro Collantes sound design Sergio Gonzalez Cuervo

By using this method I shifted my focus to character-driven scripts and concluded that the continuous development of a story can be driven by the development of a character: a character is a story.

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In the struggle about the priority of dramatic elements in a narrative structure Daniil Zubkov at the age of 13 and 17

I came to a personal conclusion: the character is the story.

BIOGRAPHY

Mariia Ponomarova studied film and television directing at the Kyiv National University of Theater, Cinema and Television, in the Ukraine. She participated in the Go Short Student Campus (2014) and has worked as director for numerous fiction and documentary projects, including the collective documentary project Babylon #13.

filmography May 9th (9’, documentary, 2015) I know you (23’, fiction, 2014) Self-defence (with Kostyantyn Kliatskin Babylon #13 - 26’, documentary, 2014) Ice cream (13’, fiction, 2012) Mother (4’, documentary, 2010)

As a trainee, Mariia conducted a workshop ‘Communication between director and cinematographer’ at the Wiz-Art Film School in Lviv (2016). Her documentary film May 9th has been screened at international film festivals like the Artdocfest (Russia) and the Go Short International Film Festival Nijmegen (the Netherlands). At the DokuMa International Film Festival (Croatia), the film won the Grand-Prix.

www.ponomarova.com/blog https://vimeo.com/ponomareva pponomarevaa@gmail.com

Still from the preparatory shooting of Daniil in a dancing class

FAMILY HOUR From the search for an alternative method of building a character derived a case study: a proposal for a short fiction film called Family Hour.

In order to create a main character I collaborated with a young Ukrainian dancer, Daniil Zubkov. I know him already for more than 5 years since he was a 13 year old kid in a summer camp group where I worked as a camp supervisor.

The collaboration with Daniil and the emotional resonance between us gave me an opportunity to establish my scriptwriting practice through the new approach. It gave me the opportunity to narrate his story vividly, turn it into a fiction and remain emotionally close to the fictional character.

Family Hour tells about the teenage dancer Danya (17) who is painfully experiencing the absence of his father who immigrated to the EU. The film tells the story of their meeting, in a summer camp near Kyiv during visiting hours.

Family Hour questions the boundaries of the family and explores the feeling of separation between close relatives. Through this film I want to explore the rhetoric question – ‘How much time do you need to feel like a family?’ in collaboration with Daniil Zubkov external mentor Helena van der Meulen

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Coloring page of the experience of the Valerius Clinic

PL AY THE PROGRAM Dorian de Rijk Dorian de Rijk’s Valerius project started by chance, when the artist found her studio space in a former psychiatric hospital in the southern district of Amsterdam. The building was left unused after the clinic moved to a new location in 2013. The majority of patients was relocated, but hundreds were dismissed. The closing down of the Valerius clinic was due both to spending reductions on the healthcare and policies of deinstitutionalization of mental patients which sought to gradually replace hospitals with community-based services. While working in her studio, Dorian met several patients who came back to the building and knocked at her door.

After being dismissed or relocated, they visited a location which had particular relevance to them. The artist started a dialogue with the former patients, trying to understand what motivations made them want to come back to the former clinic and which patterns of behavior were implied.

Stemming from these conversations, De Rijk developed a multi-channel video installation which sees the artist’s camera exploring the empty interiors of the Valerius clinic and revealing tenuous traces of past human presence. The video employs architectural elements to compose nearly abstract patterns which subtly conceal detritus spread on the floor, holes and scratches in the walls, mitigating the oppressive experience of walking through the isolation cells. The soundtrack is based on sounds and noises that the artist recorded in the building. In addition to the video installation, the project includes a series of mind maps that former clinic guests drew in response to the conversation with the artist. The video’s abstract patterns and mind maps’ geometric shapes allude to patterns of behavior, at the same time questioning whether human experience can be framed within an abstract model. On the other hand, the patterns suggest the presence of a regulating system and seek to expose the power structures underlying the mental institution.

Foucault uses the term apparatus to indicate the various institutional mechanisms which enhance and maintain the exercise of power within the social body. Through discipline, institutions regulate the organization of space (architecture), of time (timetables) and the behavior of individuals in the social body (posture, movements)1.

