Festival Hightlights

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PRESS RELEASE JUNE -JOHN THOMSON EAI
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"Ligne Verte" by Laurent Mareschal 4:00

A panning shot follows a wall-painting. This trompe l'oeil paintingactually represents the landscape behind the wall. A wall recently built in Jerusalem ...

Perpetual Motion in the Land of Milk and Honey
AL + AL Dur. 6' 22"

AL and AL's Grandfather is a retired engineer and inventor. The film simulates his lifelong endeavour to create a perpetual motion device and supply free power for the people. During a telephone call with the Lamb of God, Britney Spears sabotages the project and sets in motion her own drive for infinity.

"The Very Thought Of You" by Karl Hunter

The artist is filmed for a few seconds each day over a number of weeks, each day holding up the front page of the daily newspaper. He is seated in front of a mural which changes each day in accordance with the changing front -page news. He sings the pop song 'The Very Thought of You' and as the song progresses, the lyrics of the song replace the words of the newspaper headlines. He doesn't shave or cut his hair for the duration of the film. The footage is cut down and edited to simulate two and a half minutes of continuous action. The film utilises the pop song's sentimental take on romantic obsession in combination with an idea of the heroic cult of adversity.

"Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker" by Stefan Mueller

Disturbed by the loud music of one of his neighbours, Mr. Schwartz calls the police. But initially the officer cannot ascertain anything... Then the film starts again from the view of every tenant and allows the spectator to see what really happened in every apartment: the history of a butterfly-effect.

"Leviathan" by Simon Bogojevic Narath

...who is the creature built from people?

Why is it wearing a crown and what is it doing with a pastoral in one hand and a sword in the other?How come people shake hands with skeletons and stones obediently pile up, forming a pedestal for a golden statue?What's more, why are petals, of all things, swirling within streams of grey smoke?Jerky but smiling characters from this short film will take the audience through this animated p a geant inspired by a book by Thomas Hobbes called "The Leviathan", written in 1651.You've guessed it...It all about what happens... when shit hits the fan!

Bankok Experimental Film Festival selection

The Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (BEFF) was first organised in 1996 by Project 304 and The Thai Film Foundation to promote the work of young artists, and video/filmmakers in Thailand and Southeast Asia . The Festival aims to create an alternative cinematic experience for audiences by presenting works from local and international perspectives.

This year's theme is Bangkok Democrazy, focusing on ideas of democracy and featuring 340 videos and films. Sharing concerns of inclusion, participation and freedom of expression, the organisers sought to apply a democratic ideology in which audiences were encouraged to express their opinions, beliefs, and what they wanted to see, hear and experience.

The Tsunami Program screening at Darklight 2006 is in collaboration with Office of Contemporary Art & Culture, Ministry of Culture, Thailand

Still image is from "Ghost of Asia" by Apichatpong Weerasethakul & Christelle Lheureux

"Past and Future Self" by Austin Houldsworth

Exploring the parallels between an expanding/contracting universe and human development.

Martyrs, Myths and Metaphors by Ronnie Close

This work is a documentary body of work investigating the role of the martyr myth in Irish republicanism and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The phenomenon of this connection emerges from the 1981 IRA hunger strike led by Bobby Sands. In Iran he was perceived as a revolutionary and iconic martyr and this correlation can be evidenced in the symbolic renaming of a Tehran street in his honour.

The Iranian acknowledgement of Bobby Sands as a martyr forms an aperture into the tradition of Irish republican martyrdom and forms an intriguing connection.

His martyrdom signifies a psychological reordering of defeat and is an abstraction from reality. The legitimatisation of the Irish republican cause through death is an obsession with blood sacrifice.

The film presented here offers a fragmented insight into the world of the martyr and the role of their myth in the formation of a cultural identity.

Video Variations: Artists' Experiments with the Video Image

In association with the Arts Council's Critical Voices programme 2006

John Gerrard in public interview with John Thomson, Electronic Arts Intermix, New York

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is one of the world's leading non-profit resources for video art and interactive media. John Thomson has been active in media arts on an international level since the 1980s and has been Director of Distribution at EAI since 2000. During this public interview he will discuss issues surrounding distribution and selling of moving image work as well as issues on archiving video and media art.

