German premiere

Austrian experimental film production over the course of recent years has been exemplary in demonstrating the irreducible specificity of analog film and in exploring new digital possibilities. On the one hand, there are masterful artists such as Martin Arnold, Gustav Deutsch, Dietmar Brehm and Peter Tscherkassky who explore the very space of the film frame. On the other hand, there is a new generation of filmmakers like Johann Lurf, an artist admirably scoping out cinematic possibilities including the visual and auditory discontinuities only digital technology can produce. Lurf intensively investigates cinema itself, film after film, capturing contemporary spaces and zones of social and political conflict utilizing various analog tools (from 16 mm to 3D). He is committed to being part of film tradition while at the same time experimenting with digital images. Some of the source material he uses is disintegrated, ready to be broken down even further, rendering new perspectives and auditory bytes. (Giulio Bursi)

During this last event of the VariaVision 2018-2019 season, we will celebrate the work of Johann Lurf with an almost full retrospective of his shorts and the German premiere of his last Cavalcade. Film by film, the artist will introduce his works, together with the film critic Jordan Cronk and VB Film Curator Giulio Bursi.

Co-curated with Jordan Cronk, in collaboration with Acropolis Cinema (L.A) and Sixpack Film.

Program:

(untitled), (2003, 3 min)
pan (2005 1 min)
Vertigo Rush (2007, 19 min)
The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dog (2009, 3 min)
Endeavour (2010, 16 min)
A to A (2011, 5 min)

Reconnaissance (2012, 5 min)
Embargo (2014, 10 min)
Twelve Tales Told (2014, 4 min)
Capital Cuba (2015, 12 min)
Cavalcade (2019, 5 min)

Johann Lurf is an artist and filmmaker, using the moving image to analyse and restructure space and film. His practice involves observational and documentary filmmaking especially in the field of structural film, as well as an approach to found footage which is strongly oriented on filmic language itself.

Born in 1982 in Vienna Johann Lurf has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and had an Erasmus term at the Slade School of Art in London in 2008. He graduated from Harun Farocki’s film class in 2009. He received the State Grant of Austria for Video and Media Art and participated in the Artist-in-Residence Programs at the MAK Center for Arts and Architecture in Los Angeles 2011, the SAIC in Chicago 2015 and in Tokyo and Rotterdam 2016 as well as in Israel in 2019. In the same year he received the Berlin Scholarship of the Akademie der Künste Berlin.

His work has been recognised with awards and is shown in numerous exhibitions, cinematheques and festivals.

Berlin premiere

An inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, Hale County this Morning, this Evening looks at the lives of Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two young African American men from rural Hale County, Alabama, over the course of five years. Collins attends college in search of opportunity while Bryant becomes a father to an energetic son in an open-ended, poetic form that privileges the patiently observed interstices of their lives. The audience is invited to experience the mundane and monumental, birth and death, the quotidian and the sublime. These moments combine to communicate the region’s deep culture and provide glimpses of the complex ways the African American community’s collective image is integrated into America’s visual imagination. In his directorial debut, award-winning photographer and director RaMell Ross offers a refreshingly direct approach to documentary that fills in the gaps between individual black male icons. Hale County This Morning, This Evening allows the viewer an emotive impression of the Historic South, trumpeting the beauty of life and consequences of the social construction of race, while simultaneously offering a testament to dreaming despite the odds.

The Berlin premiere will be followed by a Q&A with the Academy Award Nominee (Best Documentary Feature) RaMell Ross, moderated by the Volksbühne Film Curator Giulio Bursi.

Trailer

RaMell Ross is a filmmaker, photographer and writer. His photographs have been exhibited around the world and in the US most recently at a solo exhibition at Aperture Foundation in New York and in the landmark exhibition “New Southern Photography” at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans. His writing has appeared in such outlets as The New York Times, Film Quarterly and the Walker Arts Center. In 2015, he was selected as one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film" and as a New Frontier Artist in Residence at the MIT Media Lab. In 2016, he was a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, winner of an Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer's Fellowship and a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow. In 2017, he was selected for Rhode Island Foundation's Robert and Margaret Maccoll Johnson Artist Fellowship. RaMell's debut feature documentary Hale County this Morning, this Evening won a Special Jury Prize for Creative Vision at its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and has since gone on to secure international theatrical, broadcast and streaming distribution as well as garnering multiple awards at top tier film festivals. The film was nominated for two IDA awards and five Cinema Eye Honors. The film won the Gotham Award for Best Documentary and the Cinema Eye Honor for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking and is now nominated for the ICS, Independent Spirit Award and DGA Documentary Award. RaMell is currently on faculty at Brown University's Visual Arts Department and recently completed his first short film, Easter Snap, which is premiering at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Berlin Premiere

An Irish filmmaker grapples with the legacy of his estranged father, the late American documentarian Arthur MacCaig, through MacCaig's decades-spanning archive of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Drawing on over 30 years of unique and never-seen-before imagery, The Image You Missed is a documentary essay film that weaves together a history of the Northern Irish Troubles with the story of a son's search for his father. In the process, the film creates a candid encounter between two filmmakers born into different political moments, revealing their contrasting experiences of Irish nationalism, the role of images in social struggle, and the competing claims of personal and political responsibility. 



After the screening, Donal Foreman will present some unedited parts of his father’s archive during an open Q&A with the audience, moderated by the Volksbühne film curator Giulio Bursi.

Donal Foreman is an Irish filmmaker living in New York City. He has been making films since he was 11 years old. Since then, he has written, directed and edited two feature films and dozens of shorts, and presented his work at festivals including Rotterdam, the Viennale and CPH:DOX. He has been nominated for the Rising Star award at the Irish Film & TV Awards, awarded the Discovery Award from the Dublin Film Critics Circle and the Grand Prize of the Avant-Garde Competition at BAFICI. He's an alumnus of the Irish National Film School and a member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective. For more info, please visit www.donalforeman.com.

A special double projection of last Godard’s masterpiece, featuring The Image's book in its international version (original languages with English subtitles) and followed by the avant-premiere of Bildbuch, the new German version realized by the film-maker (text recorded in German by Jean-Luc Godard himself). In between the two screenings an aperitif will be offered by the Swiss Embassy Berlin.

