An automatic and computerised voice, Kanya, receives and guides a tourist, Alex, in a Thailand resort in Bangsaen. It is a way of exploring the specificity of the location through a journey that is immediately much more than a touristic survey. Within a paradigmatic temple for modern vacations, we discover the history and the politics that hide behind the kitsch patina of standardised holidays. A story of corruption and unlawfulness is interestingly intertwined with the story of Thai cinema, and Seanjaroen uses this to introduce an interrogation on the function of film representation.

Alex is actually an automatic and computerised voice himself, and he starts to explore the place alone, going beyond Kanya’s limits, beyond Kanya’s algorithm. The discourse of Room with a Coconut View is no longer a linear one: Seanjaroen’s socio-political criticism intensifies and the animated images of the film switch from the status of a filmic collage to a more complex form of aesthetic self-reflection, where the postcard-like images of tourism are linked to the images that are programmed and digitally elaborated.

With a second dramaturgic shift that relies upon the concepts of disturbance and breakdown – of the image, of the voice, of the story – the socio-political criticism evolves into an existential reflection. The liberating force of the digital connections overcomes the regressive power of digital programming, introducing the motive of the sub-conscious and thus the consciousness of the machine. After having shown the aesthetic panorama of a fully digitised anthropology, Seanjaroen finally conducts a sort of re-humanisation of said digitised anthropology by way of the machine itself.

Room with a Coconut View is a rich, complex,  formally interesting essay where the documentary aspect is perfectly combined with a science-fictional reflection on the destiny of our vision and experience through the moving images, both within and beyond the machine. (GDS)

Room with a Coconut View | Short | Tulapop Seanjaroen | THA 2018 | 29’ | Locarno Festival 2018, Signs of Life

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One ultimate virtue of a work of art is the measure by which it does not make everything explicit. In this respect, Tarik Aktas’ Dead Horse Nebula is a paradigmatic example, as the story of its main character, Hay, is neither informative nor conclusive. Hay’s improbable “adventures” are mainly immersed in a colourless daily life, but this line of narrative constitutes only a sort of pretext for a lateral storytelling that appears to be more relevant. The death of a horse, and the story of the removal of its corpse; the killing of a sheep; the cutting of a tree, and the telling of its destiny, from the forest to a construction site: all these seemingly accidental events –things that appear to just happen, beyond any deliberate agency – constitute for us a parallel line of thought, that focuses on the theme of the violence of men towards nature.

The long contemplative shots give a transcendental touch to this parallel line of thought, which therefore becomes a properly filmic line of thought. Aktas’ cinematic language is able to create a new atmosphere of interrogation and astonishment, where several elements slowly emerge to anchor our reflection to an iconic ground: more precisely, machines and ropes are the intermediaries between man and nature, showing both the strength and fragility of our bold confrontation with nature. Nature can take its revenge on us: like an invisible constellation of events that has originated with the hybris of a child profaning the dead body of a horse out of curiosity, the “dead horse nebula” will finally appear under the sinister shape of a whistling owl to take its revenge…

Even if Dead Horse Nebula seems to be ungenerous with its spectator, it is a film that still works in our mind and imagination after the screening. The force of cinema is apparent (also) when what we see can be encapsulated neither in a sentence or a concept, nor in an accomplished story. Dead Horse Nebula builds a new territory that only cinema can offer. (GDS)

Dead Horse Nebula | Film | Tarik Aktas | TR 2018 | 73’ | Locarno Festival 2018, Cineasti del presente

