Extended descriptions of the varied shorts being screened as part of QFF2018.
A Bagful of Fleas
Véra Chytilová | 1962, 45m Screens before Daisies
Shot in a teenage girls boarding school attached to a cotton mill, this quasi-vérité short by Véra Chytilova anticipates both Daisies and Miloš Forman’s A Blonde in Love.
Courtesy of the National Film Archive in Prague
America
Valérie Massadian | 2013, 7m Screens following Nana
Out of the landscape, a portrait emerges.
One place. One boy. One day. One shot. One reel of film.
Courtesy of Gaïjin and Valérie Massadian
Bird
Margaret Salmon | 2016, 6m Screens before Eglantine
A riff on the pioneering films of the Children’s Film Fund producer & director Mary Field, and her early work for the Secrets of Nature series. Bird is as much about observation and environment as education and spectatorship, inviting audiences to consider the ways in which cinematic tools – camera, lens, colour, movement, voice, sound – heighten and humanise our interpretation of the natural world.
Courtesy of LUX
The Body Beautiful
Ngozi Onwurah | 1991, 23m Part of the Love Means Taking Action Pt. 2 screening
This bold, stunning exploration of a white mother who undergoes a radical mastectomy and her Black daughter who embarks on a modeling career reveals the profound effects of body image and the strain of racial and sexual identity on their charged, intensely loving bond. At the heart of Onwurah’s brave excursion into her mother’s scorned sexuality is a provocative interweaving of memory and fantasy. The filmmaker plumbs the depths of maternal strength and daughterly devotion in an unforgettable tribute starring her real-life mother, Madge Onwurah.
Courtesy of the NFSA
Catharsis
Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani | 2001, 3m Screens TBC
A giallo in miniature, condensed out of still photographs.
Courtesy of Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani
Ceiling
Véra Chytilová | 1961, 41m Screens before Something Different
Véra Chytilová’s celebrated FAMU graduation film is an Antonioniesque, semi-documentary portrait of the boredom and objectification endured by a fashion model.
Courtesy of the National Film Archive in Prague
Charity
Kate Davis | 2017, 16m Part of the Love Means Taking Action Pt. 2 screening
Inspired by the ways Margaret Tait (1918-99) invites us to contemplate fundamental but overlooked emotions and everyday activities, Charity takes artistic representations of breastfeeding as its focus. The film explores how the essential – but largely invisible and unpaid – processes we employ to care for others could be re-imagined.
Courtesy of LUX
Dario Argento
Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani | 2013, 4m Screens TBC
A collage or purification of giallo imagery from Dario Argento’s films. A symphony of leather gloves, razor blades, shattered glass and blood.
Courtesy of Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani
The End of Our Love
Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani | 2003, 10m Screens TBC
Memories of lost love, as only Cattet and Forzani can conjure, made vivid by the arrival of psychedelic red, blues and greens.
Courtesy of Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani
Fitting
Emily Avila | 2018, 14m Screens before Strange Colours
In the close confines of a lingerie fitting room, Diane, who has recently undergone a mastectomy, is confronted with a problem she cannot solve alone.
Local filmmaker Emily Avila’s follow-up to the award winning In A Cane Field (QFF2017).
Courtesy of Emily Avila
Housework
Margaret Salmon | 2014, 6m Part of the Love Means Taking Action Pt. 1 screening
Salmon captures the uncanny, beautiful and at times hysterical moments in an alternative domestic cosmos. Highlighting the current state of female domestic roles as well as the status of women in larger society, Housework portrays daily household chores being completed by themselves as a supernatural phenomenon.
Courtesy of LUX
Invocation of My Demon Brother
Kenneth Anger | 1969, 12m Part of The Rare Event screening
The Rare Event, this darkly auratic time-object is a startling black mirror of occult vibrations, magical inquiry, and the very real possibilities of Satanic resistance. (Ben Rivers, Ben Russell)
Courtesy of NFSA
L. Cohen
James Benning | USA 2018, 48m | Part of The Rare Event screening
“[A] 45-minute single take of Oregon farmland. The drone of unseen planes fills the soundtrack, but the relentlessly static image scarcely betrays any trace of movement, with even the blades of grass in the foreground remaining frozen in this windless scene. Then, about halfway through, the great event arrives: a solar eclipse engulfs the world in sublime transformation. Animals howl in the darkness, and then all is restored. The banal and the breathtaking coexist.” (Erika Balsom)
Courtesy of James Benning All Ages
Mamoushka
Valérie Massadian | 2012, 10m Part of the Love Means Taking Action Pt. 2 screening
A woman recalls. Christine Famer, Massadian’s mother, marks prejudice and its legacy. Half audio and half slideshow of Massadian’s luminous photography, Mamoushka draws on our memory.
