Competition 2: Brief Recognitions

It is May 6th, 2023, the day of the Coronation of King Charles III in London, and a young man calls Emergency Medical Services claiming the whole thing is making him feel unwell. “Thronebosis” imagines this scenario, making use of manipulated news footage of the day’s events mixed with animation to illustrate the man’s concerns in a punk-infused poetic form.

Exo Gestus #2 is an experimental animation exploring the way that motion capture sensors incorrectly track my body. It is an amalgamation of the glitches that occur from tracking my movements while wearing a MOCAP suit that is too big for my body. The suit is designed for a bigger body than mine. My body is too small even for the smallest size that the company makes – pointing to the way that small bodies are not accounted for in the tech industry. Because of this, my body size by default creates glitches within the MOCAP data tracks. Rather than correct it, I embrace the glitches of a body that cannot be fully captured. I embrace the glitches and dance for the sensors.

A young woman’s inner voice unfolds.
Successively erased, covered over, she recounts intimate moments of her life.
As the story emerges, and through the unspoken, a portrait of her relationship with a little too close friend takes shape.

How do we relate to the concept of climate catastrophe on a personal level? The filmmaker draws a parallel between various threats of climate change and her own visceral and emotional experience of grieving after an immense and sudden loss, questioning her capacity to care about humanity yet nonetheless showing a glimmer of hope for the future.

A sensorial experience of men in nature.

The One Close to the Sea shows the immersion of a filmmaker in a Scottish landscape. Not a narrative representation of what happens on the surface of this landscape, but the search for a simple rhythm, that lies underneath this landscape and makes up its essence. This is not a search for any landscape, but for that mode of being, that is essential to “all” landscape. A search for what transforms mere place, into landscape. The rhythm of the land; light, movement, sound. The action of warm colours gives way to a deeper molecular game, that precedes all surface action. Not the violence of lightning, but the silent force of a charged cloud. Not a hymn of praise for nature, but an icy breath that is the direct expression of this nature. Not the chaos of a forest in bloom, but the simplicity of a bare landscape. The camera seeks to move at this level, at this rhythm, a rhythm that is not only the essence of nature, but also the essence of cinema. Light, movement, sound. The film shows how the earth breaths. Perhaps, this is the breath of cinema.

The upper image in this film is a single shot underneath a road bridge where it crosses over a river. The images in the lower sequence are close-up shots of the surface of the water under the bridge. They are arranged in no particular order, and their appearance may be reminiscent of abstract paintings.

The film explores the idea of invisible images in landscape which the British painter Paul Nash wrote about in a Country Life magazine article in May 1938: “The landscapes I have in mind are not part of the unseen world in the psychic sense, nor are they part of the Unconscious. They belong to the world that lies, visibly, about us. They are unseen merely because they are not perceived; only in that way can they be regarded as invisible.”

A visual and sonic journey through the rural-urban landscape of northern Portugal, where door handles stand out as key elements of its identity and character.
Accompanied by the sound design of Marco Maril, the piece highlights the hidden beauty and distinctive value of these everyday objects.
The images, captured in locations such as Viana do Castelo, Ponte de Lima, Esposende, Barcelos, Vila Praia de Âncora, Caminha, Póvoa de Varzim, and Vila do Conde, invite us to reflect on the uniqueness of this Portuguese microlandscape.

What is Sound?
What is Music?
…what is Rain?

Between drug addiction, first discoveries of sexuality and a permanent state of war, the filmmaker searches for her lost youth by wandering the streets of Jerusalem.