Prize for the Best Emerging Director at Locarno Festival 2018

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Anka Schmids neuster Film hat die Intelligenz, eine spezifische und ungewöhnliche Perspektive einzunehmen, um ihre eigene Geschichte zu erzählen: die Perspektive der Haare. Eine eingeschränkte Perspektive, die tatsächlich eine Erweiterung unserer Erfahrung bedeutet und die die Entdeckung einer Dimension des Körpers ermöglicht, welche sich als entschieden weniger marginal herausstellt, als es scheint. Haarig kreuzt persönliche Daten mit historischen: So wird mit der autobiografischen Geschichte auch die westliche Geschichte der Haare in den letzten Jahrzehnten erzählt. Deswegen ist das eigentliche Thema des Films die Beziehung zwischen Individuum und Gesellschaft, zwischen persönlichem Ausdruck und einer Kommunikation durch soziale Codes – ein Thema, das auch in der Aneinanderreihung von öffentlichen und privaten Archivbildern reflektiert wird. Mehr als für die Vertiefung des Themas überzeugt Haarig für seine formale Behandlung, durch die veranschaulichende Nutzung von Musik, die Verwendung einer humorvollen Off-Stimme und einer nie redundanten Animation. Die kompositorische Dimension des Films wird ständig hervorgehoben und verleiht dem Film die Frische und Dynamik eines Filmessays. (GDS)

Haarig | Film | Anka Schmid | Fantoche Baden 2017, Solothurner Filmtage 2018

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After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, freedom and chaos were the daily routine, even in Kazakhstan, where the film-maker Rashid Nugmanov opened up and closed the self-declared “Kazakh New Wave” with his two films Igla (1988) and The Wild East (1993). The latter witnesses the need for a Western reformation of aesthetics and values as it is directly inspired by The Magnificent Seven, an American remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. The cowboy anarchic philosophy, in its punk-and-samurai version (!), the protection of the weak (a group of dwarves trying to form a settlement in the Kyrgyzstan wilderness), the fight against evil (the bikers): all ingredients of the Western film genre, which is reinterpreted here as a political tool within the geography of Kazakhstan, equal-parts wilderness and desert. This literally geo-political film, this “Eastern”, is eccentric and insecure. The epic is weakened by the comic, but the comic is never fully assumed as the main character remains tremendously serious throughout. The poor acting generates a notable distance from the story, and the tragedy of the ultimate battle becomes a masquerade. It is probably this uncertain, indefinable, ambiguous character that gives the movie its force. Within its lack of definability, the dramatic experience finds room to expand The Wild East is a film that nourishes our imagination and leaves an impression on our memory. Thanks to the Neues Kino in Basel for proposing again such a rarity.

The Wild East | Film | Rashid Nugmanov | KAZ 1993 | 98’

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Tuvalu: un État qui disparaît lentement sous l’eau, dont on a déjà eu récemment une belle documentation avec _ThuleTuvalu_ de Matthias von Gunten. Si dans ce dernier un discours engagé dénonce, témoigne et illustre, le court-métrage de Pauline Julier opte pour un tout autre angle de vue, en mettant au centre du récit filmique la légende des Aïtus, également en train de disparaître de la mémoire collective. Il s’agit au fond d’une autre revendication, non pas celle liée à la catastrophe environnementale, mais celle qui défend la culture populaire comme âme du lieu, _genius loci_. Entre histoire coloniale et étude anthropologique, ce qui frappe dans _La disparition des Aïtus_, c’est la rigueur impressionnante du film, sa justesse, et sa richesse d’idées formelles. Le son et la musique, le style du récit, l’usage symptomatique des images, souvent plongées dans la nuit, l’essentialité du texte : chaque élément est soigné avec intelligence pour construire un langage original. Nous sommes heureusement loin du journalisme qui affecte si puissamment tant de films documentaires, et nous avons l’impression de retrouver une empathie pour le réel, certainement plus efficace que les descriptions documentaires qui poursuivent le mythe de la neutralité. L’enseignement de l’anthropologie, dont on oublie souvent la critique fondamentale de la prétendue neutralité de l’observation scientifique, anime cet essai filmique en lui donnant une grâce et une justesse précieuses.

La disparition des Aïtus | Film | Pauline Julier | CH 2014 | 35’ | Solothurner Filmtage 2016

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