Bristol Radical Film Festival International Films Showcase 2023
The Steak
(Kiarash Dadgar Mohebi, Iran, 8 m)
Issues about war hold a universal quality, allowing viewers to comprehend the inherent bitterness they entail. This short film delves into the dramatic transformation that can occur within mere minutes. Through the use of a continuous 360-degree tilt and eliminating dialogue entirely, the film invites the audience to interpret the story through the characters' actions and visual symbolism, thus transcending cultural or geographic boundaries.
Kiarash Dadgar, b. 1994, a film and theatre artist from Iran. He received his M.A. in Dramatic Literature from the Soore Art University of Tehran and worked on several projects in Iranian short films, series and theatre productions. He also worked as a producer in some short films. One of them, “Jouissance” was premiered at BUSAN International Film Festival (2022). He directed his first short film “Steak” in 2023 and is waiting for his film’s world premiere.
Traces of Rocco
(Marina Resta, Italy, 16 m)
The film was developed as part of the Zavattini Prize 2018/2019, promoted by AAMOD (Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico – Audiovisual Archives of the Workers and Democratic Movement), which stimulated my sensitivity and curiosity for viewing and researching archival materials and (re)using them creatively and respectfully at the same time. I chose to focus on Basilicata, a region to which I am very attached for biographical reasons, and also the birthplace of Rocco Scotellaro.
In fact, the inspiration for Traces of Rocco stems from my personal fascination with this important person from Basilicata, a figure as complex - in just 30 years of life he was a poet, writer, socialist mayor of his hometown Tricarico (MT) and social researcher with Manlio Rossi Doria - as almost forgotten. I have tried to confront Scotellaro and what he represents for Basilicata by working on his absence. Physical absence, absence of audiovisual materials depicting him, absence of direct witnesses (many of them have already died). So, my work was to search for his traces and then to disseminate them in the film. The traces are meant both as signs of his life (his village, his house, his grave, the Luce newsreel announcement of his posthumous achievement of the Viareggio Prize for the collection of poems "È fatto giorno"), but also the iconographic traces that preserve and transmit his memory (plaques, paintings, murals and even the bronze effigy depicting Michele Mulieri, one of the "Peasants of the South" interviewed for the homonymous book by Scotellaro). Carlo Levi, a friend of the Lucanian poet from the time of his confinement in Basilicata under Fascism, played a leading role in passing on the figure of Scotellaro, contributing to create his mythology. Particularly in the triptych "Lucania '61," now on display at the Museo Nazionale di Matera in Palazzo Lanfranchi, Levi makes Scotellaro the focus of the entire painting and the metaphor of Lucania itself. Basilicata and southern Italy in general suffered (and continues to suffer) external gazes' storytelling, which, between the late 1940s and the 1960s were polarized between the "pure place outside History" that embodies the Levi vision, and the promises of technical and infrastructural development linked to the rhetoric of Agrarian Reform and the implementation of the Marshall Plan.
A third narrative that runs alongside these in the film is the one linked to Matera 2019 - European Capital of Culture, the storytelling of the cultural redemption of a city and territory long considered "the shame of Italy", now invaded by tourists. The film interweaves all these threads -the different narratives and rhetorics and Scotellaro's traces- by comparing archival materials from AAMOD and Istituto Luce with observational footage shot today in those same places. However, my choice was not to conceal the heterogeneity of the materials and their different provenance, but rather to highlight it, making clear the partiality of each narrative and ultimately the impossibility of reaching a vision on Basilicata, if not fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. Similarly, Rocco Scotellaro remains in the film an elusive, ghostly figure, of whom one can always aspire to find new traces.
Marina Resta (Altamura, Bari, 1984), graduated in Film Studies from Università di Bologna and Freie Universität Berlin. She attended the Documentary course at the Film School Scuola Civica “Luchino Visconti” in Milan and a Masters in Production and Communication for Audiovisual and Digital Media at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. As a filmmaker she made “Milano fa 90” (2013) and “L’acqua calda e l’acqua fredda” (2015), presented in several festivals including Sguardi Altrove in Milan and Foggia Film Festival. In 2018 “Traces of Rocco” was selected among the 10 finalist projects of the Zavattini Prize. She teaches audio-visual disciplines in art high school. She has been the artistic director and organiser of Working Title Film Festival since 2016.
We’ve Been Bamboozled!
(Pamela Falkenberg, Jack Cochran, USA, 7 m)
Recent revelations show that the fossil fuel industries, over the course of many decades, sponsored scientific research about the potential consequences of burning fossil fuels on the earth’s environment, which concluded that the impact would be “dramatic” and “urgent.” Instead of sharing this information and seeking alternatives, the fossil fuels industries embarked on a longstanding campaign of disinformation and obfuscation that has outdone that of big tobacco.