Introduction by Sina Najafi

Switzerland 2018, 85 Min., French version with English subtitles and German version, DCP, Colour, Dolby Surround 7.1. Director: Jean-Luc Godard, Cinematographer: Fabrice Aragno, Editor: Jean-Luc Godard, Fabrice Aragno, Producers: Fabrice Aragno, Mitra Farahani, Soundtrack: Editions ECM

Do you still remember how we used to train our thoughts? Most often we’d start from a dream. We wondered how, in total darkness, colors of such intensity could emerge within us; in a soft, quiet voice, saying great things, surprising, deep and fair things. Image and discourse. It’s like a bad dream written in a stormy night. Under western eyes. Lost paradises. War is here.

With his newest film Jean-Luc Godard continues to take advantage of all his freedoms in his late works. An ecstatic stream of consciousness, an associative collage in five chapters. The longing for freedom, the depths of humanity. The beauty of cinema. Time and history, stretched out and condensed.

In cooperation with Grand Film, Schweizerische Botschaft Berlin and Institut français Berlin.

Teaser

Sina Najafi is the editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine, a Brooklyn-Berlin based non-profit quarterly magazine of art and culture. Najafi has curated or co-curated a number of exhibitions including Philosophical Toys (apexart, 2005), Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates (White Columns and Queens Museum of Art, 2005), The Museum of Projective Personality Testing (Manifesta, 2008), The Bubble (Canadian Center for Architecture, 2009), and School of Death (Family Business, 2013). He studied Comparative Literature at Princeton, Columbia, and New York University.

With: Rasha Salti, Nina Katchadourian and Tom McCarthy

Organized with Cabinet magazine, Rasha Salti and Christoph Terhechte

This evening of improvised narration and live music revives the increasingly rare tradition of live cinematic storytelling, once prevalent in countries as diverse as Japan, Korea, Senegal, Morocco, and Germany. Three performers will each devise an extemporaneous tale to accompany a different film version of The Thousand and One Nights, bringing to life the stories’ foundational figuring of narration, love, and death.

Cabinet is a non-profit magazine of art and culture founded in 1999 and based in Brooklyn and Berlin. By operating with the most expansive and inclusive definition of “culture” possible, one that ranges from the quotidian to the extraordinary, Cabinet aims to foster an ethics-driven curiosity about the world we have made and inhabit. In addition to the periodical, Cabinet also publishes books and organizes exhibitions, conferences, panels, workshops, and screenings. The magazine operates event spaces in both Brooklyn and Berlin.

Tom McCarthy (Stirling, 1969) is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award and was recently adapted for the cinema. His third, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. McCarthy is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. He contributes regularly to publications such as The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s and Artforum. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction by Yale University. He is currently a Fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme.

Nina Katchadourian is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography and public projects. In recent years, her work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennale (2015), MoMA PS1 (2016), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2016) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017). A solo survey exhibition of her work entitled "Curiouser" traveled to three museums in the United States over 2017-2018. Katchadourian splits her time between New York, where she is on the faculty of NYU Gallatin, and Berlin.

As part of tonight's performance some of the music was made in collaboration with the Berlin-based artist and musician Jee Young Sim.

During this special event, we will explore the work of the Bosnian and Berlin-Based director Dane Komljen. Together with a selection of short films related to his most recent production, the filmmaker will present an unedited film and a new commissioned audiovisual performance based upon a research he’s carrying on about the concepts of falling and uncertainty, space in between bodies and architecture as well as speculation on non-human imaginaries. Through his almost abstract and highly imaginative approach, through his cinema of hybridization of forms, Dane Komljen will re-invent the space of the Grüner Salon transforming it into a resonant garden sculpture, inviting the audience to be part of it.

Program:
Our Body (15' 2015)
Phantasiesätze (17' 2017)
Untitled (Work In Progress, 13', 2019)
As quickly as the leaves in the garden have faded (audiovisual performance)

"The footage was captured in several botanical gardens, majority of them in Mexico last year. There are a few shots taken in Brasilia a few years ago, a few shots I asked Michael Robinson to film in LA and one shot I filmed by placing a phone on a computer screen showing a man jumping from a top of a hotel into a swimming pool. I was playing with a notion of uncertainty, falling, falling on one’s knees, bending towards earth, facing soil, stones, leaves, flowers. When one tries to describe uncertainty, most likely words like chance and aleatory come to mind. They both stem from the same image, the one of dices being thrown. Latin for dice is alea, chance comes from cadere which means to fall. I used my iPhone as a dice, letting it fall, placing it onto minerals and plants, trying to film with my hands and by chance, with my hands, uncertainly. Cadence, also coming from cadere, is a sequence of four notes or chords comprising the close of a musical phrase, bringing it to a sense of completion. Die Gartenkadenzen I made are left open, offering a chance to see differently, seeing not as a man, but, perhaps, as something else.” Dane Komljen

Dane Komljen was born in 1986 in Banja Luka, SFR Yugoslavia, and is based in Berlin. He studied at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing and the Universität der Künste in Berlin. His short films have been shown and awarded at the Locarno Film Festival, IFF Rotterdam, Festival de Cannes, FID Marseille, Toronto IFF, New York FF and Sarajevo FF. All the Cities of the North, his first feature, premiered in 2016 at Locarno and was subsequently shown at over 60 festivals and venues worldwide, received a theatrical release in the USA and has been distributed online by MUBI and Grasshopper Film. Phantasiesätze, his most recent short, won tje Mantarraya Casa Wabi award at Locarno in 2017 before being shown at TIFF, NYFF, FIC Valdivia, FICUNAM, Jeonju IFF and FRONT Triennial among others. He is currently developing two new feature-length projects: A Treatise on Limnology and Desire Lines. The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London organized a complete retrospective of his work at the end of 2018.

Doors open at 7 pm
Tickets: 8 / 5 €

Co-curated with Jesse Cumming

Shooting primarily on 8mm and 16mm, with a practice informed by neorealism, documentary, and the avant-garde, over the past decade Italian-born filmmaker Anna Marziano has steadily crafted a unique, generous, and quietly miraculous body of work. This screening brings together four of Marziano's finest films, each of which effortlessly balance intellectual and formal rigour with spontaneity and beauty.