Creating a space of control, institutions ‘project an indefinite number of courses of action, train for each possibility, and react immediately with pre-programmed responses to the actual course of events’2. Anticipation and data mining play a central role in today’s institutions. Sorting through large data sets, private companies and states discover patterns and forecast future behaviors. Quoting The Nervous Systems’ curatorial statement, today’s institutions often act according to the principle ‘that given sufficient information, threats, disasters, and disruptions can be predicted and controlled; economies can be managed; and profit margins can be elevated’3.

Data analysis, reality mining, pattern recognition, forecasting strategies respond to the imperatives of productivity and are based on a strong belief in technological solutions.

Yet the complexity of the real is hard to grasp with pure data studies and rigid causal relationship. The unpredictable escapes sophisticated surveillance mechanisms and pattern analysis.

De Rijk’s 2016 video work Winging It deals with the contemporary obsession with security and surveillance and the impossibility to predict future behaviors and events. The title refers to an advertising campaign on emergency preparedness released in the United States. ‘What would you do if a disaster strikes?’ - the advertisement asks. The video interlaces excerpts from the advertising campaign with camera records of Standard & Poor’s office in the financial district of New York.

1. Clare O’Farrell, Michel Foucault, January 1997 (https://www.michel-foucault.com/concepts/).

Last accessed 23-5-2016.

2. William Bogard, The Simulation of Surveillance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 76.

3. Anselm Franke, Stephanie Hankey & Marek Tuszynski, Nervous Systems: Quantified Life and the Social Question (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2016).

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BIOGRAPHY

After receiving her BFA in fine arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Dorian de Rijk has shifted her focus towards film and photography. She has studied conceptual photo­ graphy at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Duesseldorf under prof. Christopher Williams and greatly enjoyed practicing artistic research of at the Master of Film.

The images show us the rating agency’s lobby with a large bag on the entrance desk.

In contrast with the words warning us of a possible danger, the receptionist is apparently ignoring the unattended luggage. What if the bag conceals an explosive device? Standard & Poor’s has been widely criticized for its reliance on mathematical models which grossly underestimated the risks and failed to predict the recent financial crisis. As Wharton finance professor Marshall E.Blume explained, ‘any model is an abstraction of the world. The value of a model is to provide the essence of what is happening with a limited number of variables. If you think a variable is important, you include it, but you can’t have every variable in the world...

Still from Valerius

www.dorianderijk.com

The models may not have had the right variables’4. Winging It was supposed to be shown in the context of the exhibition Post-Peace at the Akban Senat in Instanbul.

The work was eventually censored and the whole exhibition cancelled by the bankowned art institution without further explanations.

As Tiziana Terranova reports in her essay ‘Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism’, once Deleuze and Guattari said that capitalism is pathological. ‘Like all societies, it is rational and irrational at the same time. It is rational in its mechanisms, its cogs and wheels, its connecting systems and even in the place it assigns to the irrational.

Logistical and productive arrangements, the organization of the factory floor or the office space, sophisticated cybernetic and telematic technologies, rules, regulations, protocols and markets, all is reasonable, yet only if one accepts its axioms’5.

While showing us the images of the Valerius mental clinic, Dorian de Rijk reminds us that the pathologies of the patients belong to us as well. In her artistic practice, De Rijk operates as a ‘technician of freedom’ who suggests what cannot be predicted by strategies such as data mining and pattern analysis and ultimately challenges the very axioms of these mechanisms. The role of chance, the unpredictable, the unframed, the irreducible singularity of human experience, are all elements which disrupt the space of control that institutions attempt to establish.

While talking about her work Valerius, Dorian de Rijk quotes as sources of inspiration Frank Stella’s focus on formal elements and use of repeated geometric shapes and John Divola’s LAX NAZ photographic explorations of empty buildings in Los Angeles.

However, De Rijk’s Valerius resonates with artistic practices which critically rethought geometric abstraction and minimalist forms to open up possibilities of context-based investigation, historical research and institutional critique awareness.