Courtesy of Gaïjin and Valérie Massadian
Nature Morte
Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel | 2013, 29m Screens after Leviathan
A short, still life companion to Leviathan, set inside the fishing vessel. A portrait of a tired man, drifting with his ship.
Courtesy of Arreton Ton Cinema
Ninouche
Valérie Massadian | 2011, 25m Screens before Eglantine
A reduction of Massadian’s Nana. Nana is 4 years old and lives in a stone house beyond the forest. The woods and the house are hers to explore and make home. In-between these moments, her mother cares for her—whether in the past or now is unknown.
Courtesy of Gaïjin and Valérie Massadian
O is for Orgasm
Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani | 2012, 4m Screens TBC
The moiré rainbow of a soap bubble. The glow of a cigarette. And a sigh.
Courtesy of Monster Pictures
Oyster
Margaret Salmon | 2014, 14m Screens before Nana
Framed as a bedtime story, Oyster is a minimalist documentary showcasing the native oyster and various aspects of its life, history and consumption. On and off the coast of Kent, Oyster celebrates British aquatic life, as well as the unique history and commercial legacy of the native oyster.
Courtesy of LUX
Precious
Valérie Massadian | 2012, 4m Part of the Love Means Taking Action Pt. 2 screening
Stephen Dwoskin was making his last film.
He knew this time it was the last one, as he was dying.
He asked a few friends to give him something, an image, a sound, a shot, that he would use or not in the editing of his film.
We saw it as a farewell present.
His film, of incredible beauty, is called “AGE IS…”
This was my present to him.
Courtesy of Gaïjin and Valérie Massadian
Pyramid
Margaret Salmon | 2014, 17m Part of the Love Means Taking Action Pt. 2 screening
Pyramid responds to Abraham Maslow’s theory on the hierarchy of human needs through the rhythms and choreography of middle-class South England. Salmon’s documentary both develops and challenges the themes presented in Maslow’s theory, as well as her own interest in human iconography, stereotype and domestic rhythm.
Courtesy of LUX
Santos Palace
Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani | 2006, 15m Screens TBC
Santos Palace is a coffee shop in Belgium. There, a waitress serves a strange client. Here Cattet and Forzani begin to explore how their new language can make the everyday world uncanny.
Courtesy of Agence Belge du Court Métrage
The Strange Portrait of the Lady in Yellow
Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani | 2004, 6m Screens TBC
While taking a shower, a woman hears something. An intricate study in sound design as off screen, something unfolds.
Courtesy of Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion
Dani Leventhal Restack & Sheila Restack | 2017, 29m Part of the Love Means Taking Action Pt. 1 screening
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Utilizing and exploding archetypes, the film offers a radical approach to collaboration and the conception of family. Dani and Sheilah collect and arrange images and moments that are at once peculiar and banal, precious and disturbing, creating resonance and contrast through experimental modes of storytelling.
Courtesy of VDB
Spiral Jetty
Ricky D’Ambrose | 2017, 15m Screens before Notes on an Appearence
A young archivist is hired to whitewash a late psychotherapist’s legacy in this exquisitely crafted story, imbued with an arch, conspiratorial air and told at a perfectionist’s pace.
Courtesy of Ricky D’Ambrose
Vivian’s Garden
Rosalind Nashashibi | 2014, 30m Part of the Love Means Taking Action Pt. 1 screening
Vivian Suter and her mother Elisabeth Wild are two Swiss / Austrian artists in living in Panajachel, Guatemala, where they have developed a matriarchal compound in an environment that offers both refuge and terror. Elisabeth is in her nineties and Vivian in her sixties and they are as close as maiden sisters. This film takes a close and dreamy look at their artistic, emotional and economic lives amongst their extended household, offering a tender look at an instance of post-colonial complexity.
Courtesy of LUX
Weed Killer
Patrick Staff | 2017, 17m, Part of the Love Means Taking Action Pt. 2 screening
At the heart of Weed Killer is a monologue—adapted from Catherine Lord’s moving and often irreverent memoir The Summer of Her Baldness—in which an actress reflects upon the chemically induced devastation of chemotherapy. This monologue is intertwined with comparatively otherworldly sequences, including choreographic gestures shot with high-definition thermal imaging.
Courtesy of Patrick Staff
Weight
Kate Davis | 2014, 11m Part of the Love Means Taking Action Pt. 1 screening
‘Taking a 1961 BBC documentary about artist Barbara Hepworth as its starting point, Weight explores how televised depictions of creativity have constructed our understanding of artistic production and other forms of labour. Weight re-imagines the value systems that this documentary is predicated upon and proposes an alternative vision.’ – Kate Davis
Courtesy of LUX
Yellow Room
Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani | 2002, 8m Screens TBC
Cattet and Forzani continue their exploration of the gialli and still photography, folding S&M into the mix.
Courtesy of Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani
Image: Rosalind Nashashibi — Vivian’s Garden