Competition programme №4

Germany / Denmark | 2017 | 17 min
Dane Komljen
Russian Premiere

Many years ago, the cities by the river were gripped by a contagion. Things started to change and everything slowly became something else. It was not clear if transformation was a symptom of the disease or a way to escape it. The contagion touched everything and everyone: animals and plants, stones and soil, men, women and children, their thoughts, their dreams, their memories. An old woman once told me how all memories turn into trees, I could hardly make out what she was saying. She said she could hear the trees singing: To be a body, to be any body. After the years of contagion ended, the cities appeared untouched. One had to look hard to see the traces of the previous time. If one could listen to the trees, what would they say? A way out, a way out?

Taiwan | 2017 | 18 min
Su Hui-Yu
Russian Premiere

Originally designed as a multi-channel video installation, the film The Walker ingeniously deconstructed the background stories and the plays of the legendary Taiwan Walker Theatre which pretty much represents some underground culture scenes of 1990's Taipei. Based on a multi-character narrative structure, the film reinterprets the velocity, prime-time, rebellion, physical pleasure and ethical minefield referred to in these plays. With its Dream-like images, The Walker reminds us of the utopia pictured previously by the Taiwan Walker Theatre, indicating a polysemous, hybridized art world whose components range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The screening will be followed by Q&A with Su Hui-Yu.

UK | 2017 | 43 min
The Otolith Group
Russian Premiere

From the late 1960s until his death in 1990 at the age of 50, Julius Eastman, the queer African-American avant-garde composer, pianist, vocalist and conductor wrote and performed compositions whose ecstatic militant minimalism initiated a black radical aesthetic that revolutionized the East Coast new music scene of the 1970s and 1980s. No recordings of Eastman's compositions were released during his lifetime. In January 1980, Julius Eastman was invited by the Music Department at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, to present his compositions Crazy Nigger (1978), Evil Nigger (1979) and Gay Guerrilla (1979) at the Pick-Staiger Concert Hall. A number of African-American students and one faculty member at Northwestern University objected to the titles of Eastman's compositions. The titles of Eastman's compositions were redacted from the concert programme printed by the Music Department. Before the concert, on 16 January 1980, Eastman delivered a public statement that responded to these objections. The speeches delivered by Dante Micheaux and Elaine Mitchener in The Third Part is the Third Measure (2017) are based on each performer's modified verbatim transcriptions of Eastman's Northwestern University statement.