Competition programme №8

UK | 2017 | 17 min
Graeme Arnfield
Russian Premiere

In a peat bog in North West England a Spanish woman was murdered, her body buried and subsumed into the treacherously dense ecological matter. A matter which labours have extracted for centuries, selling this fertile material as fuel worldwide; a material which upon burning releases timeless carbon deposits into our increasingly precarious and damaged ecosphere. After laying dormant under the rich dark peat for an unknown amount of time a body returned to the surface but its identity had become dislocated; it has become entwined with the history of its material host. Taking the real life disappearance of Malika Maria De Fernandez along with the global trade of fossil fuels as an poignant opening, "Shouting at the Ground" is an agricultural & archaeological murder mystery circling around a void, oscillating it's images and sounds between states of violent networked embodiment and pitch black absence, of burial and exhumation.

Spain / Japan / Netherlands | 2018 | 21 min
Yu Araki, Daniel Jacoby
Russian Premiere

Deepening confusion becomes a delightful experience watching this collaborative film by Daniel Jacoby and Araki Yu. The documentary observes the idiosyncratic sounds and rhythms of Ban'ei, a rare kind of draft horse race that takes place only in Obihiro, Japan. Capturing the behind-the-scenes operations of the race, the film gradually twists itself into a knot as the excited voices of the commentators merge into a frenzy of gibberish.

Screening will be followed by Q&A with Daniel Jacoby. Q&A is supported by Modriaan Fund.

Russia / Germany | 2018 | 30 min
Polina Kanis
World Premiere

In The Procedure Kanis takes a fictional museum building as the starting point for her meditations on collectivity and division. Lying in ruins after an unknown disaster, any attempts to ascertain what has happened to the building elicit the same response from the people interviewed: "I saw nothing." The Procedure tracks the conventions and mechanisms that have developed during the period of the museum's reconstruction. As the sequences unfold the viewer becomes privy to a hermetically sealed system, with the building and the surrounding forest now forming an exclusion zone. Access to the outside world is permitted only after completing the routine procedure of questioning and body search in the border zone. Employing her typically laconic style, Kanis uses the microcosm of the museum building to address issues of exclusion, marginalization, and liminality. As we begin to unravel the logic of this universe, we realize that the unknown event which has led the characters to this point has become secondary to the procedure that has developed in its wake.

Screening will be followed by Q&A with Polina Kanis.