Contaminated
Blossoming landscapes, shiny facades and shimmering rivers deceive our reception: there is poison underneath. Huge territories are polluted or radioactively contaminated. Harmful substances are hidden everywhere, invisible to the eye. Five experimental investigations reveal their existence: Known and unknown substances start to spread out on the screen and take different forms and shapes. Picturesque panoramic landscapes suddenly become uncanny and we start to get frightened of our homely rooms. Welcome to the Anthropocene.
Bananaland
Loukia Alavanou combines footage shot in the small farming village Los Ángeles in South Ecuador, images from the historical dioramas in the museum of Guayaquil, and images and sounds from 195Os US-American children’s documentaries and TV series, such as “Journey to Bananaland.” The film investigates the impact of toxic pesticides on the life of the indigenous population as well as the behaviors and practices that propagandize for the presence of western interests. These politics are perceived as a kind of “toxic colonialism” that harms life itself beyond the damage to the natural environment.
- Griechenland
- 00:16:35
- Director: Loukia Alavanou
- Production: Athanasios Polychronopoulos
- Photography: Loukia Alavanou, Daniel Bolda
- Editing: Loukia Alavanou
- Sound: Loukia Alavanou
- Languages: en
- Year: 2017
- Website
- World Premiere
SAFSTOR
SAFSTOR is the abbreviation for SAFe STOrage, one of the options for nuclear decommissioning of a shut down power plant. Adam Diller explores archival materials, testimonies of the partial meltdown on March 28th, 1979 and the landscape around the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Harrisburg, USA
- Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika
- 00:14:56
- Director: Adam Diller
- Languages: en
- Year: 2016
- Website
Asbestos
Mined, extracted, and woven, asbestos was the magic mineral. We now live in the remains of this toxic dream, a dream that with the invention of electron microscopes revealed our material history as a disaster in waiting. We are faced with two options: to remove this material from our homes and start anew, or to build upon its residue. Removal is a dangerous and costly operation. So often we choose to live amongst it instead, choking out our walls with plastic tarping: the failed promises of modernism literally entombed all around us. ASBESTOS was shot in the mining township of Asbestos, Quebec, home to the world’s largest asbestos mine that only stopped extraction in 2012.
- Großbritannien
- 00:19:30
- Director: Sasha Litvintseva, Graeme Arnfield
- Languages: en
- Year: 2016
- Golden Key
INversion
A visual tour through Bitterfeld, Germany, the town known for the “Bitterfeld Syndrome”, a term describing an anthropogenic soil degradation by local contamination, waste accumulation and contaminated sites. We follow the traces of the past, see blooming landscapes, re-examine a television report from 1988 and investigate the utopia of the “Solar Valley”, an industrial area at the periphery of the city, which once was home to start-up companies.
- Deutschland
- 00:08:29
- Director: Rolf Pilarsky
- Languages: de
- Subtitles: en
- Year: 2016
- Website
- World Premiere
Substanzaufnahme
Sterile spaces, white walls, black doors, no human life. A glowing black liquid sloshes in, spreads out slowly across the floor, swallows the white and shapes into a plastic form. Voluminous substances, foreign, soulful, mysterious – eerie, grotesque bodies that disturb our usual perception of space.
- Österreich
- 00:08:00
- Director: Bernd Oppl, Bogomir Doringer
- Photography: Bernd Oppl,Thomas Oppl
- Editing: Bogomir Doringer
- Music: Bernd Oppl
- Sound: Oliver Brunbauer
- Year: 2017
- Website
- German Premiere
