Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024

In his note about Yuyan Wang’s One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean, Kevin B. Lee talks about the two interlocked infrastructures that fuel much of our contemporary mediascape: the hypervisibility of the social media economy, and the cognitive and affective ecosystem of the media consumer.

Indeed, there is little doubt that concerns about the growing gap between a fully mediatized, image-saturated collective imagination and our individual, often anxious search for meaning loom large in many of the films in the 2024 Winterthur programme. I say “growing gap”, though it is also fair to say the gap has been growing for a while. Even as I write this I am struck by how exquisitely postmodern this problem sounds, at least in the way I’ve just formulated it.

[continue to read about the films below]

Perhaps it is not casual then if the form of the pastiche, with all its built-in postmodern appeal, resurfaces several times throughout the selection, particularly in the work of filmmakers who came of age artistically in the 1990s, such as Ulu Braun. His Pacific Vein is effectively a film pastiche, built around the idea of turning our shared pop cultural iconography into detritus. In this case the iconography has a distinct American slant (John Wayne, rampant capitalism, etc.) but underlying the structure of the film is a more general collapse of our shared cultural encyclopaedia into random accumulation, debris and continual drifting. Visually, the film functions as a planar exploration, with the camera sliding over an imaginary surface, continually twisting and adjusting its perspectival depth, in a way that evokes the optical paradoxes of surrealist art, and – of course – the failure of the camera obscura as an ideological, “ordering” device.

Pacific Vein | Ulu Braun | DE 2024 | 12’
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Equally postmodern with its twinkle-in-the-eye irony is Rachel Maclean’s Duck, a deepfake animation featuring an impossibly impassible Sean-Connery-as-James-Bond fighting an army of die-hard Marilyn Monroes. It’s a gruesome romp and, granted, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, but I find it irresistible. Pop icons turned into collective archetypes (of control, of desire), self-conscious simulacra striving for fleeting mastery over their own simulated world: Maclean pushes all the right buttons, with gusto. Underneath the romp, however, there is a certain existential angst: truth-making is simply manipulation and delusion, and then there’s the impossibility of escaping, not even through death. There’s darkness in the gimmick.

Duck | Rachel Maclean | UK 2023 | 16’
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Darker yet is Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s La fille qui explose, which I would put in the same basket as Duck, despite the tonal difference. A fable morale of sorts, the film revolves around Candice, the titular girl, who in a confessional voiceover describes how she’s developed an incurable exploding condition: she blows up spontaneously, multiple times per day, though, seen again here, she seems unable to die. Her reflections also include musings about the state of world, a recent breakup, and her difficulty coping with it all. Visually, the film relies on a language of crudely polygonal characters moving around in smoothly rendered spaces. Like Maclean, Poggi and Vinel draw upon pop culture to reinforce the idea of a reality filled with simulacra, or rather with detached avatars. The world Candice inhabits seems exclusively populated by pop cultural creatures, from Superman to Bart Simpson to less recognisable videogame villains. Stacked against the artificiality of these polygonal personas is a grandguignolesque vein (severed limbs and splattered blood) which renders the idea of detachment in a visceral, indeed explosive manner. Candice wonders about where social violence goes, and the film suggests, implicitly, that it ends precisely in that hypermediated world that we all (detachedly) inhabit. It also suggests a failure of language (again a postmodern motif), as these ever-accumulating signs no longer convey the lived, signified stuff of people's pain: as the Candice puts it, «le problème, c'est pas le manque. Le problème c'est le trop.»

La fille qui explose | Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel | FR 2024 | 19’
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Moving beyond the pastiche now, interdisciplinary artist-researcher Gala Hernández López adds a socioeconomic layer to these same themes in her For Here Am I Sitting in a Tin Can Far Above the World. In her film, the unnamed voice-over narrator recounts her dream encounters with Hal Finney, a techno-utopian crypto-developer whose body has been cryopreserved following incurable illness. We see fragments of Hanney’s home movies, and hear his voice. In parallel, a cacophony of images and other voices: posterised, negative split-screen vistas, YouTube videos of failed crypto investors, spiralling financial graphs. A contrast slowly takes shape: on the one hand, through Finney and his techno-utopian, stand the imaginary economies of the future (whereby the future itself becomes a financial asset); on the other hand stands the widespread, cacophonous fear of the present. Indeed, Hanney’s cryostasis (his “suspension far above the world”) finally finds its visual opposite: bodies in free fall.* Against the capitalist project of “suspending” the subject above time, and indeed monetize time itself, the film posits the shared experience of falling through a bottomless, fearful, but at least communal present.

