Film programme
The film programmes of this year’s EMAF offer a broad overview of contemporary experimental film and artists’ moving image – from current short and feature-length film to historical works and Expanded Cinema. Numerous artists will be in attendance to show and discuss their work. Around 100 films and film performances from all over the world will be presented.
EMAF’s film programmes are developed in collaboration with international curators, artists and theorists who, as members of the programming team, select the contributions for competition and feature film programmes, or are invited to develop their own thematic programmes and series.
International Competition and Feature Films
In this year’s International Competition and Feature Film section, numerous films revolve around the different layers of space and time and the question of how we learn from the past for the present. They reconstruct historical events, imagine alternative histories, and read possible paths into the future from the memories of others. The relationship to land and territory is another focus. Both documentary and experimental, the works tell stories of origins and orientation, of discplacement and migration, of living and staying.
With films by: Basel Adra/Hamdan Balla/Yuval Abraham/Rachel Szor, Tolia Astakhishvili/James Richards, Boris Dewjatkin, Carl Elsaesser, Ismaël Iken, Mira Klug/Johannes Gierlinger, Vika Kirchenbauer, Alexis Kyle Mitchell, Monica Maria Moraru, OJOBOCA, Alee Peoples, Peng Zuqiang, Leonardo Pirondi, Martyna Ratnik, Messaline Raverdy, Steve Reinke, Ann Carolin Renninger, Miko Revereza, Margaret Salmon/Maria Fusco, Reiji Saito, Clare Samuel, Deniz Şimşek, Jordan Wong, Xin Shen, Yu Wang, Micah Weber, Sabrina Zhao and Chris Zhongtian Yuan.
The following artists have withdrawn their films in solidarity with Strike Germany: Razan AlSalah, Onyeka Igwe, Sofia Theodore-Pierce, Amina Ross and Maryam Tafakory.
Artist in Focus
EMAF is proud to present Phil Collins as this year’s Artist in Focus. Collins is internationally acclaimed for a socially engaged practice that addresses the intersections of art, politics and popular culture. Taking different forms – from films, photography and installations, to performative situations and live events – his work foregrounds aspects of lived experience and voices that have often been disregarded or suppressed.
In a newly commissioned essay Dominic Paterson asserts that Collins “uses his own strategic reproduction of normative media frames as the occasion to trouble (or queer) them. His work acknowledges the force of such frames through its reiterating of their strongly determining effects—a feature that is always itself performative in the work; always a matter of conspicuous gestures, demonstrations, enacted poses, and repetitions. The task Collins’work has taken on in recent years, however, is not just to critique or subvert existing framings, but rather to collectively create conditions in which communities can shape, for themselves, the spaces in which they appear and perform as themselves.”
Feelers, Sensors
Curated by Jamie Crewe
In Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938) American author, anthropologist and filmmaker Zora Neale Hurston observes Haitian people mounted by Guedé, a “god of derision”. With their lips Guedé says “tell my horse”, and launches into spectacular invective and behaviour. His horses speak devastating revelations, defame their rulers, prance and gallop, splash their eyes with rum, or leap to their deaths. As channels for their god, they are able to say and do things they could not do unridden. When unable to speak, people or horses—minds or bodies—find other means of expression: no silence can be maintained.
With films and sound pieces by: Art Bears, Samuel Beckett, Tanya Syed, Don Taylor, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Sarah Pucill, Jazell Barbie Royale and Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Curated by Oraib Toukan
Is this really the wonderful Palestinian poet and writer Mahmoud Al Shaer asking: “Is this my mouth saying gas, flour, drinking water, washing water, coffee, biscuits, qasef, zananah, tayarah, tuna, beans, cup, battery, internet, connect, disconnect, oven, fire, yeast, salt, sugar, mattresses, sheets, pillows, carpet?”. To stream pain real-time. Command-Tab. Silence. Feelers, sensors–––––– from where in the body should we fathom this? From this earth that makes life worth living, maintained Mahmoud Darwish. “From the hesitance of April, the smell of bread at dawn…the beginning of love, a herb bush on a stone”. This programme foregrounds the heart as a fundamental sensorial organ – an organ whose purpose is to see and to hear. To this aim, works that explore suffering or struggle are combined with works that explore desire. Ultimately, the two are presented as one and the same.