Now that all this has come to light, the result is an unprecedented rash of lawsuits and investigations. These legal proceedings are expected to take years, but right now we need to be informed about what is at stake.
Our film “We’ve Been Bamboozled” combines images of a world powered by fossil fuels with a poetic summary, based on text extracted from the oil industry’s own reports, is part of that effort.
We freely admit that our poem takes liberties with the original texts, ironically paring down their prose using an erasure strategy, to reveal and highlight that the fossil fuel industries knew how much they were contributing to climate change, how dangerous that was, and just how long they chose to keep that information to themselves (since at least 1959).
We encourage our audience to get the full story from our source materials, via this link on our website: https://www.outliermovingpictures.com/we-ve-been-bamboozled
Link to the text of the poem:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CNhqfivzbGp2lvfkUrLysjkyR9o3T8M6zrE2euqGIBA/edit
Pam is an independent filmmaker who received her PhD from the University of Iowa and taught at Northern Illinois University, St.Mary's College, and the University of Notre Dame. She directed the largest student film society in the US while she was at the University of Iowa, and also ran films series for the Snite Museum of Art in South Bend, IN. Her experimental film with Dan Curry, Open Territory, received an individual filmmaker grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as grants from the Center for New Television and the Indiana Arts Council. OT screened at the Pacific Film Archives, as well at numerous film festivals, including the AFI Video Festival, and was nominated for a regional Emmy. Her other films include museum installations, scholarly/academic hybrid works shown at film conferences, and a documentary commissioned by the Peace Institute at the University of Notre Dame. She is an occasional contributor to Moving Poems Magazine (http://discussion.movingpoems.com/ ) and Liberated Words (http://liberatedwords.com/ ).
Jack is an independent filmmaker who has produced, directed, or shot a variety of experimental and personal projects. As a DP he has extensive experience shooting commercials, independent features, and documentaries. His varied commercial client list includes BMW, Ford, Nissan, Fujifilm, Iomega, Corum Watches, and Forte Hotels. His features and documentaries have shown at the Sundance, Raindance, Telluride, Tribeca, Edinburgh, Chicago, Houston, and Taos film Festivals, winning several honors. His commercials and documentaries have won Silver Lions from Cannes, a BAFTA (British Academy Award), Peabody Awards, and Cable Aces. Some notable credits: Director of Photography on Brian Griffin's Claustrofoamia, Cinematography for Antony Thomas’ Tank Man, Director/Cinematographer of Viento Nocturno, and Cinematographer of Ramin Niami’s feature film Paris. Jack was trained at the University of Iowa Creative Writers Workshop as well as the University of Iowa film studies program.
An experimental movie about the relation between performance, history and Iranian revolution 1979.
Since 2016, he started collaborating with some publications as a photographer. Beside photography, he began his theatre and cinema activities mainly as writer and director since 2010.
In recent years, Sahand Sarhaddi has been active in the field of multimedia and visual arts. He has been trying to integrate and combine photograph, video, performance, filmmaking and literature through his art works.
Fragments of a Revolution
(Sahand Sarhaddi, Iran, 6 m)
A Bedroom for Everyone
(Ed Webb-Ingall, UK, 15 m)
Four strangers meet at a housing demo. They talk about resisting being moved out of their neighbourhoods to make way for overpriced luxury apartments, fighting for safer housing while waiting on corrupt councils to decide their fates, challenging rent increases from sub-standard private landlords and the dangers of damp overcrowded, temporary flats.
A Bedroom for Everyone, stems from a long-term body of work that asks what the role of filmmaking is in response to the current housing crisis in the UK. The project explores the power of grassroots activism and organising in the face of this ongoing emergency; whilst making space for the camaraderie that unfolds in the community centres and meeting halls where this work takes place.
Following time spent with housing and migrant-support groups from Glasgow, Nottingham, Liverpool, Birmingham and London, filmmaker Ed Webb-Ingall has collaborated with members of these groups to co-write the script for this new animation, illustrated by lead artist Sofia Niazi and animated by Astrid Goldsmith.
Ed Webb-Ingall is a filmmaker and researcher working with archival materials and methodologies drawn from community video. He collaborates with groups to explore under represented historical moments and their relationship to contemporary life, developing modes of self-representation specific to the subject or the experiences of the participants. He is a co-founder of the London Community Video Archive and is currently writing a book with the title BFI Screen Stories: The Story of Video Activism. Previous solo exhibitions have been at the The Showrpoom Gallery (2015), Focal Point (2018), South London Gallery (2019). Group Exhibitons include MK Gallery (2019), Invisible Dust (2019) and Brent Biennial (2022).
Death and My Grandfather
(Gon Caride, Spain, 15 m)
A hymn to life, with Death as the main character.
Legend has it that every one-hundred years, Death becomes human and lives with us for a day, to better understand those whom she will have to come and collect.