Frequently built around intimate interviews or personal reflections, the films in “The Mutability” offer dynamic portraits of individuals and understandings, variously exploring topics of violence, trauma, and adaptability (The Mutability…), the discord between a dreamlike personal sphere and external realities (La Veglia), and lives lived at the margins of society (Orizzonti Orizzonti!). The program culminates in the Berlin Premiere of Marziano’s poetic debut feature Beyond the One, an evocative examination of close relationships and distinct approaches to living together.

Program:

Orizzonti Orizzonti! [Horizons] (2014, France, 11min)
Della Mutevolezza Di Tutte Le Cose E Della Possibilita Di Cambiarne Alcune [The Mutability Of All Things And The Possibility Of Changing Some] (2011, France, 16 Min)
La Veglia [The Wake] (2010, Italy, 2 Min)
Al Di Là Dell’uno [Beyond The One] (2017, France/Italy/Germany, 53 min)

After the films: Q&A with Anna Marziano, Jesse Cumming and Volksbühne film curator Giulio Bursi

Anna Marziano (1982, Italy) is a filmmaker experimenting with the documentary form and with the association of fragments (texts, sounds, images). She dedicates great care to the process of meeting the others and the relational possibilities offered by a sound-recorder and a camera. Gathering voices and writing with the others’ words, her films question the transformations of singular/plural identities and keep traces of the experience of being in the world.

She studied filmmaking at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Rome) and Political Sciences (Padova). In 2009 she moved to France supported by the Film Commission Friuli Venezia Giulia Fellowship. She attended the Ateliers Varan (Paris) and participated in Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains (Tourcoing). Her films have screened internationally at the Toronto International Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Torino International Film Festival; Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen; Experimenta Film Festival Bangalore; Media City Film Festival, Windsor; LABoral Centro de Arte, Gijon; FRAC, Dunkerque; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus OH.

She served as a jury member for the Italiana.Doc section of the 2018 Torino Film Festival, and she ran courses at Srishti School of Art Bangalore and Univeristy of Goettingen as an invited artist. Since 2012, she is based in Berlin, Germany.

Jesse Cumming is a curator and writer based in Toronto, Ontario. He has curated, co-curated, and presented programs with The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, HANGAR (Lisbon), Pleasure Dome (Toronto), and Concordia University (Montreal). Since 2016, he has served as a Programming Associate for the Wavelengths section of the Toronto International Film Festival. His writing has appeared in Cinema Scope, The Brooklyn Rail, Prefix Photo, MUBI Notebook, C Magazine, Filmmaker, and more. He sits on the steering committee of the Toronto Film & Media Seminar and was a founding collective member of MICE Magazine, a web and print publication dedicated to Moving Image Culture, Etc.

Doors open at 7 pm
Tickets: 8 / 5 €

The Subduer was born out of a regular visit by the artist to one of the many public notary offices in Egypt. In these offices, citizens, state functionaries and legal/bureaucratic processes strain on a daily basis to continue functioning with and against each other. In the midst of these tense relationships, or maybe because of them, prayers abound. A slew of soiled and aging sheets of paper, informally pinned or taped on the walls, appear on the walls of these offices. Calling on our higher selves, our finer temperaments, our sense of forgiveness, and reminding us of the brevity of this material world, these prayers project a parallel or supplementary world-view to the highly regulated material world of these offices. Following this paper trail, Maamoun visited many public notary offices across Cairo to surreptitiously record the appearance of these prayers with the camera of her mobile phone. A photographic installation is accompanied by a publication that reflects on these prayers and their context. The title is a reference to one of the ‘99 most beautiful names of Allah’ in Islamic tradition. The Subduer will be performed live in a new version conceived for the Grüner Salon’s space.

Maha Maamoun works with text, still and moving images. She’s interested in the form, function and currency of common visual and literary images, and how they shape the cultural fabric that we weave and are weaved into. She also works collaboratively on publishing and curatorial projects, and is a founding board member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC) – a non-profit artspace founded in Cairo in 2004. In 2013, she co-founded Kayfa ta: an independent publishing initiative and book series.

Her work was shown in exhibitions and biennials including: Constructing the world: Art and economy 1919-1939 and 2008-2018 – Kunsthalle Mannheim (2018); Strange Days: Memories of the Future – Store X and New Museum (2018); The Time is Out of Joint – Sharjah Art Foundation (2016); Century of Centuries – SALT (2015); Like Milking a Stone – Rosa Santos Gallery (2015); The Night of Counting the Years – Fridricianum (2014); Here and Elsewhere – New Museum; Ten Thousand Wiles and a Hundred Thousand Tricks – Meeting Points 7; Forum Expanded – Berlinale 64; Transmediale; Objects in Mirror are Closer than they Appear, Tate Modern; 9th Gwangju Biennale; Momentarily Learning from Mega Events, Makan, Amman; Second World: Where is Progress Progressing, Steirischer Herbst; The End of Money, Witte de With; Sharjah Biennial 10; Mapping Subjectivity, MoMA; Live Cinema, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Ground Floor America, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art; The Future of Tradition/The Tradition of Future, Haus Der Kunst.

The wonderfully bizarre films of Benjamin Crotty form a welcome antidote to the doom and gloom of much contemporary film, drawing instead on absurdity, artifice and wry humour to pass oblique comment on politics, gender and society. This unique sensibility has its roots in his biography: born in Spokane, Washington, Crotty moved to France in 2003, studying at the prestigious Le Fresnoy film school before settling in Paris. His work is as well-acquainted with American pop culture and Anglo-Saxon absurdity as it is with French loquaciousness and repartee, resulting in a fascinating hybridity that also extends to the worlds his films dream up. It’s never entirely clear when and where Crotty’s films are unfolding, a feeling only amplified by his choice of format and theme. While his use of 16mm indexes the (cinematic) past and often forges an atmosphere of subtle nostalgia, his view of the world could not be more contemporary, as the underlying ridiculousness of life in France and the US alike is revealed in a wash of sly cultural references and gender fluidity. And similar fluctuations also determine the mood of his films, whereby one-liners and slapstick can easily give way to moments of introspection or even melancholy.

This last ever Roter Salon edition of VariaVision includes the German Premiere of Benjamin Crotty’s acclaimed recent short The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin (2018) accompanied by two other works, followed by an exclusive performance / reading of the script for his as-yet unfilmed second feature Ursa Major, which was co-written with filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins.
Co-curated by James Lattimer

Film Program:

Fort Buchanan (Winter), France, 2012, 13 min
Fort Buchanan forms the opening section of Crotty’s celebrated 2014 debut feature of the same name, which depicts four seasons in the lives of a group of bored French-speaking spouses at the US army base of the same name; winter turns out to be a time of intergenerational tension, sexual frustration and insatiable appetite.