With films and talks by: Dahaleez (Rahaf Al Batniji/Majdal Nateel/Salman Nawati), Pary El-Qalqili/Nahed Samour and Michel Khleifi
Curated by Anna Zett
Audiovisual media connect points of our own imagination with points in the imagination of other people. The network of perceptions, narratives and symbols created in this way, just like memory, does not represent a realistic image of reality in the individual brain. It is a reality of its own – a form of social dreaming. What role do I play as a spectator, how much freedom am I given to participate in the process of this association? What happens to me at the moment of reception, what do I allow, what do I reject? The programme understands filmmaking and film screening as a participatory, poetic practice, driven by the desire for connection and supported by the conviction that a shared reality is constantly being created anew between individual sensations and perceptions.
With films and performances by: Ester M. Bergsmark, Alice Brygo, Jesse Darling, Janine Jembere, Shambhavi Kaul, Anri Sala, Toni Serra, Sarnt Utamachote, Elisa Wendy/Wai Shing Lee and Gernot Wieland
SPECTRAL
The collaboration with the analogue film collective LaborBerlin, which commenced last year under the title SPECTRAL. Unburdened Recollections, will be continued this year. The joint project is dedicated to the re-staging of historical Expanded Cinema works, and this year, it will present analogue multiple projections and film performances from the 1960s and 1970s. A classic of Expanded Cinema by Malcolm Le Grice (curated by Cinzia Nistico, Filmwerkplaats Rotterdam) and a recently restored work by Dutch artist Babeth Mondini-VanLoo (curated by Simona Monizza, Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam) will be reconstructed. In a panel discussion, the participating artists and curators will discuss the restaging and archiving of live cinema, as well as the ethical issues surrounding the reconstruction of historical works.
Awards and Jury Statements 2024
EMAF AWARD
EMAF Award: I Am Also Part of the Three Turns by Monica Maria Moraru
The jury awards the EMAF Award to I Am Also Part of the Three Turns by Monica Maria Moraru for its delving into the history of the earthquake that happened in Bucharest in 1977 and the attempt to rewrite this historical ‘so-called’ natural catastrophe, which was instrumentalized by the political authorities. The film puts forward the apparent stability of orders – whether natural or political, in the purpose of requisitioning these categories and our relation to them. Natural catastrophes and political ruptures are intertwined throughout the film, history traverses the images of the film through its voices, objects, bodies, and cracks. Glass cups and plates start to reflect and echo the fragility of these given systems – the fragility of the ground we stand on.
Special Mention EMAF Award: Belfi by Ismaël Iken
The jury would like to make a Special Mention of Belfi by Ismaël Iken. In a light playful manner, Belfi responds to the weight of the passing of time, repetition, redundancy, and the financialization of the urban landscape. By following crumbs of bread and inaccessible money, the film raises the question of survival in the city and plays with the illusions and promises of economic mobility. Belfi takes us on a cyclical derive across seasons and streets, and ends with a handing over of the uncashable treasure.
Dialog Award
Dialog Prize: The Cyan Garden by Peng Zugiang
The jury awards the Dialog Award to The Cyan Garden by Peng Zugiang for its haunting and beautiful historical archaeology into the sounds and voices of an underground radio station. This excavation into the voices of the Malayan revolution brings back a historical intimacy as well as a history of the intimate as it was organized at the time. All of this makes for an affective relation to that moment that traverses the limits of broadcast with its inherent glitches and spectral frequencies.
