Competition programme №7

MIEFF presents a selection of the most recent and most exciting short experimental films of the year. We like diversity: 33 films from 20 countries take part in the program and each of them has its own unique language. The program is divided into 7 sections, after the screenings films will be discussed with the guests of the festival. An international jury will announce the winners at the closing ceremony.

ALTIPLANO

Canada, Chile, Argentina | 2018 | 16 min
Malena Szlam
Russian premiere
Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymara, and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Chile and Argentina, ALTIPLANO takes place within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes, coupled with a soundscape generated from infrasound recordings of volcanoes, geysers, blue whales, and more. Located at the heart of a natural ecosystem threatened by a century of saltpeter and nitrate mining practices, and recent geothermic exploitation, ALTIPLANO reveals an ancient land standing witness to all that is, was, and will be.

Transformations Scenario

Germany | 2018 | 20 min
Clemens von Wedemeyer
Russian premiere
In the background of blockbuster films, algorithms have been employed to replace extras in post-production. Since years we are used to scenes in which masses of automated characters fill the screen, animated by algorithms that let them interact, similar to computer games and agents in computational sociology. Such artificial masses are stepping in the foreground. Simulating life began in the movies and computer games, but is influencing many fields today. In architecture, city planning and traffic navigation as well as in predictions of markets and trade, virtual scenarios influence society and change the way we live.

Transformation Scenario (2018) by Clemens von Wedemeyer creates a speculative narration on the impact of emulated group behaviour in society. It follows an idea that could be inspired by Jean Luc Godards film Le Gai Savoir: «To find the solution to a problem, be it a chemical or political problem, one has to dissolve it: dissolve hydrogen, dissolve the parliament. Therefore we will now dissolve images and sounds.»

Instructions on how to make a film

USA | 2018 | 13 min
Nazlı Dinçel
Russian premiere
Shot at the Film Farm in Mt.Forest, this comedy is a quest about performance, educational voiceover, analogue filmmaking, ASCII, language, ethics of ethnography and narrative storytelling under a metaphor of instructions to farmland. Text by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Wikihow/shoot-film.

Souvenir

Germany | 2019 | 20 min
Miriam Gossing, Lina Sieckmann
Russian premiere
Souvenir explores the deserted inside of contemporary 36-hour-minicruise ferry ships between the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and the UK. As a low-budget replica of luxurious Caribbean cruises, the ship is in a constant state of transit, never arriving at a final destination. On board settings and décor bear reference to a European history of seafaring and trade while the actual ocean remains distant - in surveillance monitors, the on-board cinema and panoramic window fronts. A female voiceover is composed out of different interviews with seamen's widows, somewhere in between dialogue and inner monologue, circling around topics of distant love, memory, fury and a departure from society's expectations. Starting from a documentary observation of the inside space, the limits of outer and inner reality become blurred over the course of the film. Single souvenirs as fetishized objects turn into a unified ornament as the point of view shifts from the individual to the collective. The film as a souvenir itself opens up memories of a colonial past, drawing a connection between the ship as the largest arsenal of imagination and the nautic space of the cinema.

People of the Lake

France | 2018 | 18 min
Jean-Marie Straub
Russian premiere
Video is based on a novel by Janine Massard in which a man reflects on his youth, growing up as part of a fishing family on the coast of Lake Geneva during the Occupation. Lake is also a border, but in the water his drawing is lost: in the fishery, «profession of free men», Savoyards and Vaudois find themselves in confreres, and if out loud we only talk about nets and fish, in silence we sometimes enter the Resistance. After the war, a fisherman son, elected municipal, he participates in the emergence, in Lausanne or to Thonon, of a new left.
July 14
18:30
ILLUSION CINEMA, 18+
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July 13
23:00
ILLUSION CINEMA, 18+
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PROGRAMME 2019