Program 5 includes five pictures: artist Ismail Bahri’s poetic cinematic commentary on Tunisian Independence Day; the story of the famous Taiwanese Siamese twins reimagined by Hsu Che-Yu; an impeccable tactile video essay by Antoinette Zwirchmayr; a film by Anya Tsirlina based on Soviet propaganda found footage celebrating equality of the sexes; and Graeme Arnfield’s stroboscopic trip into the future.
Please note that Graeme Arnfield’s film features strong stroboscope effects.
Apparition
A new Ismail Bahri picture, one of the winning filmmakers of the 2017 edition of MIEFF. We see hands studying a photograph by an unknown author, found by the artist in his father’s family archive. He illuminates the print with strong light—but only the shadows cast by his hands reveal the hidden—Tunisia’s independence day on March 20, 1995.
Dir. Ismail Bahri
France, 2019. 3 min. 16+
Single Copy
The surgery to separate Taiwan’s first Siamese twins that took place in 1979 was broadcast live on national television. Before the operation, an artist was invited to the hospital to make a ceramic cast of their body, but the attempt was unsuccessful because the children could not stay motionless during the molding process. Forty years later, Hsu Che-Yu recasts a ceramic form of one of the twins’ bodies using 3D scans to preserve his digital copy.
Dir. Hsu Che-Yu
Taiwan, 2019. 21 min. 18+
The Seismic Form
A terrain of wet pebbles glitters and undulates, molten lava spurts. Grooves in white smooth rock recall the material’s own mutability. The world of The Seismic Form is made of tactile, textured surfaces responsive to light. As solid as these planes and contours may seem, they are not stable, despite our delusions of permanence and depth.
Dir. Antoinette Zwirchmayr
Austria, 2020. 15 min. 18+
All other things equal
Edited from found Soviet propaganda footage advocating equality of the sexes, this fairy-tale movie plays with cinematic recontextualization, engaging in a dialogue with modern feminist ideas.
Dir. Anya Tsirlina
Switzerland, Russia, 2019. 19 min. 16+
The Phantom Menace
By 2021, the sun had fallen to its lowest point of activity. Magnetic waves that once protected the Earth critically weakened. During this solar lull powerful intergalactic cosmic rays, formed eons ago from dead stars, penetrated our atmosphere. These particles were only noticed because of the effect they produced on our bodies and on the technologies we thought we could rely upon.
Dir. Graeme Arnfield
UK, 2019. 36 min. 16+