Division Movement to Vungtao (co-directed with Bertrand Dezoteux), France, 2017, 4 min
Division Movement to Vungtau inserts all manner of dancing fruit into archive footage of American army manoeuvres, a deliciously silly gesture that equally highlights the absurdity of war.

The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin, France, 2018, 26 min
A prize-winner at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, the film depicts the rambling, gleefully anachronistic award acceptance speech given by the titular Chauvin, a French soldier who served in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte, gave his name to the conception of chauvinism, and may or may not have actually existed.

Performance:

Ursa Major is the story of a Mexican-American boy and an anthropomorphic bear whose immediate, irresistible attraction get tongues wagging in small town Texas. Crotty’s idiosyncratic mix of high school romance, Shakespearean drama and provocative artifice is still at the funding stage, with this reading of sections of the script by an international cast intended to give renewed attention to this unique project.

On stage: Milan Holmes, Tyrell Teschner, Benjamin Crotty, James Lattimer

Benjamin Crotty: American-born, Paris-based visual artist, writer, and director Benjamin Crotty creates 16mm narrative films about American history and military life. Crotty mixes a diverse range of genres, including documentary film, queer cinema, French art-house, and American soap operas to create these unique narratives. His first feature length film, Fort Buchanan, 2014, depicts a tragic yet comic story of a man stranded in an isolated military post while his husband carries out a mission in Djibouti. In a more recent work, Division Movement to Vungtau, 2016, Crotty and his collaborator, Bertrand Dezoteux, combine material sourced from the US National Archives with superimposed CGI animated anthropomorphic fruit. Benjamin Crotty’s work has been exhibited and screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, Tate Modern, London, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and the Biennale of Moving Images at Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève. His work has been screened at film festivals internationally, including New Directors/New Films at MoMA, Rotterdam International Film Festival, International Film Festival, Berlin, and Oslo International Film Festival.

James Lattimer is a film curator, critic, and filmmaker based in Berlin. He started working for the Berlinale Forum in 2008 and joined their selection committee in 2011. His most recent independent curation project was Porous Boundaries – New Paths Through Mexican Film, a film series put on at Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin in June 2017. His writing has appeared in Cinema Scope, Sight and Sound, Film Comment, Fireflies, Slant Magazine, MUBI's The Notebook, and Senses of Cinema. His first short film All Still Orbit, a collaboration with Dane Komljen, premiered in competition at the 2016 Rotterdam International Film Festival. He started working for the Viennale as a programme consultant in 2018.

Germany debut of the Vilnius-based filmmaker and theatre director’s first film, which was honoured at the Locarno film festival. Barzdžiukaitė will also be one of Lithuania’s representatives at the Venice Biennale in 2019. With breathtaking images that could be from a horror film, Acid Forest documents a dying forest located in the border regions between Lithuania and Russia. Followed by an artist talk with Barzdžiukaitė, Sergio Fant (Locarno International Film Festival) and Giulio Bursi.

Trailer Acid Forest

Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė (b. 1983) works as filmmaker and theatre director, based in Lithuania. She completed her MA in Screen Documentary at Goldsmiths, London (2013), BA in Cinematography (2006) and Theatre directing (2008) at Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. In her creative works, Rugile explores the gap between objective and imagined realities, while challenging an anthropocentric way of thinking in a playful way. Prior to Acid Forest, Rugile has directed four short films and two contemporary operas (Have a Good Day! and Sun and Sea), which brought 6 prestigious awards for the creative team and are still touring around the world. Rugile is one of the three artists who will represent Lithuania for the Venice Biennale of Art in 2019.

Sergio Fant is an Italian film programmer and curator, after graduating in Film Studies and following an experience as archivist and researcher at Cineteca di Bologna, he went on curating programs for several venues and festivals, collaborating with, among others, the Cinema Ritrovato festival, the Rome Film Fest and the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica in Venice, before joining in 2012 the Locarno Festival selection committee. He currently programs as well for DocPoint – Helsinki Documentary Film Festival, he is the Head of Program of the Trento Film Festival in Italy and runs the film programming and distribution platform CineAgenzia.

Chris Delforce, Dominion, 120’, Berlin premiere
English with German subtitles

The animal agriculture industry is one of the most violent and secretive institutions on the planet. Its trillion dollar profits are sustained by the public’s ignorance, and it goes to great lengths to maintain the status quo. By exploring six primary facets of our interaction with animals - Companion Animals, Wildlife, Scientific Research, Entertainment, Clothing and Food - the film will question the morality and validity of our dominion over the animal kingdom.

“In the age of fake news, corporate propaganda and repression of dissent, bringing truth to the public has become a democratic obligation. Something that none of us can afford to ignore is the plight of animals exploited for human benefit. Not only is the suffering inflicted on them deeply immoral, but the human-animal binary relegates fellow humans to inferior status. (The Trump administration's use of the word "animals" in vilifying migrant populations is just one example.) The anti-oppression work being created by conscientious people has become a beacon of hope for our society. And this is why the new documentary Dominion is so important.” (Laika Magazine, 30 May 2018)

Trailer

Half of the ticket income will be donated to Aussie Farms charity and Dominion Movement.

Before and after the projection the activists of Peta 2, Animal Rights Watch, Albert Schweitzer Stiftung für unsere Mitwelt and Proveg will set up tables with resources about animal issues. If you want to join us with a table or you want to send us material, please email our film curator Giulio Bursi here: giulio.bursi@volksbuhne-berlin.de.

With: Sir Henry and Herman Herrmann

This performative extension of the exhibition off this play (Atelier Impopulaire, Volksbühne Pavilion) is conceived as a happening to celebrate the life and work of the Swiss artist Klaus Lutz. The musicians Sir Henry and Herman Herrmann will provide a lush, faux primitive sound for the space, invoking the spirit of the Volksbühne Schmalzwald of the 90's on Solina Eminent organ and guitar throughout the evening, while the space will be invaded by multiple live projections of rare original 16mm copies of the artist’s films, screened over a series of sculptures realized by Lutz for his performances and installations.

In collaboration with the Association for the Preservation of the Works of Klaus Lutz.