A recent example could be Rossella Bicotti’s installation at 2013 Venice Biennale I dreamt that you changed into a cat which saw the Brussels-based artist collecting audio recordings of dreams from female inmates and presenting minimalist structures made out of leftovers from the women’s prison in Giudecca. De Rijk is concerned with the visual aspects of her work and the artist’s attention to compositional elements puts some distance between the viewer and a highly charged environment such as the former psychiatric hospital. On the other hand, Valerius offers an insight into the experience of former patients and invites us to reflect on the process of institutionalization.

VALERIUS

This text, by Corrado Salzano, is based on a conversation with Dorian de Rijk held in Amsterdam in May 2016.

A multi-channel film installation about the specificity of madness.

The viewer is challenged to experience the subjective experience of a person who is institutionalized. director Dorian de Rijk cinematography Christiaan van Leeuwen, Dorian de Rijk sound composer, production sound mixer Coen Berrier digital compositing Charlotte Velthuijsen editor Jordi Beukers, Inèz Poortinga, Sabine Maas graphic design Julio Reyes Montesinos

4. Marshall E. Blume in Why Economists Failed to Predict the Financial Crisis, Knowledge at Wharton, May 13 2009 (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-economists-failed-to-predict-the-financial-crisis/).

Last accessed 23-05-2016.

5. Tiziana Terranowva, “Ordinary Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism”, in The Psychopatho­lo­gies of Cognitive Capitalism (Berlin: Archive Books, 2013), 51.

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short film, 3’

An essay film about what happens when fear becomes an environ­ment.

Shot between 3 and 4AM on Wall Street, New York. To what extent is fear used as a tool to stay in power? The film shows the impossibility of total control and was banned in Turkey. director, editor Dorian de Rijk sound design Matteo Canetta cinematography Winston Nanlohy, Dorian de Rijk grading Petro van Leeuwen

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Julia Sokolnicka Hello! My name is Julia! I was born in Warsaw in early eighties, and I was growing up when the political system changed. This experience is something that will always define me as an artist. Seeing the entire world’s visual description changing in front of your eyes in a very short time is quite a view. Not only did colors suddenly appear on the streets but there were also all the new values, ethics and the aesthetics of propaganda that entered our TV’s and boy, did my generation watch TV! It turned out that the world can change with the help of some styling. Like almost every girl growing up, I was obsessed with pretty things, but also with analyzing stuff, so I grew into a strange hybrid and right after high school I became a fashion stylist while at the same time studying Philosophy. Until this day I style and deconstruct the styling, and analyze the world. My career has gone from fashion into costume design, and my passion for thinking and deconstruction turned me into a documentary filmmaker. At the Master of Film I realized that my double identity of Stylist/Philosopher is in fact manifesting a common passion: discovering parallel realities.

Still from Side Roads

REALITY AND REALNESS

I called my research Reality and Realness, because in any comparison there is always a matrix, a primary truth, and this other thing - the realness – is something that resembles the Reality. The thing is that I think that any realness is somebody’s reality. At the Graduation Show in EYE I am showing two works on Reality and Realness. One is Side Roads, a documentary on how the landscape of Polish side roads visually correspond to the lives of the drivers. In Digital Nomads - Live mixed documentary I will investigate the relation between different models of gentrification in Berlin, New York and Amsterdam, and the city’s state of counterculture. Both projects are documentaries that challenge the notion of authenticity. Because no matter how many ‘realnesses’ I encounter, no matter how many people I think I can be or understand, the only thing that I will always search for is authenticity.

From Selfie Movie to Digital Nomads Right before coming to the Master’s, I was assisting my teacher from the Polish film school, Piotr Stasik, on his documentary about people he met in the New York subway, called 21x New York. It was a group portrait and the research we did was enormous. While editing, Piotr had to cut out stories, mix a few characters into one, and even invent people. For example we needed a character that would use dating apps in search of love, but then got lost in endless choices. We met several people like this, but in the end, I played that character, unifying a few stories into one that was made up. I was wondering about that experience being on film playing myself, but not exactly being myself, who I am. It made me wonder, how much of my identity am I ready to share? How much of that identity is made up? Studying at the Master’s I focused more on the visual shaping of individuality and on recognition of self through images. It led me straight to a selfie experiment, that you can track on my research website.

