A room can be a place of safety, but this feeling can turn claustrophobic and oppressive quickly, when one is not allowed to leave it – be that one’s own four walls, those of others or even a whole country. The experience of being stuck and inhibited runs through all films in the program. But their makers and protagonists find persuading ways to leave behind the restricting walls – they turn their rooms into camera obscuras, build spaces of imagination, tear down barriers and broaden the view. In doing so, they rely as much on their own imagination as on that of cinema itself.
A woman sits at a table, cutting a printed image of a natural landscape, and placing it on the wall of a studio space. As this action progresses, the image comes to life. A view opens up.… >>>
A family home in Croatia. An artist, recently returned after a long absence. COVID-19 forces her to stay put. Memories and mirrors, optical illusions and cinematic inventions combine in a playful exploration of loneliness and family history.… >>>
JUNKERHAUS is shot in the residence of Karl Junker (1850-1912) who dedicated his life to building his house in Lemgo, Germany. Junker cocooned himself within wood carvings which extended over all floors like a spider’s web. Reflections, projections and changes in light form abstract shapes which animate surfaces and structures, producing a psychological portrait that offers a new appreciation of Junker’s architecture as mystical and visionary experience. In Junkrehaus, bodies and buildings, matter and memory, constantly interact and combine, creating a psychological retreat that's found outside of establishment structures.… >>>
THE FANTASTIC is built on interviews with exiled North Koreans, who describe what they imagined the outside world to be like, based on their experiences of watching smuggled western fiction films. Alternating documentary footage and visual effects, the film raises the question of how reality is defined and what we wish to believe in. THE FANTASTIC reverses the set-up where westerners are peeping in on the everyday life of the closed-off state. In this film, it is the North Koreans who direct their curiosity at the outside world and imagine what life in Western countries is like.… >>>
“Several years ago I immigrated to Germany. Here, I live in a small old house which urgently needs a modernization and that theoretically, protects me from wind, rain and cold.” (Victor Orozco Ramirez) A dilapidated building somewhere in the sticks in Germany becomes a canvas for the story of a migration told through animated wall paintings, dead insects and a view of an exercise of the voluntary fire brigade.… >>>
A room with a view: A filmmaker and cameraman meticolously documents he events outside his window through the first two weeks of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown. The inquiring view from the distanced and safe position of a hitchcockian backyard voyeur produces a curious study in human behaviour in the densest residential area in the UK in the middle of London.… >>>