Global Players
Economy as a playground: In this program, GLOBAL PLAYERS are no longer just international corporations, but anyone connected to the globalized economic infrastructures, searching for a niche within the system and its value creation chains – in Bangladesh, at the Styrian Erzberg, or in virtual gaming scenarios. But who is actually able and allowed to play? Who determines the rules? And where are the limits of this game? A program on networks and value systems, on craftsmanship and immaterial labor, on automatisation and abstraktion.
Off The Grid
Sandwip is a Bangladeshi island which has no grid electricity in homes. Men routinely leave their families in search of jobs where industrial electricity exists. In the last ten years, solar energy has brought a tiny spark of light and connection to their wives and children facing the isolation of life here. Guided by a young and ambitious solar engineer, we enter the homes of a mother of two and a young girl about to finish school. OFF THE GRID explores what the experience of a life without electricity means both emotionally and materially, as we go from light to dark over the course of a day.
- Großbritannien
- 00:17:55
- Director: Meghna Gupta
- Production: Meghna Gupta
Raihana Ferdous - Photography: Susanne Salavati
- Editing: Prano Bailey Bond
- Music: Eleni Hassabis
- Sound: James Hynes
- Languages: bn
- Subtitles: en
- Year: 2015
- German Premiere
Machines
In the warm light of a glowing filament machine parts appear: spools, wires and gearwheels, a slowly spinning numerical scale. In details, partly out of focus, the filmmaker and graphic artist Jeremias Altmann shows fragments of four machines he constructed of discarded household appliances. But even when the machines stop abruptly and can be seen in bright neon lighting, their operating mechanism remains enigmatic. Stripped of their functionality, it seems that their only purpose is to reveal our nostalgic fascination for the aesthetics of mechanical labour.
- Österreich
- 00:04:00
- Director: Jeremias Altmann
- Production: xx
- Photography: xx
- Editing: xx
- Music: xx
- Sound: xx
- Year: 2015
- German Premiere
F For Fibonacci
F FOR FIBONACCI takes as its departure point William Gaddis’ epic modernist novel "JR" (1975). JR tells the story of a 11 year-old capitalist who inadvertently creates the greatest virtual empire the world has seen. The film develops an episode from "JR" in which a televised music lesson is scrambled with a maths class on derivatives inside the mind of its child protagonist. Unfolding through the modular aesthetics of the video game Minecraft, text book geometries, graphic scores, images from physics experiments, and cartoon dreams, blend with images from wall street: stock market crashes, trading pits, and algorithms. Gibson also draws on the work of British experimental educator and composer John Paynter, who was at the forefront of utopian post-war pedagogigy. Following his ideals of child-centered education, Gibson worked closely with 11 year-old Clay Barnard Chodzko. Their ramblings on his game protagonist Mr Money lead the viewer through F FOR FIBONACCI’s hallucinatory soup.
- Großbritannien
- 00:16:20
- Director: Beatrice Gibson
- Production: Denna Cartamkhoob
- Photography: Nick Gordon
- Editing: Beatrice Gibson
- Music: /
- Sound: /
- Languages: en
- Year: 2014
Toymakers
TOYMAKERS looks at the production and aesthetics of customized, limited-edition trophy objects known as "deal toys." The video was filmed at a factory in Quebec, where more than half a million deal toys are produced each year for global corporations ranging from Google to Deutsche Bank, Heinz to Beats by Dre. The factory’s fifty employees work on the production line with a great skill and care, as acrylic plastic is mixed, poured into molds, machined, and polished. A man assembles a toy truck using his hands and a hammer, revealing the craftsmanship behind the objects used to memorialize global finance.
- Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika
- 00:14:00
- Director: Benjamin Brown
- Production: Ben Thorp Brown
- Photography: Ben Thorp Brown
- Editing: Ben Thorp Brown
- Sound: Alexander Thompson
- Year: 2014
Metaphorical Container
Anybody can question the system – but here is the answer!
- Portugal
- 00:01:00
- Director: Nikolai Nekh
- Production: Nikolai Nekh
- Photography: Nikolai Nekh
- Editing: Nikolai Nekh
- Music: No Music
- Sound: Nikolai Nekh
- Year: 2015
- World Premiere
Of Stains, Scrap & Tires
OF STAINS, SCRAP & TIRES is a calm, documentary miniature that chooses the auto export business of three young Nigerians in the Erzberg region as a point of association and departure for formulating something more fundamental about the first and third worlds, movement and standstill, business, space, and freedom. Director Sebastian Brameshuber demonstrates his appreciation of sculptural still life and fine moving-image compositions: car tires bounce through the garage as though possessing a life of their own, and the men perform physical labor on the car wrecks that they sell to Africa in whole or fileted pieces. Brameshuber hints at economic connections and processes, but is equally interested in the painterly traces of rust and paint, the inner lives of the motors and the view of the containers piled on top of one another in which the cars will be shipped.
- Österreich, Frankreich
- 00:19:00
- Director: Sebastian Brameshuber
- Production: Gabriele Kranzelbinder, Marie Tappero, Le Fresnoy, KGP Kranzelbinder Filmproduction
- Photography: Klemens Hufnagl
- Editing: Sebastian Brameshuber, Eva Hausberger
- Music: xx
- Sound: Matthias Kassmannhuber
- Languages: de,en
- Year: 2014