Basically, what I have discovered is that we are willing to share more, and are more aware of our image, because of a constant presence of the camera, which has become an everyday tool we carry everywhere.

The presence of smartphone and putting out instant feedback into the social group that defines our identity, is crucial to what contemporary documentary characters look like and how we can frame them.

The observed have simply started to observe themselves. In Digital Nomads, a live mixed documentary, I give my characters, whom I befriend, a possibility of using another screen to show themselves: a film screen. They are a part of a project, they are my guides and teachers, but by letting me really close, they also trust me to handle their identity and show it to the audience in an acceptable way. The people I show live in different cities: New York, Berlin and Amsterdam, they have different nationalities, but share a culture of electronic music. Most of all is Digital Nomads a film about shaping an identity and about using the space of technology at the same basis as real space of the city.

Side Roads Side Roads is a film I made over the course of four years. I was fascinated by how the landscape of my own country was similar to the landscape of Southern India, where I had travelled. The same big format commercials, the same signs of individual entrepreneurship and the same local architectural monsters, pretending to be something bigger, better and exotic. The absurdity and chaos of this side road landscape represented to me everything that I knew from the rapid economic change. Me, being a wealthy woman, the owner of a Mac Book Pro and Cannon 5D, a cosmopolitan who can no longer remember how often she took the plane to go somewhere, I needed to find a way to reach for the people who were left behind in this rapid race to wealth and Western identity. An identity that I – as a Warsaw-born English speaker – found myself in so well. In fact I felt like a tourist in my own country, losing myself in the poetic brutality of a winter landscape in provincial Poland. The way to enter a Slavic soul is not easy. The people are suspicious and not very friendly, but they have golden hearts, and want to help. So in a way, hitchhiking seemed a natural method. Once we entered the space of someone’s car, the burglary into the world of that person was made. In my research I referred to “hacking the world of other” as my artistic goal. I think that each person I interviewed has a right to let me in only as much as they want. If they are not willing to share more they need not - why would they? I only spent about an hour with each person I encountered during the making of Side Roads, but in this brief moment, in a single gesture or little story there is an entire construction, there are millions of perspectives and views of a human individual. The coexistence of such different characters and entire worlds next to one another fascinates me. I feel somehow that the chaotic landscape of nowhere and the state of transit relates more to the real us, to who we really are, than to whom we try to be at the destination.

www.realityandrealness.wordpress.com

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DIGITAL NOMADS

2016, Live Mixed Film, 45’ Digital Nomads explores a method of conversation and live performance in the cinema in order to establish an authentic contact between the audience and characters portrayed in the images, who are the representatives of a modern international, nomadic, precarious counter-culture, gathered around the techno music scene. It also explores one of my main interests in ‘technology as space’ and its relation to the political setup of the so called real space. The live mixed film also positions a documentary director as an editor, an editor of an inclusive archive of personalities. The Mix includes portraits shot in New York, Berlin and Amsterdam. Digital Nomads is an ongoing project. Next I’ll be exploring the techno underground scene in Cairo.

The play between the meaning of images and ourselves is an old postmodern game that we play more and more. And by ‘we’ I mean the everyday users of social media, those who occupy digital space. The privileged, awkwardly called ‘western middle class’, a unified generation of English

Posters for Side Roads

Stills from Digital Nomads

speakers. In my case it’s the creative class, that’s why I’m really playing. Enjoy!

BIOGRAPHY

SIDE ROADS

Julia Sokolnicka is a Polish experimental and documentary filmmaker. She lives and works in Amsterdam and realizes projects internationally. Her portfolio includes collaborations with choreographers, theatre and music videos. She also works as an art director and costume designer.

2015, documentary, 17’ Side Roads was framed from an archive of conversations with men and women driving along Polish roads. In this poetic road trip through the rural winter landscape of Poland, the intimate portraits of the drivers inside their cars or trucks are juxtaposed with grotesque architecture. Still frames capture absurd objects and people frozen in reflection about what’s really important.

juliasokolnicka.com juliasokolnicka.wordpress.com

director Julia Sokolnicka cinematography Mateusz Wołoczko editor Pedro Collantes sound design Kamila Wójcik Side Roads was awarded Best Documentary at International Culture Film Festival in Los Angeles, and is now touring major Polish Festivals.

