By excess or default
by Giuseppe Di Salvatore
Aesthetic maximalism is an easy temptation in our epoch of digital hyper-availability of tools and information. I tend to consider it an obstacle for cinema which, on the contrary, needs to breathe, to take a stance, to leave room for active spectatorship. This is why I like insisting on the virtues of ellipses in film, from hors cadres to pauses; this is why I am in favour of a minimalist cinema that (artistically) chooses to reduce its tools. Nevertheless, a poetic of excess can make sense, when it conveys radical experiences, fantastic and/or disruptive, as the first three films I selected to discuss exemplify most nicely.
The tribunal and the cinema both stage, both represent. Their theatrical common essence triumphs and cracks at the same time in Dorian Jespers’ carefully designed trial in the Liverpool of the beginning of 19th century. The historical immersion is effective as well as occasional, because the Kafkian atmosphere we beat witness to is a universal category of society – especially appropriate to our current bureaucratised society. The accused is a corpse, with neither name nor past (the corpse itself will later disappear). A furious and disoriented foul of lawyers, witnesses, and spectators alternate improvised slogans and philosophical speculation on identity, nominalism, justice, but the farce never prevails on the seriousness of crime, which appears to be more and more in the act of trial itself. Is this a theatre deprived of its soul, the crime, or is a human soul, unseizable for any judgement, the silent winner of a society of losers? We don’t obtain clarity while the story plays out, merely more vagueness, but said vagueness will enhance the precise reality the film conveys. Vox populi vox Dei – the motto says – God, then, will here be a bit anarchic, a bit confused. And its cinema will wonderfully stage the sweet and cruel chaos of humanity.
Dorian Jespers | BE-FR-MKD-UK 2025 | 25’
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Her boyfriend does not like empty spaces in her face: she will reject him, an inane future father, for she is pregnant, and obsessively inspects the transformation of her body, uneasy with herself and under the pressure of society and family that impose conformist standards of woman beauty. Yuki Buma efficaciously expresses the isolation of her frustrated protagonist through a constantly mirrored animation. The voice over brings the societal factors into the films, while the image layer, with its redundant aesthetics, defines the feeling of burden in being in one’s own body. In monstrosity feminist critique finds an ally, and we can do no less than recall how Japanese yokais fundamentally mean an unresolved past. This is the burden of a patriarchal society, this is why the body and the labour of its reproduction aches as such a burden, but the yokai’s spell is made explicit, and the film works as a ritual of healing. Ms. Understoned is a coarse tale of liberation.
Yuki Buma | JAP 2024 | 11’
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Animation as a subversive art: this seems to be a shared idea by the artist duo Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña with Niles Atallah, who often collaborate together. Atallah’s film Merrimundi unfolds as a crescendo of self-generative, invasive puppets that indirectly tells the tale of Artificial Intelligence drifting away from human-controlled paths. How not to become victim of the maximalism of digital hyper-availability? Atallah appears to turn maximalism into a weapon that – as for the disturbances of noise aesthetics – disrupts control through a global proliferation of what he calls «insurgent imagination». In his own words, the «film is a flare into the unknown, defending the messy, poetic right to dream beyond conformity», it «embraces chaos as resistance», it is «a metaphysical joke with teeth».
Niles Atallah | CHL 2025 | 20’
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Sometimes the force of a story lies entirely in what doesn’t happen, in what a protagonist is not able to formulate: here, more than the hors cadres, are the “hors histoires”, so to say, that make the difference. It is the case of Charlotte in States of Lower Probability, where the director Willy Hans efficaciously focuses on the cracks of normality, empty moments of hesitations where we will feel the imminence of exceptional deeds, of states of lower probability.
The same sensitivity for those cinematic moments of hesitation engenders the force of Wang Han-Xuan’s Delay: the story of a difficult reconciliation between a homosexual father and his son, who is going abroad to marry, is less interesting for its actual unfolding than for the general emotive situation it depicts, especially because it is the older generation that is to bear the burden of a non-conformist way of living, and to do it in the position of the one who is not leaving the country (China). It is in the folds of the story, in its narrative pauses, that the naturalist style will be transfigured, and we will perceive the extraordinary presence of the protagonists. Only such strong presences can support the expression of complex situation, without turning the film illustrative.
Through a skilful mixture of documentary and fictional elements, Maryam Khatchvani also renders the presence of her familiar context in a remote village in the Georgian mountains. This is not only the occasion of denouncing the patriarchal mentality in general, but to explore its nuances: the apparent solidarity of the community and benevolence of the family, or the “inherited silence” of the women themselves. In this way, we can feel how emancipation is not just a question of acting but a slow labour that has to be processed against deeply rooted heritage.
States of Lower Probability | Willy Hans | DE 2025 | 24’
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Delay | Wang Han-Xuan | CHN 2025 | 15’
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Inherited Silence | Maryam Khatchvani | GEO 2025 | 14’
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