Competition programme №7

USA | 2016 | 10 min
Zachary Epcar

A constellation of objects, each emerging into the soft peach-light void of an indeterminate condominium space.

Great Britain | 2017 | 22 min
Patrick Hough

Merging CGI animation, laser scanning and live action footage, And If In A Thousand Years takes us to an archeological site in California where the remains of an epic 1920's Egyptian film set have been uncovered. Untethered from its ruined plasterwork body, a CGI Sphinx now stalks the landscape - a digital ghost of the original filmset decor - in search of identity and purpose.

Great Britain | 2016 | 19 min
Sasha Litvintseva & Graeme Arnfield

Mined, extracted, and woven, asbestos was the magic mineral. Towns became cities under its patronage, Persian kings entertained guests with its fireproof nature, and centuries of industry raked in the profits of its global application. We now live in the remains of this toxic dream, a dream that with the invention of electron microscopes revealed our material history as a disaster in waiting. Yet the asbestos industry has far from left us with extraction from the soil transforming to extraction from our walls. We are now faced with two options: to remove this material from our homes and start anew, or to build upon its residue. Removal is a dangerous and costly operation. So often we choose to live amongst it instead, choking out our walls with plastic tarping: the failed promises of modernism literally entombed all around us. Shot in the mining township of Asbestos, Quebec, home to the world's largest asbestos mine that only stopped extraction in 2012, the film is a meditation on the entanglement of the fragility of bodies, the nonlinearity of progress, and the persistence of matter.

Russia / USA | 2016 | 35 min
Anton Ginzburg

«Turo» is a film exploring post-Soviet geography and Constructivist architecture. It is made up four chapters and an introduction-index. Each chapter is exploring a different Constructivist building as a stage for past utopias. The buildings are landmarks of Soviet modernism: Melnikov House (architect Konstantin Melnikov), Narkomfin Building (architect Moisei Ginzburg), ZIL (Automobile factory designed by Vesnin brothers) and also recording of a "ghost mode" of a video game exploring ruins of Pripyat' (Soviet town affected by Chernobyl catastrophe) featuring unrealized Tatlin's Tower. Since a lot of Constructivist projects were never realized and existed as potential designs, they are placed into the virtual environments of the video game, positioning utopia within dystopia. It's an atemporal collective territory, where past dreams coincide with current consumer culture. Modernity could be interpreted as an updated Babel Tower project where the universal tongue would have been imposed over the rest of the world. It still resonates deeply with contemporary culture, but today it exists as an archive of ruins, the record of fragmentation. Exploring various methods of representation the video's structure combines cinematic approach with layering and digital abstraction. Each part of the film is a metaphorical tower that gets deconstructed throughout the duration of the chapter. Some parts are direct cinematic narratives, like an enormous blaze, while others show use projected images, deconstruction of an image and shaping its potential meanings on the basis of technological reproduction.