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EVENTS

Sharing the process and the ‘knowledge’ produced through the research is thus as crucial as showing the work. That’s why the Graduation Show also includes ‘events’: research presentations by the graduates, in the form of lectures, lecture-performances or readings that contextualize

RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS Eliane Esther Bots Cinematic Intimacy – A study of the Encounter “When I went back for the first time I pressed myself against the walls of the house to embrace it. For a very short moment, I had the feeling that the world behind the door was still there.”

Eliane Bots explores the possibilities of visualizing that which isn’t visible at first glance: the longing for a home(land), the influence of conflict on a family and the intimate narrative relationship with someone who is no longer present. In her presentation, she’s inviting you on a narrative journey to meet the characters of her filmic triptych. ______________________________________ Matteo Canetta, Mikko Keskiivari, Stanisław Liguziński THE SHOW - cinematic research fair They say that a magician shouldn’t reveal his tricks. Matteo Canetta, Mikko Keskiivari and Stanisław Liguziński are going to try to prove that wrong, by putting up a show in which they will expose their research processes into scaling, profanity and spectatorship.

Whether it were the Auguste and Louis Lumière brothers who decided that, or some anonymous projectionist long forgotten by history, but the first public cinema screening opened with the film depicting the arrival of a train at the station (or at least, so legend has it). Such an iconic and self-conscious image: a modern technical wonder, carrying people on a journey. At that point the magician who bought the famous Theatre Robert Houdin - Georges Méliès was yet to discover special effects and the cinema as a spectacle (as we mostly know it today). Films were simple and lasted no longer than a well-crafted joke or a hasty prayer but their fate wasn’t decided yet. Celluloid reels were rolling at the fairs, enchanting the crowd with sheer movement, at stag parties, arousing the voyeuristic fantasies of men, at courts and salons providing news, gossip and images from distant lands and finally in archives and scientific facilities - seen as modern sources of history and tools for magnification and exploration. Matteo, Miko and Stan want to create the conditions of possibility for those magical, scientific and spiritual dimensions of the moving image to arise. Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome to our (cinema) fair.

After the event at the cinema you are kindly invited on a guided tour through their installations which will conclude with a more informal forum for discussion and drinks. ______________________________________ Dawood Hilmandi BREATHLESS SHAMELESS FRAMELESS - cinema selon Godard Afghanistan and Switzerland may be far away but the visual iconography of both these mountainous countries cannot be closer. Imagine the famous 15th century Swiss revolutionary / terrorist, William Tell with his arrow and apple bringing havoc to his Austrian Colonizers, but then just for one minute 46

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their work and raise questions for further development, a forum about contemporary censorship and an alumni programme in which alumni present the work that they started to make or develop during their master studies. Included in the events programme is also a presentation of the Master programme itself, a discussion with students, tutors and people from the industry about the relevance of artistic research for the practice and understanding of cinema, art and beyond.

In order to highlight the research and its relation to the work, the graduates have also made ‘visual abstracts’ of their research. These are screened as part of the film programme and can be viewed separately on monitors in EYE and Grootlab.

update this image to the 9/11 attacks and its instigator, Osama bin Laden. I only say all this, not to applaud violence, but simply to show that even thousands of miles away and approximately 500 years in time, the strains of history are connected, even in the most unimaginable ways.

And the cinematic layout was always there; beyond the gorgeous mountains of both our respective countries, beyond the fact we both posses three main tribes, beyond the fact that we are both land-locked and beyond the fact we both had/ have enemies everywhere surrounding us and we always welcomed our anarchist guests. Sometimes we are too kind to our guests for better and worse. But beyond all those facts, the Swiss finally had a Pact of Grutli that united them once and for all. And we, the Afghans, are still are going through our version of it, called the loya Jirga, with our 3 main tribes. And here I stand before you, an Afghan / Dutch, imagining the past, watching the present and having a crazy affinity to this Master of cinema called Jean-Luc Godard.