* In itself another subversion of linear perspective, such as in Ulu Braun’s film. See, on this, Hito Steyerl’s remarks here.

For Here Am I Sitting in a Tin Can Far Above the World | Gala Hernández López | FR 2024 | 19’
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One final mention for Nicolas Gebbe’s The Sunset Special 2, a continuation of his multi-media experimental project, which also included an exhibition and a custom social media account. The film, like its 2020 antecedent, puts forth a pungent satire of the stultified, hollowed-out experiences that encompass both the social and personal infrastructures described by Kevin Lee in the opening paragraph. In Sunset Special 2 the characters – nameless, expressionless digital avatars chosen by an invisible player – go on a self-proclaimed, exclusive family cruise. They speak to each other and to their friends in clichéd, trite dialogues, parroting the advertising rhetoric of holiday brochures and the consumerist entitlement of online customers reviews. In addition to the avatar selection I mentioned, both Gebbe’s Sunset Special films nod heavily to videogame aesthetics, featuring crude graphics and cinematics, though these are also mixed with promotional material and overlaid with images of screens, on which social media posts appear to scroll endlessly. It’s a noisy condensate of our mediascape, and indeed, of all the films mentioned herein, Gebbe’s version of our mediatised reality is admittedly the grimmest. Visual and linguistic noise overwhelm any possibility of meaning – but when you least expect it, a glimmer of hope: one of the kids of the family escapes the cruise. We see her on a rock, alone, next to a lifeboat. The journey continues; the course remains uncertain.

The Sunset Special 2 | Nicolas Gebbe | DE 2024 | 19’
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I don’t know whether my recent discovery of Fred Dewey’s happy formulation of «non-fictional imagination» had an influence on my selection at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, but I retrospectively realised that at least five of the short films that impressed me the most could be collected in a section whose title would unambiguously be Non-Fictional Imagination. Now, the cinematic version of Fred Dewey’s idea, which mostly applied to embodiments of political imagination like a memorial site, would focus on the “reality” of clearly imaginative films. It is about the vividness, the truth, the expressivity of what would be appear as the production of sheer imagination. When a film departs from naturalist representation but still does not want to draw a fictional line, then we can speak of non-fictional imagination, which would be another name – a non-derogatory one – for hallucination.

[continue to read about the films below]

This is precisely what happens in Miguel Afonso’s Unicorn Hunting, where the unrestrained fantasy and garish aesthetics quickly reveal an accurate choice of emotive situations. With this film we learn how exaggeration can be just the tool for expression. The scenes are certainly imaginative but non-fictional and rather cogent, until the last scene where the making of the film slowly occupies the screen and serves a deconstructive intention that fits perfectly to the needs of the story.

Unicorn Hunting | Miguel Afonso | PT 2024 | 18’
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In Mohamed Bourouissa’s Genealogy of Violence, the naturalist and the hallucinatory levels are juxtaposed, the second being developed through digital animation. Contrary to what often happens with such a new medium, Bourouissa does not explore the medium in and of itself but instead chooses what is useful in order to convey a specific experience of drifting away into the inner forum of the protagonist. The alienation of this experience is rendered acute, perfectly in contraposition to the naturalist scenes, which are able to show the nuanced realities of two young lovers that slowly approach the big questions in life. In this way we can feel how violent the relatively ordinary intervention of the policemen is, and how it works on the protagonist in disconnecting him from the possibility of a shared intimacy. The digital hallucination will mean and express solitude and rage.

Genealogy of Violence | Mohamed Bourouissa | FR 2024 | 15’
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Alienation is no fiction in Marcel Mrejen’s Memories of an Unborn Sun too. The understanding of the documentary context that the film depicts is not immediate, which will reveal itself to be a true force of the film. Post-apocalyptic, abstract and cosmic images can appear uncanny and attractive, and so guide us towards the discovery of one of the last versions of extractivist neo-colonialism. The Chinese worker and the Algerian citizen will share the same destiny of victims, victims of a gigantic system of exploitation. This one is well expressed through grand images, whose brightness is able to communicate a profound obscurity.

Memories of an Unborn Sun | Marcel Mrejen | ALG-NL-FR 2024 | 22’
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Obscurity is also the thread of Thao Nguyen Dang’s Memory Replica. The mystery around the disappearing of a pagoda is probably the simplest of the obscurity motives of the film. Obscure in its understanding, the film proposes exploring memory as haunting a territory where spirituality appears fossilised, perhaps disguised in apes, and where life itself glows as fragile being. It would be easy to replace a fictional story of the impossible inquiry of recollecting the memory of an entire culture that has disappeared, but the film resists this, and instead wanders in the sensual and somehow desperate non-fictionality of a besieged nature.