Special Mention Dialog Prize: detours while speaking of monsters by Deniz Şimşek
The jury would like to honor detours while speaking of monsters by Deniz Şimşek with a Special Mention for the Dialog Award. In the film, the landscape becomes a witness to a history of violence around Lake Van. From the depths of the bottom of the lake to the story of an aerial helicopter crash- from the myths that historically inhabit the mountain to the memories of the genocides of the Armenian and Kurdish people. The landscape starts to speak to our present-day ongoing violence
Media Art Award of the German Filmcritics (VDFK)
EMAF Media Art Award of the Association of the German Film Critics (VDFK): Hey Sweet Pea by Alee Peoples
How to describe the feeling that a gigantic nothingness is slowly consuming everything? And how — in the very act of dealing with this relevant and far too big question — not to become so abstract as to encounter this nothingness with very little that is concrete? One film in the program has given us a particularly convincing cinematic answer: By listening to what the mother leaves on the mailbox and getting a sense of how she cloaks her longing for closeness by dictating a Walmart shopping list; by looking at what happens to the landscape around you and observing how it disappears under construction foil, becoming invisible under concrete crusts, or becoming property behind fences. By taking the Never-ending Story told to children and adults out of the virtual world and transferring it to the concrete reality that we inhabit. And by making films with almost nothing, with only what is at hand, that can be visually grasped or audibly perceived, and doing so by being — at the same time — masterly and modest, playful and insisting, depressed and humorous.
Special Mention EMAF Media Art Award of the Association of the German Film Critics (VDFK): The Wind is Taking Them by Ann Carolin Renninger
What we can see is an alert, childlike gaze that is interested in everything: tardigrades and trees, fire, the universe, and the Big Bang. He takes everything as it is, everything is important. With the wisdom of age, a gaze on stones that acknowledges their crystalline structures and tries to gauge the temporal dimensions of their existence. A childhood afternoon, a human lifespan, an era of the earth. The present is a moment of sunny joy by the equanimous sea, the present is news of war brought by the radio. Gentle observations in a familiar, neighborly realm that come together to form something big: a measurement of the existential dimensions of experience and imagination; from the microscopic to the vastness of space. What we can see, with cinema, with this film: For a wondrous attempt to put the world – and ourselves – into perspective, we award an honorable mention to The Wind is Taking Them by Ann Carolin Renninger.
Exhibition
Our senses are the foundation from where we find our way in the world. They are the interface between our inner self and the outside world. Millions of nerve endings connect our brain to a constantly changing stream of sensory impressions, from which it assembles the external stimuli into a coherent picture of the world, and the internal stimuli into a picture of ourselves. These experiences feel real to each of us, but they are never objectively accurate. We are all sensorially unique, our perception is influenced by our way of thinking, distorted by individual emotions and expectations.
The artistic contributions to the exhibition Feelers, Sensors engage the question of what role sensory perception plays in human and non-human experiencing of the world, what role it could play in the future, and how technologies such as artificial intelligence or “sensing machines” are changing the way we access and interact with our environment and each other.
mixed media: XR installation, modified Oculus Quest, sculptures
Campus
An important meeting place for emerging artists, the EMAF Campus presents current projects by classes from leading European art and film schools. This year, classes from Germany, Belgium, Norway, and Spain will be guests, presenting exhibitions and film screenings developed especially for the festival.
On the occasion of its 35th anniversary, the Academy of Media Arts Cologne is presenting a broad selection of experimental short films from recent decades, showing student productions in various media formats: from web series to material films, from found-footage music videos to autobiographical films.
The film programmes of the KASK art academy in Ghent, which were created in 2022 and 2023 by master’s students in film, animation, and photography, move thematically between alienation from and immersion into one’s own world.
Under the title In the Belly of the Vacuum Cleaner, the Norwegian Kabelvåg School of Moving Images is developing an exhibition around the image of the vacuum cleaner, which, like our consciousness, sucks in the environment, collects it, and reassembles it into new (dis)orders.
With BLACKBIRDS SINGING IN THE DARK, the joint exhibition of the University of Osnabrück and the Universidad de la Laguna Tenerife portrays the perspectives of a young generation marked by the current presence of crises, wars, social injustices, and social traumas. Harmony of Mindscape, another project by students from the Department of Art at Osnabrück University in collaboration with students from Osnabrück’s Music and Art School, allows visitors to experience how they react to certain stimuli and to sense the point when they change.