Just imagine the magic of the moving images of Godard’s cuts, which are themselves a kind of endless revolutions in themselves. The changing in forms, context, contents and sub-subtext, whether it’s the classic dramas of Le Mépris, Masculin Féminin, made in the USA, or the more politically overt works like Le Petit Soldat, Les Carabiniers, or the literally boat rocking Film Socialisme. I am going to go through my personal history of cinema using Master JLG’s works and their artistic parallels to ideas of my own . Perhaps it will explain how and why I find this man, this honorary mountainous Swiss – French – Afghan maker so close to my heart, spirit, artistic and intellectual development.

Join me on a night of adventure. Perhaps Jean-Luc will be there as well in spirit and flesh. ______________________________________ Stanisław Liguziński Workshop video-essay FilmArcades Books are there to be read, food is there to be tasted and films are there to be watched. Or are they? Do we really just read the books, digesting stories as they are or do we simply devour the food? What about Proust’s iconic Madeleine - a cookie triggering cascades of memories? Or what about the margins of the paperback editions in our libraries filled with insightful notes?

Spectatorship is by no means a passive process - we constantly render words, construct stories, defy meanings and argue on the margins of the books read, films watched or food tasted. It’s just that certain media lend themselves better (book margins) to that kind of production. When we look at film we rarely see that possibility of changing it into a notebook, a canvas on which we could expose those emotions, insights and hesitant thoughts that often remain right at the tip of our tongues. Those things that are so hard to utter in language, but could be so easily shown to others. In the FilmArcades workshop we invite you to make a collaborative attempt at exploring those creative possibilities of (essayistic) spectatorship and interrogating films from the EYE’s Bits&Pieces collection, so that they unfold their mysteries to us in the process of re-editing, juxtaposing and remixing.

The workshop is a real life extension of the FilmArcades: the Atlas of the Emancipatory Spectatorship workstation and will be led by Stanisław Liguziński and an experienced video-essayist. It’s highly recommended to bring your own laptop with basic editing software.

Number of participants: 15 (5 reserved, 10 free) + 5-10 bystanders.

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gwen.n From autobiography to fiction In this lecture-performance, gwen.n will take you along the different stages of her research process to turn autobiography into fiction. A variety of experiments will explain the development of cinematic distance between memories and script. A process of fine tuning to find the essence of the ‘biography that turned fiction’, a personal and yet emancipatory journey. ______________________________________

investigations, Julia plays with the role of the director, emphasising the director’s presence and decisions by an act of performative editing in front of an audience. This form of presentation also shifts the role of the character in documentary cinema, from framing to interaction and dialogue. ______________________________________ Still from Winging It

The focus of the Master of Film is on ‘artistic research in and through film’. The research creates, to use the term the students suggested for the title of the Graduation Show, a ‘condition of possibility’. Research – itself conceived as a practice and an ongoing process - as a condition for a work to emerge. These works – the films, the installations, the proposals – are on display at the Graduation Show. But the relevance of the research goes beyond the works – also in the cases where the work is the research and especially where, inversely, the research has become the work.

Anastasija Piroženko The Aesthetics of Mimicry – the contemporary condition of the emergent Eastern European States The fall of the Soviet system in 1990 has meant, for Eastern Europe, not only political change, but also the collapse of general structures of meaning and patterns of everyday life. “We live in the ruins of culture”, Vytautas Landsbergis, Lithuania’s first head of state, said. The Eastern European states emerged from the “ruins” as uncertain and insecure, looking over their shoulders to Western Europe and feeling “almost European but not quite.” The Eastern European societies have started intense processes of imitation and mimicry.

By borrowing, adopting and appropriating Western European cultural and linguistic practices and life styles, they attempted to establish new identities and recuperate some legitimacy. At some point, the unequal relation between the two can be characterized by the metaphor of Plato’s cave – where Eastern Europe stands for the play of shadows, and Western Europe for the real world or authentic reality.