Gon Caride studied Audiovisual Communication in Salamanca and in 2008 he emigrated to the USA where he studied a Master in Filmmaking and Cinematography at the New York Film Academy (NYFA) in New York.
For the last 15 years he has been working professionally as a director, screenwriter, editor, cinematographer and producer in the US, the UK, Poland, France, Portugal and Spain.
His previous works as screenwriter and director have been selected in more than 100 Film Festivals in 30 different countries around the world. He has been awarded prizes for Best Director, Best Short Film and Best Script on many occasions.
These days he’s working on his first feature film and also finishing a new short film about racism and the fascinating world of film accessibility.
Matryoshka
(Joseph Ros, Cuba, 5 m)
A woman, in a dystopian context, re-experiences a painful event over and over again, trying to resolve it.
Joseph Ros is a director and producer of music videos, shows, short films and advertising, as well as illustrator. With more than 20 years of experience in the audiovisual sector, starting with state television, today he is considered one of the most important young directors in Cuba, being recognized on multiple occasions with the most significant awards in national and international competitions in video-art, video clips and short films.
If Not Now
(Jill Daniels, UK, 15 m)
If Not Now is a documentary essay film addressed to my Jewish great-great grandmother, Rebecca, who lived and died in Brick Lane in London’s East End. Her death haunts my memories. Brick Lane has been home to successive immigrant communities, Huguenot weavers, Jews, Bengalis; today it is semi-gentrified with hipster clothes shops, street food, beigel bakeries, Indian restaurants and sari shops. In 1978, Bengali workers organised the first black strike in England and protested against racist attacks and murder by the fascist National Front. Left-wing parties were divided over strategies of resistance to the National Front. The film explores the assertion that in opposition to notions of waste, and dispersal, there is a grand circularity, of nothing ever, ever going away; that resistance to fascism in the past may be a catalyst for resistance today.
Born in Manchester Jill Daniels is an internationally renowned British filmmaker and writer. Her innovative documentary essay films explore memory, place, Jewish identity and autobiography.
She has won many awards, including best experimental film award for My Private Life II a film about sexual identity in her family, at the Ann Arbor Experimental Film Festival in the USA. Resisters (2021) is the latest in her series of films exploring the rise of nationalism in Berlin. The first film in the series, Breathing Still (2018), won the best documentary award at the Small Axe Radical Short Film Festival in 2019. Her website is www.jilldanielsfilms.com
For the Birds
(Eva Sykes, UK, 2 m)
A 90 second animation exploring the vulnerability in giving your heart to someone and creating visceral imagery to empathise with the universal experience of the heart being discarded.
My name is Eva Sykes, I’m an artist/filmmaker passionate about social realist and experimental film, working with mixed media techniques such as paint, sculpture and stop frame animation.
I enjoy observing human nature with all its flaws and imperfections, often exploring challenging dysfunctional characters and relationships, exposing both the agony and the ecstasy which lies beneath. This is expressed in my work which has a visceral quality and can be both grotesque and ethereal at the same time.
Looking for Loïe
(Tuulia Soininen, Finland, 9 m)
Looking For Loïe is a project that took over 1,5 years to complete.
The director Tuulia Soininen was hugely inspired by the dance and technology pioneer Loïe Fuller.
Fuller was one of the first dance practitioners to de-sexualize the dancing female body. The body became abstract, it formed shapes, colors and images. In this film we have consciously aimed to point out, comment and diminish the male gaze.
Fuller does not fit into one box. She was a scientist during an era when women were not welcomed to the science world. In history books she is seen either a dance artist or a theater technology inventor. Why ought thinking and moving be binaries?
Looking For Loïe revolves around the themes of visibility and agency. It was created by all woman and non-binary makers. The decision was made in order to address the striking inequality in the film industry. It also continues the discussion on how to create agency for discriminated genders on and off screen.
For Tuulia this project is deeply meaningful. It is her first solo direction. It was also the first project she received funding for. She was truly touched by all the passionate people she got to make this film with.
The process wasn't without controversy. There was some backlash from inside the film industry. But that proved there was all the more reason why this film should be made.
This film was created by the power of community, supporting each other and believing in the common cause of equality in the workplace.
Tuulia Soininen is an award-winning dance and video artist from Finland. Soininen is a fresh, innovative and up-and-coming artist in the screen dance world. She graduated as a dancer-choreographer from Falmouth University in 2018. After that, she has worked as a freelance dance artist in Pirkanmaa and completed studies in the audiovisual field. Soininen also participated in Women In Film and Television Finland mentoring in 2022.
She is the CEO of Muusa Tuotannot Oy, which specializes in dance films. She works with experimental and feminist films. Soininen has choreographed the dance films Looking For Loïe (2023) and To Be Touched (2022) and created Connecting... A dance documentary (2021) and HEARKEN (2021).