All Films in Competition

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.

No. 28 is a film version of the animation installation composed of the fading remains of the director’s childhood memories without overt or linear narrative structure. The hand-drawn animations of fragmentary memories with different temporal, spatial, and narrative qualities suspend the chronological development of events and their immediate interpretation. The perception of No. 28 is kinaesthetic, which depends on walking between projections in the gallery space or moving the eyes between frames on the film screen. Through the back-and-forth movement between discrete pictures, their concepts blend into each other, revealing the memory of innocent childhood life in a remote, peaceful environment against the surrounding political affairs of post-revolutionary Iran.

Based on the themes of loss and grief through dementia, Potter’s Mirror symbolically represents the internal structures of the mind. We follow the daily activities of the Watchman as he tends to his memories and nurtures new emerging ideas. All is well until a deterioration of the environment forces him to escape through the window.

A waitress goes about her daily routine serving coffee whilst having thoughts of escaping her reality. A costumer is constantly recording and listening back to the surrounding sounds of the café and is completely fixated by this task. Apathy is a condition that leads consciousness into stagnation, but do either of them realise that they are themselves examples of this condition?

REVERSAL combines images and sounds from movies released or broadcast in 1973, the year the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade. In the strange new reality ushered in by the Dobbs decision, the slogan “We won’t go back” is recalled with bitter irony. This collage piece evokes the spectre of regression and repression that has followed the Court’s decision.

The music video for Black Taffy’s Riding Day is a loving nod to British experimental filmmaker Malcom Le Grice’s 1970 film Berlin Horse, an iconic work of Structural/Materialist filmmaking that featured a soundtrack by Brian Eno. Like that film, this film is an exploration of the material qualities of celluloid film in ways that are analogous to gestures in electronic music. Just as Black Taffy has sampled and reworked the soundtrack for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to create a new musical composition, this film samples and reworks images from its sequel Tears of the Kingdom, translating the interactive game world into a physical form. Similar to the way Eno’s tape loops fall in and out of sync with one another, the images of Link’s horse are made into loops that superimpose positive on top of negative and allow them to drift away from each other.

An astronaut in love orbits around the sun absorbing its energy. But the sun is too big, causing their connection to break, and the astronaut must continue on his own. As he tries to return to his source of energy, he realizes there are others like him. What started out as a game, slowly turns into a love triangle. Shapes change, but their needs remain the same.

By projecting our sense of self into intangible, conceptual representations while neglecting our transparent senses, we are risking becoming disembodied, two dimensional. In our virtual worlds we may be gaining certain kind of freedoms, but at the same time we are sacrificing the profound depth of human experience, one that is fundamental to our wellbeing, as previous examples showed us. In our obsession to chase “other worlds”, we are choosing a voluntary exile from the flesh of reality, enamoured instead with surface and appearance. Floating in cyberspace, we are becoming lost, disoriented, no longer fully active agents enmeshed in the fabric of reciprocity, responsibility and interaction, enacted on our common ground. Our pain may be reduced but so is our joy. The more disembodied our world becomes the less meaningful it is. With our diminishing sensory skills, we are simultaneously weakening our ability to access our own emotional worlds, thus also losing our ability to understand and empathise with each other.