With: Philip Rizk and Rasha Salti

Filmmaker Philip Rizk and curator Rasha Salti will perform an excerpt from Rizk’s film, World without Maps, still in the making. The performance will be followed by a conversation.

The film’s dramaturgy is based on the travel diary of a fictional character, named K. Ouda, a Palestinian teacher who is returning home in 1919, after having participated in the Bolshevik revolution in the nascent Soviet Union. With the Ottoman Empire coming undone, Ouda intends to take part in shaping the liberation of the Greater Syria region in a moment when communities are exploring new ways of imagining their lives.

In the performance, Salti will read a selection of Ouda’s diary entries over a wide variety of footage including excerpts from colonial archives and early Soviet-era classics including Spain (1936) by Esfir Shub, Alexander Medvedkin’s Happiness (1935) and Bread by Mykola Shpykovsky (1929). In addition, the film will feature footage shot by an anonymous visitor to Syria in 2011 and 2012, during a period of critical popular insurgency when local forms of governance emerged following the state’s withdrawal from opposition areas.

Based in actual events, the film imagines a world that could have been then and now.

Philip Rizk is a film-maker and writer based in Cairo, Egypt. He studied Philosophy and Anthropology and has been working with video since 2009. In 2010 Rizk completed the short film series Sturm, a two channel articulation that explores rural and industrial ruin in Egypt. Since 2011 Rizk has been a member of the Mosireen video collective that recently released an online archive called 858.ma. In 2015 Rizk and Jasmina Metwaly co-directed the feature film "Out on the Street", in which they engage with performativity and theatre in a film featuring non-professional actors using the factory as a microcosm of Egypt leading up to the January 25 revolt. The film premiered at the Berlinale 2015 and was a part of the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2015. Rizk's texts have appeared in various collected volumes including "2011 is not 1968: a letter to an onlooker" in Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in the Middle East and North Africa and "fear the everyday state" in Stubborn State part part of the collaborative writing series Emotional Architecture. In 2016 Rizk’s audio installation “A Colonial Landscape,” a reading of a travel diary through Palestine, accompanied Tobias Zielony’s photography exhibition of the same name at Fotohof, Salzburg in November 2015. Rizk and Metwaly’s 2017 lecture performance “On Trials” explores performativity within the legal realm. Rizk is currently working on a fictional travel film placed in the period that engages with two periods in Greater Syria’s history, prior to the establishment of the state and following the Syrian state’s partial withdrawal starting the end of 2011. His text “An affront to ettiquette” reflects on the process of the making of the film. Since 2016 Rizk has been teaching film part-time at the American University in Cairo.

Un-Spoken
Un-Spoken is a series of conversations, presentations and performances with Arab artists and filmmakers, based in Germany and Europe, that proposes to explore practice, process, language based on the artist or filmmaker's on-going projects. Inverting the conventional artist or filmmaker talk, the encounter offers a roundabout approach looking at un-making, un-veiling and un-speaking. It is co-presented by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture- AFAC (in the framework of the Arab European Creative Platform) and Volksbühne (in the framework of VariaVision series), and co-curated by Rasha Salti and Giulio Bursi.

LaborBerlin presents a selection of recent films and performances made by individual artists working within a collective context. These works give testimony to the value of individual freedom achieved through collaboration, solidarity and mutual support.

LaborBerlin e.V is a nonprofit, independent film collective, open to every individual interested in artist-run initiatives and especially in analogue film practice, which embraces a more experimental and D.I.Y., craft approach to film production. The Lab is a meeting point of exchange and engagement of ideas and experiences around filmic creation.

Every new member is introduced to the lab and has the opportunity to learn how to use its facilities, in order to autonomously pursue personal projects. In addition, LaborBerlin e.V., independently or in collaboration with other artist-run collectives or institutions, organizes screenings that explore different themes and holds regular workshops teaching various technical aspects of analogue film production.

Program:

Bernd Lützeler – Digital Rituals in the Analogue Cloud
8 min (single channel Super-8 with Guido Möbius playing live music)

Björn Speidel – Tree Again
2–8 min (3x 16mm with live sound)

Sophie Watzlawick – Sans Lune with prelude
12 min (single channel 16mm)

Laurence Favre – Resistance
11 min (single channel 16mm)

Luisa Greenfield – Imago Mundi
6 min (single 16mm with live performance lecture)

Natalia Fentisova – Soul
1 min (single channel 16mm)

Katrin Eissing & Melina Pafundi – Gedenken
9 min (single channel 16mm)

Johnny Welch – Discharge Working II
5 min (single channel 16mm)

Anja Dornieden & Juan David Gonzalez Monroy – The Hot & the Cold
25 min (16mm, slide projection, fog with live sound)

Q&A w/ Juan David Gonzalez Monroy & Luisa Greenfield

Busenvolk (analog trash punk band from Berlin)
20 min (expanded concert)

For this special event curated by Atelier Impopulaire for VariaVision, the Berlin-Based cult artist and musician Black Cracker will perform a new episode of his Mirror Test series, followed by a new multimedia performance by the Los Angeles based film-maker Ben Russell, both conceived for the space of the Roter Salon. During the evening will be screened a selection of Russell’s "apocalyptic films” which became the starting point for the two commissioned works.

Programme:

Black Cracker, Mirror Test 13 (live spoken words, video and sound performance)
Ben Russell, Ponce de León (co-directed w/Jim Drain) (26.00, HD, color, sound, 2012)
Ben Russell, Greetings to the Ancestors (29:00, Super16mm, color, sound, 2015)
Ben Russell, We Always Lived in the End Times (live video and sound performance)

Mirror Test 13
Of no concern,
Under belly.
so to say: I Can Not Speak Clearly

Mirror Test are a series of site specific performative poems through which Black Cracker encourages and documents failures accumulated during the process of challenging points and breaking. These preparation serves as the uncensored stream of conscious culminating in distraught moments of aversion, and experimentation.

More meditation then mainstage in its function, Mirror Tests explore the challenges of misrepresentation, expectation and implicit negation as provoked thru the perfrial elements surrounding each staging. The poem are the receipts of construct and conflict resolved and then presented.

Eliminating the body and primarily utilizes sound, text and film Mirror Test 13 is a response to Ben Russell’s apocalyptic films, exploring more specifically ending, anxiety, and the artist own thoughts on genre, labels, and (class)ification.