Anastasija has invited sociologist prof. dr. Rasa Baločkaitė, who has written extensively on the subject, to come and discuss with her the practices of the production of identity by the former Eastern Bloc. In this context Anastasija will also introduce her film Syndromes Of Mimicry. Moderator: Katia Krupennikova.

Rasa Baločkaitė is an associate professor in sociology in the Department of Social and Political Theory, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. Her scholarly interests include Soviet and post Soviet societies, Soviet colonialism, societies in transition. She was visiting Fulbright scholar at UC Berkeley in 2011 and visiting fellow at Potsdam Centre for Contemporary History in 2012 and 2013.

______________________________________ Mariia Ponomarova Character is a story

In her presentation Mariia will focus on her research into finding an alternative method for building characters in film. The method she developed led to ‘Family Hour’, a script for a short fiction film that will be read by an actor-storyteller. ______________________________________ Julia Sokolnicka Digital Nomads – a live mixed film Digital Nomads is an interactive documentary project, exploring nightlife and community shaping movements in Amsterdam, New York and Berlin, mixed live in the cinema. Mixing live the footage gathered in her ongoing

R E S E A R C H

FORUM Dorian de Rijk Free to Censor At the beginning of this year Dorian experienced political censorship first hand. She was asked to show her essay film Winging It at the exhibition called Post-Peace in Istanbul, curated by Katia Krupennikova. Winging It is about what happens when fear becomes an environment. How can you stay alert 24/7 and to what extent is fear used as a tool by the government to stay in power? It shows the impossibility of total control. The Post-Peace show got cancelled days before the opening.

Needless to say that this example of censorship doesn’t stand alone. That’s why Dorian and the Master of Film are organizing ‘Free to Censor’ – a forum pairing young and seasoned filmmakers and artists to discuss contemporary issues of censorship and freedom of speech. What does contemporary censorship look like? How do you deal with it as a maker? How does it influence your work? How can you defend the space for art while at the same time keeping focus on the content of your project? What information do you share about yourself and your work and where? These are some of the questions raised during an evening of panel discussions followed by presentations of international experts and researchers moderated by Chris Keulemans. Guests: Kadir van Lohuizen (NL), Kuba Mirkurda (Poland), Esra Piké (Turkey), Ibrahim Quraishi (VS), Karin Spaink (NL). Visual contribution: Devin Kenny. https://www.vn.nl/expositie-met-onder-meer-nederlandse-kunst-in-istanbul-afgelast/

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ALUMNI PROGRAMME As the Master’s programme is focused more on process than product, students can also graduate with proposals and works in progress. For those that do, the Graduation Show offers the possibility to show the results at a later moment.

This year two alumni present their work and development: Maria Ångerman and Fedor Limperg.

THE DEAD WALK SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE LIVING

SHORTCUTS TO SPONTANEIT Y CAN FILMMAKERS HACK ACTING TECHNIQUES?

Maria Ångerman

Fedor Limperg

Filmscreening The Dead Walk Side by Side with the Living and Q&A The film invites immersion in parallel but distinct worlds. Humanity and animality, alienation and tactility, language and silence – the video piece touches on a range of themes, though at the core is the exploration of the human/animal split as a binary opposition. The screening is a cinematic adaptation of a three-channel-installation.

The use of spontaneity in acting is often misunderstood. This short lecture aims to look at what an extraordinary activity acting is and explores what non-actors might gain from various acting techniques. True emotions cannot be planned, and by its nature, spontaneity never occurs on demand. In fact film actors and directors need to work around this paradox: the harder you try, the less spontaneity you get.

Meanwhile acting is one half of the inseparable pair of acting and directing (without a director present, actors are still directed, albeit by themselves). Being material, creator and tool at the same time, actors have learned to deal with certain problems of creativity in unique ways. These specific creative insights of acting professionals might have significance beyond acting.

Join this meeting to explore the possible use of acting principles by non-actors. After a short presentation based on the Master-research of the speaker, you are invited to share your thoughts.

After the screening of the film there will be a Q&A with Maria.

Fedor’s graduation installation It’s Not Like I Planned It This Way (4 film proposals) is also on show as part of the programme.

