Competition programme №5

Hong Kong, USA | 2018 | 8 min
Simon Liu
Russian Premiere

As an exploration of the energy found in transient moments between final destinations, "Star Ferry" attempts to construct a cinematic replica of the circadian rhythms of Hong Kong and Tokyo by day and night. Shot entirely with a 35mm still camera, the work is structured between moments of stasis and frenetic movement - drawing out tensions between abrupt passages forward past neon signs and LED advertisements to quiet observations of personal rituals.

USA | 2018 | 12 min
Bill Morrison
Russian Premiere

Using the discarded, deteriorating remnants from seven silent film titles, filmmaker Bill Morrison braids a story of intertwining love triangles that pivots between the accounts of two women.

Thailand| 2018 | 28 min
Tulapop Saenjaroen
Russian Premiere

A tour guide and also a hotel rep automated voice, Kanya, leads her foreign guest, Alex, through a beach town in the east of Thailand called Bangsaen. Since Kanya's presentation is overtly aestheticized and strictly regimented, Alex decides to explore the town by himself, fantasizing to get out of the frame.

Portugal / France | 2018 | 34 min
Louis Henderson, Filipa César
Russian Premiere

The film tracks Fresnel lenses from their site of production to their exhibition in a museum of lighthouses and navigational devices. It also examines the diverse social contexts in which optics are implicated, contrasting the system of triangular trade that followed the first European arrivals in the 'New World' with the political potential seen in Op art in post-revolutionary Cuba. Incorporating 16mm celluloid images, digital desktop captures and 3D CGI, the film also maps a technological trajectory: from historical methods of optical navigation to new algorithms of locating, from singular projection to multi-perspectival satellitic visions. Registering these technical advances progressively through the film's materials and means of production, Sunstone creates "a cinema of affect, a cinema of experience — an Op- Film."

India | 2018 | 10 min
Sohrab Hura
Russian Premiere

The Lost Head & The Bird explores the artist's response to the current socio- political climate in India today. It takes the audience on a journey to hidden aspects of Indian society - to life on the fringes. A disorientating and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction blur, and the undercurrents of caste, sexual, religious, and political violence lurk beneath the surface, erupting in ever more frequent outbursts. Born out of an ongoing four year photographic project titled The Coast, which saw Hura traveling up and down the subcontinent documenting "the wonderful and vicious things that happen along the Indian coastline," The Lost Head & The Bird explores a frighteningly fast-changing, post-truth world where actions are fuelled by appeals to emotion and facts are increasingly ignored.