The psychedelic ethnographic cinema of Ben Russell — filmmaker, artist, curator — challenges conventions of documentary representation from within, to produce intense, hypnotic and hallucinating experiences between experimental cinema and a form of speculative ethnography.

During the first of the two nights (29.06.) of total immersion in his work, Ben Russell will present a selection of his most rare short films followed by "Black and White Gods", an expanded cinema performance which can be considered a "classic", never presented in Berlin. Screenings and performance will be followed by a conversation with film-maker and Labor Berlin’s collective member Anja Dornieden and Giulio Bursi.

The second night (30.06.), the artist will perform in a new multimedia piece conceived for the space of the Roter Salon and commissioned by Atelier Impopulaire, followed by a new performance by the cult Berlin-based artist and musician Black Cracker. The evening will be introduced by a selection of Russell’s "apocalyptic films”.

Programme:

Black and White Trypps Number One (6:30, 16mm, B/W, silent, 2005)
Black and White Trypps Number Two (8:00, 16mm, B/W, silent, 2006)
Black and White Trypps Number Three (12:00, 35mm, color, sound, 2007)
Black and White Trypps Number Four (10:30, 16mm, B/W, sound, 2008)
Trypps #5 (Dubai) (3:00, 16mm, silent, 2008)
Trypps #6 (Malobi) (12:00, 16mm, 2009)
Trypps #7 (Badlands) (10:00, Super16mm, 2010)
River Rites (11:30, Super16mm, 2011)
+ Surprise
Black & White Gods (live film and sound performance)

Using a short segment of Russell's early ethnographic film Daumë as its foundation, this double-projection performance employs a variety of 16mm film loops, hand-built electronics, prismatic lenses, and analog components to create an audiovisual feedback loop that edges steadily towards the phenomenological. With echoes of Tony Conrad's The Flicker and William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, The Black and the White Gods seeks to interrogate the possibility of representation via the abstracted field of bodily experience.

In collaboration with Fireflies and MUBI

Programme:
Excerpts from Albert Serra’s [Liberté film] (work in progress)
Discussion with Albert Serra, Alain Guiraudie and Fireflies editor Giovanni Marchini Camia to follow the presentation.

The discussion is in English and French with English live translation.

Across the last two decades, France’s Alain Guiraudie and Catalonia’s Albert Serra have emerged as two of the most singular, invigorating and celebrated voices in European cinema. Employing their own idiosyncratic aesthetics, Guiraudie and Serra are guided by a kindred interest in storytelling, one energised by the use of myth and the spirited creation of utopic spaces in which to tease at the sensuous borders of the real and the fantastical, the spiritual and the material.

Over two special evenings with the filmmakers, we consider the treatment of myth in their work. On the 1st June we start with Guiraudie’s breakthrough film, That Old Dream That Moves (2001), a subtly political and profoundly melancholy meditation on sexual desire and the passing of time, wherein a young worker arrives at an industrial factory in its final days of operation, catching the eyes of the other, older workers. The programme continues the following evening with a presentation of excerpts from Serra’s current work in progress, [Liberté film], a filmic adaptation of his own play Liberté. Both works will be explored and expanded upon through on-stage discussions between the filmmakers together with the founding editors of Fireflies, probing their respective conceptions of cinematic myth-making.

In accordance with these events, the streaming service MUBI will programme Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013) and Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV (2016), which will be available to stream for a month starting on the 27th of May, respectively, thus offering attendees the chance to delve further into the filmmakers’ work ahead of the discussions. To watch these films, attendees are invited to sign up for a month-long free trial here: www.mubi.com/fireflies

Albert Serra, [Liberté film] , work in progress
Albert Serra’s play Liberté, first staged at the Volksbühne in February 2018, centres around a group of libertines who meet every night in the woods “somewhere between Potsdam and Berlin” to give free rein to their wildest sexual urges. Set in 1774, at the eve of the French Revolution, the play stages a clash between virtue and libertinage, depicting a Europe on the cusp of radical change. Serra is currently filming an adaptation of the play and he will present exclusive excerpts from this work-in-progress at the Roter Salon on the 2nd of June.

Fireflies is a print film magazine created between Berlin and Melbourne, founded in 2014. Each issue assembles an international group of writers and visual artists to celebrate the work of two extraordinary filmmakers through a curated assembly of creative works—hybrid essays, short fiction, poetry, visual art, and all spaces in between. Issue #6 dedicated to Alain Guiraudie and Albert Serra will be published in September 2018. www.firefliesmagazine.com

MUBI is a hand-curated cinema streaming and download service. Instead of offering thousands of films, MUBI proudly present just 30. Every single one chosen by a human, not an algorithm. Cult classics to award-winning masterpieces, forgotten gems to festival-fresh independent releases. Every day new selection is added, and every day the oldest one is removed. MUBI is available globally.

In collaboration with Fireflies and MUBI

Programme:
Alain Guiraudie, Ce vieux rêve qui bouge (That Old Dream That Moves), 51’, 2001
Discussion with Alain Guiraudie and Fireflies editor Annabel Brady-Brown to follow the screening.

The discussion is in English and French with English live translation.

Across the last two decades, France’s Alain Guiraudie and Catalonia’s Albert Serra have emerged as two of the most singular, invigorating and celebrated voices in European cinema. Employing their own idiosyncratic aesthetics, Guiraudie and Serra are guided by a kindred interest in storytelling, one energised by the use of myth and the spirited creation of utopic spaces in which to tease at the sensuous borders of the real and the fantastical, the spiritual and the material.

Over two special evenings with the filmmakers, we consider the treatment of myth in their work. We start with Guiraudie’s breakthrough film, That Old Dream That Moves (2001), a subtly political and profoundly melancholy meditation on sexual desire and the passing of time, wherein a young worker arrives at an industrial factory in its final days of operation, catching the eyes of the other, older workers. The programme continues the following evening with a presentation of excerpts from Serra’s current work in progress, [Liberté film], a filmic adaptation of his own play Liberté. Both works will be explored and expanded upon through on-stage discussions between the filmmakers together with the founding editors of Fireflies, probing their respective conceptions of cinematic myth-making.