Screening of a selection of work from EAI's catalogue and archive

Artists working with video have often manipulated images they have shot or found to produce new contexts, meanings, and effects. The works in this programme re-present original materials in ways that enthral, disturb, and entertain. They undermine our expectations of the behaviour of moving images, placing in relief the elements of contemporary film and TV that we take for granted: character, narrative, figure, scene, and tempo. Spanning four decades, this collection includes work from Steina and Woody Vasulka, Dara Birnbaum, Peggy Ahwesh and Shana Moulton.

Image credit:

Shana Moulton. "Feeling Free with 3D Magic Eye Poster Remix," 2004. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York .

"Tyttönen -The Young Girl" by Fabian Giessler   Finland/Germany 2006   Student Production   05:03 Min.      

A young girl is sitting in a room. While she walks on the floor to ask who wants to play with her she recognizes only old people hanging around the tables. Suddenly a man arrives and calls her "mother". This is a short movie inspired by the fate of the filmmaker's grandmother who got ill with Alzheimers. This little movie tells the story of how different we can see old people and the handling of their illness.

"Columbarium" by Tony Kenny

Columbarium is a pseudo-documentary, set in the head of a disembodied and mute poet as they embark on an elliptical and interminable perambulation. Concerned with the nature of perceived duality, it is a subjective examination of mans compulsive mind; a meditation on the nature of addiction, escapism, grief, hallucination and acceptance: obsessively wrapped up as a long form visual love poem with lots of birds, bees and biplanes.

Head Trauma directed by Lance Weiler

Head Trauma is the follow-up to Lance Weiler's internationally successful award wining feature film, The Last Broadcast . Head Trauma is a psychological horror film that pushes the envelope on what is possible within an independent feature film. It is the story of George Walker, a down and out transient, who travels back home after a 20-year absence only to find the house where he spent his childhood summers, condemned and slated for demolition.

George's ambitious decision to save the house he has inherited brings misfortune when a bizarre accident causes him to fall and strike his head. He becomes plagued by vivid nightmares, which depict the murder of a young woman in the woods by a strange hooded figure. As he tries to make sense of the images that haunt him, his nightmares begin to cross over into his reality, and he becomes convinced that someone or something is trying to kill him.

"From Hell to Heaven" by Khaled Ajamieh 64:00  

She is Palestinian girl, 17 years of age, wearing an explosives belt. She arrives at a large shopping mall in Israel , but at the last minute she decides not to press the button. How did she manage to persuade a military group to prepare her for a suicide operation? What lies behind her decision to be a suicide bomber? And what makes her change her mind?

Lunacy directed by Jan Svankmajer 2005 (118:00)

The creative diversity of Jan Svankmajer exceeds the limits of film. Practising since the end of the 1950s, his literary expression is marked by blasphemous black humour and a playful viewpoint which, together with an extraordinary sensibility and a penetrating critical intellect, form the determining facets of his creative personality. Lunacy is his most recent work whose plot incorporates ideas from two stories by Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial and The Mad Psychiatrist and whose main character was inspired by The Marquis de Sade. Although the story appears to be set in early 19 th Century France , the film contains many deliberate anachronisms which remind us that this is an allegory of the modern world. And what better setting for this world than a lunatic asylum? Svankmajer himself describes this film as a 'philosophical horror', whose theme is absolute freedom, civilizational repression and manipulation.

"SubZero" by Ian Dowson

Middlesbrough ; sometime soon. Mayoral Candidate Ronnie Lord is on the verge of victory because of his popular stance on law and order and anti-social behaviour. His tough solutions are backed by the public; he's a 'local lad' and knows what he's talking about. But Ronnie has yet to play his trump card; a groundbreaking law and order initiative that would see every young person between the ages of 11 and 17 'tagged' and surveyed 24 hours a day.

Meanwhile his daughter, Sabrina , falls in love with 'Grangetown Lad,' Carl , whose best mate, Mark , has just been murdered in a drugs feud.

Worldly Desires directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2005 (42:00)

Worldly Desires is a reprisal of a forbidden love story in a more romantic time past where a couple escape their families to search for a spiritual tree in the jungle. Their quest is accompanied by a song that speaks of innocence and a sense of guiltless freedom one feels when hit by love. Apichatpong Weerasethakul describes this film as a "small simulation of manners." Weerasethakul has become one of the few filmmakers in Thailand who have worked outside the strict Thai studio system. He is active in promoting experimental and independent films through Kick the Machine, the company he founded in 1999. 2004).