The first part of the film is based on fragments from the play “Agatha” by Marguerite Duras. director, screenwriter Maria Ångerman cinematographer Maria Ångerman, Siska editor Pedro Collantes, Lars Späth sound engineer Miha Erman sound mix Sergio González Cuervo, Marc Lizier color grading Teo Riznar german text editing Thomas Gerber cast Anne Thieme, Thomas Gerber voices Participants of the project Blind Urban walk chimpanzees Luci, Shirly, Maaike special thanks to Laura Taler, Miha Erman, Eyal Sivan, Djaka, Kili thanks to Angela Melitopoulus, Boris Gerrets, Jyoti Mistry, Agnese Cornelio, Mieke Bernink, Kris Dekkers, Jan Sebening, Alexandra Lodewijkx, Press office / Antwerp Zoo, Erik Block / Antwerp Zoo, Karin Kolam, Mikael Nylund, Johan Ångerman made in co-production with NuFrame supported by AVEK, Netherlands Film Academy, Arts promotion centre Finland – media production, Arts promotion centre Finland – Ostrobothnia, V.W. Drygsbäcks Foundation

Presenting a film plan is often done merely through a synopsis, a few lines of text to communicate what might become an entire film. This installation is an attempt to enrich the traditional synopsis format to appeal to all the senses used by a film audience.

Entering a dimly lit space, visitors experience different facets of 4 films plans including gestures, objects, smell, colour, image and sounds. The set-up shows a different approach to presenting film ideas, practically applied to the four sample projects. When leaving the space, visitors are asked to share what they liked best about the films-to-be. performers Jessica de Bot, Patrick Atsma, Sara Alba narrative advice (16 film projects): Luuk van Huet external coach Ruben Bloemgarten

BIOGRAPHY

Maria Ångerman is a Finnish artist based in Berlin, Germany and Vaasa, Finland. Her educational background is in Fine Arts studies at Nykarleby Polytechnic of Applied Sciences, Art Science at Stockholm University as well as in Film at the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam.

Previously she worked for several years in Barcelona, where she exhibited extensively. Her work has also been shown in Brazil, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. Her films deal with displacement, belonging and the tension of intimacy in public space. Her artistic strategies are organic and relational, and their processual approach is guided by an intuitive sense, taking into consideration circumstance and external participation. The editing process becomes a way to define the grammar in the material, to create connections between different storylines. Hence the work is a continuous creative process of discovering the film, a venture where risk is always present.

BIOGRAPHY

Fedor Limperg graduated from the Netherlands Film Academy as a director in 2003 and has since started Filmpeople, an online network for filmprofessionals. He also founded MeccaPANZA, an association for new cinema in the Netherlands and has been a board member for NISI MASA, European Network for Young Cinema. Fedor worked for various film festivals (Shadow Festival, Cinedans and others) and coordinated the European Script Contest at NISI MASA. As a student of the Master of Film Fedor explored alternative ways to filmmaking. He did this by asking ‘naive’ questions of all kinds. The most prominent of these topics of investigation were: acting techniques, idea development and forms of presentation. www.fedsak.com

http://mariaangerman.com

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Jazz, fine arts, film, photography, design, fashion…

We are keeping an eye on talented young artists.

By providing grants and awards we are assisting the brightest musicians, artists, designers and filmmakers to develop their talents, create new opportunities and above all, to achieve their creative goals. www.keepaneye.nl

© Nederlandse Filmacademie, Amsterdam juni 2016 Markenplein 1, 1011 MV Amsterdam +31(0)20 52 773 33 filmacademie@ahk.nl www.filmacademie.nl www.masteroffilm.nl

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Condition of Possibility (Master of Film Graduation Show) is part of the Keep an Eye Filmacademie Festival 26 June - 2 July 2016.

Generously supported by festival partner Keep an Eye Foundation.

MASTER OF FILM, NETHERLANDS FILM ACADEMY Director Netherlands Film Academy Bart Römer Programme Director Master of Film Mieke Bernink Coordinator Master of Film Kris Dekkers Programme Coordinator Sabien Schütte Mentors Sander Blom, Albert Elings, Aneta Lesnikovska Design Ecco Fatto! / JP Commandeur