In accordance with these events, the streaming service MUBI will programme Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013) and Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV (2016), which will be available to stream for a month starting on the 27th of May, respectively, thus offering attendees the chance to delve further into the filmmakers’ work ahead of the discussions. To watch these films, attendees are invited to sign up for a month-long free trial here: www.mubi.com/fireflies

Alain Guiraudie, Ce vieux rêve qui bouge (That Old Dream That Moves), 51’, 2001
Alain Guiraudie’s cult film That Old Dream That Move was hailed as ‘the film of the festival’ by Jean-Luc Godard when it premiered in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in 2001. Lust-filled and lustrous, it depicts the final days of a rural factory whose machines are being dismantled and shipped out, while the men are left behind. A young specialist is hired to take apart one of the machines and his youthful presence awakens the desires of the factory’s supervisor and one of the elderly workers, giving rise to an erotically charged triangle of frustrated longings. By never leaving the confines of the factory, the film constructs a mythical space where sex and politics intermingle in an elegiac salute to utopian ideals. French with English subtitles.

Fireflies is a print film magazine created between Berlin and Melbourne, founded in 2014. Each issue assembles an international group of writers and visual artists to celebrate the work of two extraordinary filmmakers through a curated assembly of creative works—hybrid essays, short fiction, poetry, visual art, and all spaces in between. Issue #6 dedicated to Alain Guiraudie and Albert Serra will be published in September 2018. www.firefliesmagazine.com

MUBI is a hand-curated cinema streaming and download service. Instead of offering thousands of films, MUBI proudly present just 30. Every single one chosen by a human, not an algorithm. Cult classics to award-winning masterpieces, forgotten gems to festival-fresh independent releases. Every day new selection is added, and every day the oldest one is removed. MUBI is available globally.

In collaboration with Acropolis Cinema

Program:
Luise Donschen, Unedited Excerpts from Casanovagen, HD, Colour, 12’, 2018
Helena Wittmann, Drift, 2K, Colour, 95’, 2017
Helena Wittmann and Luise Donschen in conversation with Jordan Cronk and Giulio Bursi

All films are in German and English with English Subtitles

> Interview with Luise Donschen about Casanovagen, mubi.com, 22.05.2018
> Interview with Helene Wittmann about Drift, mubi.com, 22.05.2018

Born just months apart and less than 600 kilometers from one another, Germany’s Helena Wittmann and Luise Donschen have recently emerged as two of the most exciting young filmmakers of their generation. Friends and frequent collaborators, Wittmann and Donschen are guided by a similar cinematic philosophy, one predicated on the image and its capacity for revealing experiential truths. Their debut features, Casanovagen and Drift – official selections of the Berlin and Ven ice film festivals, respectively – represent the fullest expression of their complementary yet distinct methodologies to date.

In this second of two evenings with the filmmakers, the program will be opened by an unedited scene from Donschen’s first feature Casanovagen and featuring John Malkovich, followed by Drift, the astonishing Wittmann’s debut of 2017 never presented in Berlin.

After the projection, a Q&A with Helena Wittmann, Luise Donschen, film critic Jordan Cronk and Volksbühne Film Curator Giulio Bursi.

Helena Wittmann, Drift, DCP 2K on HD, Colour, 95’, 2017 - Berlin premiere
“Written with Theresa George, fastens together an assemblage of moving still lives about the sea, moving pictures matched in mood and motivation by Nika Breithaupt’s transfixing sound design and music. These are still lives about two people called to travel across the ocean — to family, to uncertain futures, to, by detours, one another. These are still lives, too, about the sea and our senses of it: about the ocean’s coastal clamor, about the mythic murmur and rumble of the maritime, about the rise and fall of waves unfurling at frequencies long and short. In Drift, people, water, and waves all emerge as diffracting patterns.” (Stefan Helmreich)

Two women spend a weekend together at the North Sea. Walks on the beach, fish buns at a snack stand, mobile weather forecasts. Sky, horizon, water. One of them will soon return to her family in Argentina, whereas the other one will try to come a step closer to the ocean. She travels to the Caribbean and the unknown makes her vulnerable. Then, the land gets out of sight. On a sailing vessel she crosses the Atlantic Ocean. One wave follows the other, they never resemble. Thoughts go astray, time leaves the beaten track and the swell lulls to deep sleep. The sea takes over the narration. And when she reappears, the wind is still in her hair while the ground beneath her feet is solid. She returns and the other one could ask: „Have you changed?“

With Drift I have tried to translate our own motivations and experiences into a cinematic form. We actually have lived the stories we are telling. It was painful to watch Josefina pack her belongings while the camera was rolling. We were aware that she would leave soon after, while the sounds and images would remain. Today, the Atlantic Ocean lies between us. We lived this film with everything we have. It is about states of being, spaces, emotions and movements. But all of these are complex subjects in themselves. Trying to approach these subjects by choosing to face an abstract entity like the sea, seems actually pretty delirious. In the best sense of the word. For sure, the sublime of the ocean cannot be denied. Something will always stay beyond our means of understanding and grasping in whole. I think that is quiet reassuring.

Trailer Drift

Luise Donschen was born in Berlin in 1982. She studied Anthropology, German Philology and Film in Hamburg and Belgrade. She graduated in 2012 from the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Her graduation film GIVE ME BACK MY OWN PICTURE PERFECT MEMORY! was screened at film festivals internationally. CASANOVA GENE is her debut film.

Helena Wittmann was born on 5th of October in 1982 in Neuss, Germany. Originally studying Spanish and Media Studies in Erlangen and Hamburg, she went on to attend Te Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK), where she graduated in 2014. Her works, including the short flms WILDNIS (2013) and 21,3°C (2014), were shown internationally in exhibitions and flm festivals. For her frst feature flm DRIFT, she collaborated closely with anthropologist Teresa George and musician Nika Breithaupt.

Jordan Cronk is a film critic and programmer based in Los Angeles. He founded Acropolis Cinema, a screening series for experimental, international, and undistributed films, in January 2016, and is co-director of the Locarno in Los Angeles film festival, now in its second edition. He’s a regular contributor to Cinema Scope, Film Comment, and Sight & Sound, and writes a monthly column on Los Angeles repertory cinema for the Hollywood Reporter. His writing has also been published by Frieze, BOMB, the Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition to his work with Acropolis and Locarno in Los Angeles, Jordan does freelance programming for the American Cinematheque in Hollywood. He served on the inaugural Signs of Life jury at the 70th Locarno Festival.