Memory Replica | Thao Nguyen Dang | VTN 2024 | 23’
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Who is Miss Ronnie? A Jamaican poetess? Her words in voice-over, Una’s words in Joseph Douglas Elmhirst’s Burnt Milk tell a story of migration. We see a Jamaican woman in London in the Eighties, her story made of a web of explosive fragments of emotional intensity, made by poetry. The image layer is non-narrative yet precise enough to place us in her life, under her skin. The memory of her country creates a black-and-white island made of natural landscape, whereas in London she adheres to her private world, the house, a cell and a shell where only memory can penetrate.

Burnt Milk | Joseph Douglas Elmhirst | USA 2023 | 10’
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Selin Öksüzoglu’s Adieu, tortue develops a poetic of gestures, of framings, and of silences, through which the cultural distance between patriarchal rurality and urban – probably delusional – freedom is highlighted. The construction of a relationship through a young woman and a child will mean a play of memory and projection, where emancipation and lost innocence will have to join forces.
Giuseppe Di Salvatore

Adieu, tortue | Selin Öksüzoglu | TK 2024 | 24’
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Details are everything in Nebojša Slijepčević’s The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent. Unity of time, place and action makes the story a classical theatrical piece, easy to follow, but if at the centre of the film is a tragic story of moral courage, the dramaturgic choices give priority to the fringes, with the perspective of a good but non-courageous everyman. One who is unable to understand and copy with the blatant symptoms of the disappearing of the rule of law and of humanist respect. The more “normal” and varied the societal landscape that is accurately depicted, the more aching will be its silence and passivity. A highly topical film for our times of democracy erosion!
Giuseppe Di Salvatore

The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent | Nebojša Slijepčević | BG-SLO-FR-HR 2024 | 13’
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The second entry in a planned trilogy about the diasporic experience of Haitian migrants, Dreams like Paper Boats is an elegant piece of film-making. Through a progression of vignettes, director Samuel Suffren sketches the life of a man – Edouard – a street food vendor whose wife has migrated, leaving him behind to take care of their daughter Zazou. The chronology is unclear but the suggestion is that she has been gone for quite some time. Her voice, however, continues to imbue our protagonists with life, in the form of a letter recorded on a single cassette tape, which Edouard and Zazou listen to continuously. The woman’s voice thus enters the space of daily life like a ghostly absence, recounting the hardship and tragedy of her journey, but also offering a simulacrum of presence, maternal love, companionship, all the more painful for its acousmêtric, unattainable qualities. The private and the universal coexist in this disembodied voice, a symbol for thousands of other human bonds severed by migration. Suffren does break the pattern by having Edouard experience brief, hallucinatory glimpses of his missing wife, but for the most part the film explores its themes more subtly. The black-and-white cinematography in particular stands out: in static long shots, the film uses Caravaggesque lighting to turn floating drapery and smoke into a visual, textural parallel for the theme of lingering absence. A reminder, if one was needed, that when it comes to style an economy of means and symbolic complexity can go hand in hand.
PM Cicchetti

Dreams like Paper Boats | Samuel Suffren | Haiti 2024 | 19’
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Nastia Korkia, Vlad Fishez | BE-HUN-PT 2023 | 30’ | Berlinale 2024 (Woche der Kritik), Bildrausch Filmfest Basel 2024, Fantoche Baden 2024

In repressive regimes, dreams constitute a sort of last space of freedom. A strange, involuntary freedom, to which Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez pay a wonderful tribute by photographing the Russian collective unconscious, sadly occupied and preoccupied by the incumbent President. This search for an interiorisation of public personae is not new – John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Barack Obama have already been the subject of artists’ projects – but Dreams about Putin explores the theme through the clever use of roughness in creating images with the video game tool Unreal Engine. The fragmentary animation perfectly expresses the blurry representation of dream memories and enhances the surrealist, absurd situations described by the witnesses. Something that should be in contrast with the several pieces of archive footage that Korkia and Fishez intersperse in the film, but which is surprisingly not the case: the glorification of the little tzar in pathetic pseudo-heroic setups – flying with storks or spearfishing – seems to be so staged and surreal that we actually experience the astonishing continuity between digital manipulation and staged reality. In this way, the found footage anticipates and pre-empts the collective imagination: is this a saturation of that last space of freedom? Not really, because the digital creations underline the reduction of the powerful patriarch to the status of a miserable puppet (of himself), something that is already working in the found footage. Image manipulation can serve power or make fun of it. The last (manipulated) found images of the President in a court behind bars mark the spirit of Dreams about Putin: a therapeutic and liberating film.
Giuseppe Di Salvatore

