EXPERIMENTAL FILMS 3

Nigel Braddock

(NZL):                             

Worms Ate My Flesh

5 min.

(2021) 

trailer               

Twenty years ago, New-Zealand-born musician/filmmaker Broad Oak had a particularly vivid and disturbing dream. "I was dead and buried in the ground, yet somehow conscious," he says. "Lying there in complete darkness, I could feel worms and insects devouring my flesh and crawling through my eye sockets."

The next day he was inspired by the experience to record a piece of music but only finished it in early 2021 while recovering from covid in Berlin. "Although I didn't have a severe case, it led to me contemplating my own mortality so it felt appropriate to come back to this piece I'd started so long ago." The mesmerising animated video is a collaboration with an AI called WZRD and represents the cyclic and transformative nature of life and matter from cells to galaxies.

Carlos S. Peña

(ESP):

Hiperrealidades / Hiperreality

2 min.

(2021)

Understanding ‘hiperreality’ as an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality, this work tries to represent the seek of a memory, a longing, which finds itself within a virtual realm; a dilema about the connection between the outside and the inside, the imagination and reality.

Christopher Rohde & Kenneth Warner

(CND):

Melt

4 min. 

(2021)

trailer

Melt is a psychotropic rock spectacle with images and music by Christopher Rohde and Kenneth Warner. Extreme close-ups of butter melting in a pan metamorphose into colorful abstractions that evoke shifting through distant stellar regions, as well as the familiar comforts of a home-cooked breakfast.

Tom Bessoir & Joshua Pines

(USA):

Digits of Pi

4 min. 

(2019)

trailer

Alisa Sizykh

(UKR):

e2-e4

3 min.

(2021)

trailer

Short film-metaphor for philosophical reflections.

Joke Althaar

(HOL):

Berg

80 min. 

(2021)

trailer

Three hikers meet shortly before climbing a mountain together. They discuss their expectations briefly in voice-over. It is not until fifteen minutes later that we see them – as unrecognisable dots on the landscape. They never lose this nullifying anonymity, neither do they speak again. The protagonist here is not the people setting out to climb the mountain, but rather the mountain itself. Valleys cloaked in powdery snow, eroded rock formations and majestic peaks are all depicted in crystal-clear black and white. Here it is man who has to adapt, picking a path step by tentative step, hoping that the mountain will not block the way. Dated film footage of a rescue team suddenly interrupts the majestic flow of the silent landscape. A minimalist soundscape mixes wind, the buzzing of insects, rushing water and rolling thunder into a symphony of natural forces. Here, thoughts disappear and a connection to the earth is forged. BERG is a highly aesthetic landscape experience, with a spiritual charge.