In collaboration with Acropolis Cinema

Born just months apart and less than 600 kilometers from one another, Germany’s Luise Donschen and Helena Wittmann have recently emerged as two of the most exciting young filmmakers of their generation. Friends and frequent collaborators, Donschen and Wittmann are guided by a similar cinematic philosophy, one predicated on the image and its capacity for revealing experiential truths. Their debut features, Casanovagen and Drift–– official selections of the Berlin and Venice film festivals, respectively – represent the fullest expression of their complementary yet distinct methodologies to date.

In this first of two evenings with the filmmakers, the program will feature a new sound piece created by the artists especially for this event, followed first by Wittmann’s 2014 short 21,3° C, a clever and beautiful meditation (starring Donschen) on the moving image’s ability to capture and reformulate time, and continuing with Donschen’s feature-length hybrid Casanovagen, a playful investigation of desire (shot on seductively textured 16mm by Wittmann) that articulates the essential inscrutability of its subject through everyday absurdities related to sexuality, ornithology, religion, and the art of representation itself, embodied in an unknowing cameo by the actor John Malkovich. Formally daring and thought provoking, the films of Donschen and Wittman propose a new way of approaching and considering the image that’s as intuitive as it is deliberate.

Q&A with Luise Donschen, film critic Jordan Cronk and Volksbühne Film Curator Giulio Bursi to follow the screening.

Program:
Luise Donschen and Helena Wittman, OFF, sound performance
Helena Wittman, 21,3° C, 16mm, colour, 16’, 2014
Luise Donschen, Casanovagen, HD, colour, 67’, 2018

All films are in German and English with English subtitles

Luise Donschen and Helena Wittman, OFF, sound performance
The OFF is the space of the invisible. It is a promise. On its border with the concrete of the image, tension or great disappointment can arise. It can be understood as an invitation to the viewer. The picture foreshadows it and the sound is its ambassador.

Helena Wittman, 21,3° C, 16mm, colour, 16’, 2014
A window.
An opposite window facade.
A room. Flowers.
Luise and a phone call.
An action scene.
A construction site.
A musician.
The room temperature is 21,3°C.
The image of a room, its appearance changing with the shades of light. A window front, seen through the window. Changing flower arrangements on a side table. Sounds, entering the room from outside the frame. A construction site hints at changes in the exterior. Rehearsals. Are the sound waves of the piano reaching us from downstairs or from next door? In 21.3°C Helena Wittmann reduces the filmic elements to the essentials: light, shadow, sound, direction. Out of this minimum, stories emerge that linger, atmospheres that resonate. Little by little the viewer is thrown back upon herself/himself. Through the facing window front someone seems to look back at us. Only the temperature remains the same.

Luise Donschen, Casanovagen, HD, colour, 67’, 2018
A person enters the frame dressed up as a bird. In a dressing room, John Malkovich sheds the costume of Casanova. A young woman's skirt is just as orange as the beak of a zebra finch singing in a cage. White lilies stand at the foot of a statue of the Virgin Mary, red roses in front of the window of an SM studio. There the quiet game of submission in exchange for money, in a museum an embrace, a poem whispered in the ear. Children playing in a forest in autumn. A forest in summer, framed by light. An orgasm and a dance. CASANOVA GENE is a film about desire.

Luise Donschen was born in Berlin in 1982. She studied Anthropology, German Philology and Film in Hamburg and Belgrade. She graduated in 2012 from the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Her graduation film GIVE ME BACK MY OWN PICTURE PERFECT MEMORY! was screened at film festivals internationally. CASANOVA GENE is her debut film.

Helena Wittmann was born on 5th of October in 1982 in Neuss, Germany. Originally studying Spanish and Media Studies in Erlangen and Hamburg, she went on to attend Te Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK), where she graduated in 2014. Her works, including the short flms WILDNIS (2013) and 21,3°C (2014), were shown internationally in exhibitions and flm festivals. For her frst feature flm DRIFT, she collaborated closely with anthropologist Teresa George and musician Nika Breithaupt.

Jordan Cronk is a film critic and programmer based in Los Angeles. He founded Acropolis Cinema, a screening series for experimental, international, and undistributed films, in January 2016, and is co-director of the Locarno in Los Angeles film festival, now in its second edition. He’s a regular contributor to Cinema Scope, Film Comment, and Sight & Sound, and writes a monthly column on Los Angeles repertory cinema for the Hollywood Reporter. His writing has also been published by Frieze, BOMB, the Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition to his work with Acropolis and Locarno in Los Angeles, Jordan does freelance programming for the American Cinematheque in Hollywood. He served on the inaugural Signs of Life jury at the 70th Locarno Festival.

Luke Fowler, Country Grammar (with Sue Tompkins), UK, 2017, 16mm transferred to digital, 18’ (German Premiere)
Sue Tompkins, Country Grammar (2003-2017), live performance in conjunction with the film screening

Based on Sue Tompkins’s first and never repeated solo performance ‘Country Grammar’ (2003), this special collaboration between the two Glasgow based artists has produced a new film shot by Luke Fowler. The film is comprised of fleeting and spontaneous material shot in summer 2017 - at a recording studio, in public gardens, at home and around the streets where the artists' live. It introduces a new project by the British performer, which invites filmmakers and artists to respond with their own visual material to her historical performance pieces. The sound and image are combined through the editing, bringing new associations and meanings to the original performance text. Especially for VariaVision, Sue Tompkins will perform ‘Country Grammar’ live in front of the screening of the film.

Luke Fowler, Electro-Pythagorus: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett, UK/Can, 2017, 16mm transferred to HD, 45’

With his last film, Luke Fowler pays tribute to the work and musical ideas of Martin Bartlett, an experimental Canadian composer influenced by David Tudor and John Cage who during the 1970s and 1980s pioneered the use of the ‘microcomputer’. The life and work of the highly influential, yet little known, composer “is resurrected in this lovingly constructed biographical essay. Archival footage finds Bartlett at home, at work, and onstage, while voiceover readings of the proudly out artist’s reflections on his place in the era’s gay community convey a sense of intimate, holistic personal history.” (NY Film Festival). Bartlett, who died in 1993 of AIDS-related causes, made an important and original contribution to the development of live electronic music. Working both with theatrical and mixed media environments, he devised elegant and open interactions for instrumental performers and computer-controlled synthesizers.