At the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024

Lawrence Abu Hamdan | UK 2022 | 15’ | Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2022

The film ingeniously unfolds as a geometric theorem on the absurdity of borders and protective – or hypocritical – legislation and the anomaly of a single jurisdictional case becomes the vector for a global issue: the unacceptable impunity of drone wars and their coward violence at a distance. This is an urgent reality check. 
Giuseppe Di Salvatore

At the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024

Yuyan Wang | FR 2021 | 11'

One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean is less than 12 minutes long but I shiver at the thought of how many hours of viewing it represents. I’m not only referring to the hundreds, if not thousands of hours of footage Wang Yuyan watched and re-watched to create this overwhelming compilation of punctum moments from the online video genre known as “oddly satisfying.” I’m also thinking about the millions more hours spent by others, including myself, clicking and scrolling through the endless sea of online content, seeking one audio-visual dopamine hit after another.
This dazzling montage is not just a display of technical virtuosity for its own sake. Its simultaneous affective registers of abjection and hypnosis build into an altered state of consciousness that renders palpable two invisible and inextricably linked infrastructures. On one hand sits a social media economy that trades in hypervisibility, an endless doomscrolling of audio-visual consumption. On the other, the cognitive and affective ecosystem of the media consumer, pulsing through an endless cycle of stimulation and hollowness.
In my media studies classes I typically have my students keep a log of their media consumption habits for one week and then I ask them to calculate the number of hours spent consuming media (the average is 40 hours a week, though in some instances it has reached triple digits). Finally, I ask them to reflect on those hours spent watching YouTube and Netflix, scrolling Instagram and TikTok, to think about what they were watching all that content for, and to imagine what they could do with all that time.
Now I have an answer.
Kevin B. Lee

At the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024

In Filmexplorer's selection of the Video Essay Gallery 2022

Total Refusal | AT 2022 | 20’ | Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2022, Festival Fantoche Baden 2023, Whiteframe Online Series 2023

Just imagine that our own lives would be faithfully mirrored in this second life video game: the film essay would become an ethical focus, and a profound reflection, on the background figures that are part of our own daily landscape as a commodified labour force. Beside this brilliant anti-capitalistic thread we also discover an existentialist line that emerges from these non-playable characters (NPCs to gamers), for programmed slavery implies moments of indefinite suspension. Do we dare to see ourselves in them?
Giuseppe Di Salvatore

At the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024

Manuel Abramovich | ARG-DE 2019 | 18’ | Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2019

Patric Chiha’s Brothers of the Night (2016) has already focused on the world of rom male sexual workers, and I noticed that the use of fictional elements was the perfect solution to convey the hard and complex reality of people that can do little more than hold on to (more or less fictitious) dreams. Manuel Abramovich chooses an artificial setting to give a space of self-reflection to their witnesses. We face nothing but faces hearing their own voices, their own tales, which we hear correspondingly. We pay witness to the self-reflection on the witnesses, but these layers of mediation, even if they are displayed in a minimalist way, don’t put us at a distance from the reality we discover; on the contrary, the effect is even more raw and direct than seeing what we hear. We directly witness the troubles of the spirit, the consciousness that could break the dream.
Brilliant finale: we hear as one of the interviewed aggressively puts Manuel Abramovich’s procedure itself in question. In this way, the filmmaker self-reflects on the power dynamic of filmed interviews, which includes a form of prostitution, or of service, an intercourse that needs rules, fairness, respect, and reciprocity. Only a film that is able to critically reflect upon itself will balance the violence of taking the voice or the image of the filmed person.
Giuseppe Di Salvatore

At the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024

Nikola Ilic | CH 2024 | 19’ | Visions du Réel 2024

There’s something peculiar about Nikola Ilić’s found footage memoir from times of war, specifically its sedated (im)personality, both in form and narrative, as the n^th recent film about the collapse of Yugoslavia. In late adolescence at that time, the director talks about the failed attempt of serving in the army as a convinced pacifist, and eventually about his own private – but not uncommon – subterfuge: pretending to be mentally ill. Using what seems to both personal and found footage shot on VHS in the last years of the 90s, as well as institutional surveillance footage, Exit through the Cuckoo’s Nest seems distant, unremarkable, a fragmentary reminiscence of no intense feeling, particular detail or emotional tale. To some, these might be its faults. However, I found myself excited about Ilić’s approach, at a time when I’m rather unimpressed by discourses about history as epiphany or trauma. Sometimes, history is an untouchable spectacle, and the narrator? Nothing but an unreliable witness. Ilić’s way of remembering is sober, a resigned sadness free of fury or victimization, somehow similar to that popular wisdom of elders and to a “natural” way of addressing history. Complementary, the images seem nothing save a natural landscape of VHS imagery, by now unmistakably associated with political turmoil and Y2K leisure.
Calin Boto