"Too Tired To Tango" by Simon Jones

Sometimes when you are least expecting it everything goes wrong with your relationship, usually when you think everything is going just great. Mr. Rabbit has been eagerly awaiting his romantic evening with Trunk, just like they have every Valentines Day. There's no worry about the evening going wrong because Mr. Rabbit has it perfectly planned with everything just the way it should be. He should know it's been done the same way every year since they met. In the meantime, Trunk is trying to work out why she isn't interested as usual.

"Vocations" by Inesa Kurklietyte

A movie about first sin that happens in child's head, his first try to win a woman.
It's about strong feelings when a fantasy is still in a world of lullabies and
fairytales. It's about woman's body- mystical, full of secrets, a woman that
lives in child's fantasy.

"There's an Extraordinarily Tall Man and an Extraordinarily Short Man That Follow Me Wherever I Go" by Luke Franklin

An extraordinarily tall man and an extraordinarily short man start following a third man everywhere he goes - he tries to run and he tries to get rid of them, but nothing he does loses them. He grows accustomed to them, learns to live with them in his life and even like them being there but then one day it occurs to him, what will he do if they leave?

"Monster in my Tummy" by Padraig Mannion

A young boy who goes to bed on an empty stomach takes a chance on a week old mouldy sandwich, but is woken in the middle of the night to discover that he has bitten off more than he can chew!

The Krakow Film Festival is one of Europe 's longest-running events dedicated to documentary, animation and other short film forms , organised every year since 1961. Duruing this period the festival has become well established among similar world events, vying for primacy with the Oberhausen festival in the 1960's and 1970's. It was in Krakow that the outstanding Polish documentary makers such as Krzysztof Kieslowski, Wojciech Wiszniewski , Andrzej Fidyk and Marcel Lozinski began their career. It was also here that the masters of Polish animation, Ryszard Czekala, Jerzy Kucia, Julian Antoniszczak, Piotr Dumala and Zbigniew Rybczynski, winner of the Academy Award for the film Tango, made their debut.

Together with Krakow Film Festival programmer Kaja Krawczyk, Darklight have selected a number films from the 2006 programme. Over the past decade there has been a new wave of young Polish talent emerging from its prestigious film schools. Now in its 46th year the national competition at the festival hosts a program of films representing this talent and we are delighted to showcase a number of these films at Darklight this year.

This video was created by compiling different clips and moving them through a meticulous frame-by-frame process to simulate the handheld effect.

The "Square Millimeter of Opportunity" series seeks to emulate the possibility of extraordinary but overlooked occurrences as if captured by a passing videographer. This series is informed by the writings of anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, who described rare moments when our normal perceptions of daily life would shift dramatically and without warning.

DATA

XNO AV SESSIONS
"Video Is the Cocktail Molotov ov thee TV generation.
Cause thee cathode ray tubes to resonate and explode. You are your own screen.
You own your own screen."
-Genesis P. Orridge
Thee Splinter Test
O u r s e t i s m a d e u p o f a m i x o f v i d e o f o o t a g e t a k e n f r o m m a n y s o u r c e s :
mainstream and underground films, documentaries, TV shows and adverts; old
8MM footage. We include also original stuff such as short films and loops,
photographs, graphics and diagrams, paintings and illustrations, animated
typography...

Nam June Paik: Entertainment Values

Renowned video artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006) sought to bring Fluxus-inspired experimentation to a wide international audience through the medium of broadcast television. Nam June Paik: Entertainment Values investigates his innovative and utopian use of mass communications and popular entertainment, and includes a screening of his ground­breaking multi-city satellite TV program Good Morning Mr Orwell (1984), featuring Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel and Merce Cunningham among others. Good Morning Mr. Orwell, 1984, 38 min, color, sound

"How Long Is Forever" by FG

"How Long Is Forever " is a film and series of photographs that explores subculture through narrative. The piece, set against a gritty working-class backdrop, examines a mystical group immersed in fabrication of large-scale chopper bicycles and death-metal music. Through the narrative and juxtaposition of imagery, the work examines notions of the supernatural and the fantastic, carrying undercurrents of biblical allegory, adolescent angst, identity and alienation.

Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith graduated from the Royal College of Art animation course in 1997 and teamed up with producers Chris O’Reilly and Charlotte Bavasso at the incipient Nexus studio.
They have gone on to develop a reputation as one of London’s top animation teams and their portfolio spans short films, music videos, commercials and film title sequences.

Recent credits include the film title sequence for THUNDERBIRDS and an animated ‘film within a film’ for DreamWorks and Paramount’s LEMONY SNICKET: A SERIES OF UNFORUNATE EVENTS.

For more information please contact the festival office