At the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024

Alberto Gonzalez Morales | CH 2022 | 8’ | Locarno Film Festival 2022

Alberto Gonzalez Morales a réalisé Les dieux du supermarché en première année de Bachelor Cinéma à la HEAD – Genève, lors d’un atelier sur le net-footage encadré par le duo français Caroline Poggi et Jonathan Vinel. « Nous devions réaliser un court-métrage avec comme seules contraintes de traiter du thème du portrait et inclure une adresse en sous-titres ou en voix-off », m’écrit-il.
Les dieux du supermarché entremêle des vidéos trouvées sur YouTube, des images recherchées par mots-clefs et des extraits de films pornographiques...

Read the entire interview by Morgane Frund (in Filmexplorer's section «New Voices»)

At the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024

Faye Tsakas, Enrique Pedráza-Botero | USA 2022 | 15’ | Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2023

There’s a very brief moment in a boy’s life when he’s already experienced enough to fervently play-act machismo, but amateurishly so, making it seem more of a role than a dogma through his awkward, overthought interpretation. As a spectator – as well as a second-rate actor – I always wish for such a spectacle to fail, a line to be forgotten so as to overhear a reassuring boyish stammering. As such, unsurprisingly, I was greatly intrigued when watching four teenage OnlyFans models posing on a slide from a children's playground, however facile such a mise-en-scène might seem. 
In their quite academic, no-nonsense documentary about a sort of Texan brotherhood of teenage online “findoms” (financial dominators), filmmakers Faye Tsakas and Enrique Pedráza-Botero observe the interplay between the boys’ onscreen being-male and their off-screen coming-of-age. From the very first glimpse, their personas are fascinating to eyeball – and eventually worship – because they are images, faces of the fetish, incarnations of ordinary reality (they look nothing different from other boys their age) and sexual fantasy (the performance that forces reality into fulfilled desire). The taboo fetishes, even if dubbed as fantasies – sometimes almost religious – have much more to do with sexual realities: with a sense of risking realities through sexualities. Most of their clients seem to be older, rich men. 
These boys are the children of contradictions, self-made winners of a capitalism that is in itself contradictory: puritanical in principle, and hedonistic in action – as long as said action, as cinema has showed existing for decades, is conditioned by money as a narrative trope. 
However, Alpha Kings depicts a counter-narrative – the more money these boys are making (and it never seems enough), the more inactive their lives seems to become. Self-isolated in a physical and ideological enclave in the Republican suburbs of Texas, they never go farther away than just around the corner, smoking weed, eating junk food and, of course, working more and more – for easy money is addictive. There is a John Waters type of pleasure in watching them inhabiting the Texan suburbs, between Republican billboards, American flags, and people playing golf; the film works best when understood as a serious depiction of the causality between these two individualistic epochs. What has changed is that money lost its national identity and its ideological morals. Now it's just making and spending as a way of living in itself, no longer a trope but a self-consuming narrative.
Calin Boto

At the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024

Saulius Baradinskas | LTU 2021 | 18' | Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2021

How to keep a high dramatic tension without overdoing things? Saulius Baradinskas knows how, without relying on editing but by building strong characters, and an exceptional performance in long one-take scenes. A film that emotively hits like a bullet.
Giuseppe Di Salvatore

At the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024

Vytautas Katkus | LTU 2019 | 15’ | Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2019

Even when adult, coming back home remind you of the destiny of being for ever a son. Community Gardens’ dramatic peaks are all in wonderfully filmed small details. Emotive tensions remain under the surface of a normal holiday summer. A big fire and a lot of humour makes this intimist tale spicier.
Giuseppe Di Salvatore

At the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024

Jorge Cadena | CH 2022 | 15’ | Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2022, Solothurner Filmtage 2023, Whiteframe Online Series 2023

This film arises out of an urgency and efficaciously points out how queer and indigenous people suffer from the same violent discrimination in Colombia. The mixture of tradition, carnival and drag aesthetic could be seen as the Latino version of Afrofuturism, if one could not recognise how this is not a utopic matter but a burning reality. The subjective perspective, the symbolic imagery and the wonderful lively wind that breathes in Jorge Cadena’s film reveals how this reality is able to be both confrontational and empathic. 
Giuseppe Di Salvatore

At the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2024