EFS @ Process, Riga

Process is an experimental film festival in the Baltics dedicated to analog cinema, celebrating the physical film medium in all its personal, adventurous and uncompromising forms. The selected films break with the conventional rules of filmmaking and aesthetic norms, using the physical film as their main medium. Taking place from 22nd to 25th of March in Riga, Process addresses both local and international artists and audiences.

Experimental Film Society (EFS) is widely present in this edition of the festival:

EFS Short Film Programme:

La Picota (2018) by Ana González / Colombia / 3mins

Contact (2011) by Vicky Langan / Maximilian Le Cain / Ireland / 3mins

Feed Me (2016) by Maximilian Le Cain / Ireland / 3mins

Universal Film (2018) by Jann Clavadetscher / Ireland / 3mins

Ice (2018) by Michael Higgins / Ireland / 5mins

Homo Sapiens Project (161-170) (2013) by Rouzbeh Rashidi / Ireland / 8mins

Image Turned Down (2011-2014) by Maximilian Le Cain / Ireland-Greece / 20mins

Refining the Senses Performance – Atoosa Pour Hosseini

Refining the Senses is an uncanny sensory experience that places the viewer in a mysterious and contemplative liminal zone between different dimensions of life, death and memory that fluctuates between the personal and the general, the pictorial and the material. Combining found and original footage, she scratches, dyes and paints the film surface to highlight both the fragility and persistence of the image.

FEAR Short Film Programme curated by Rouzbeh Rashidi & Maximilian Le Cain

Cinema is fundamentally linked to the ghostly and uncanny. In summoning up insubstantial images that replay moments already passed, it can be compared to séance activity. In showing us sights and sounds of people often long gone but animated by the illusion of movement, it answers to Jean Cocteau’s description of it as ‘death at work’. Experimental film and horror cinema are therefore joined in being the two modes of cinematic practice that best explore the essence and deepest implications of what cinema is. At their most visionary, they overlap extensively. This is a view held by filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi and repeatedly explored in his atmospheric films. ‘Fear’ is a programme Rashidi has curated of experimental films that haunt the shadows between experimental film and the horror genre.

Vicky Langan DJ Set

EFS filmmaker Vicky Langan is an Irish artist whose practice operates across several often overlapping fields, chiefly performance, sound, and film. Vicky will DJ mysterious fragments and textural soundings.

Full info HERE

Kindly supported by Culture Ireland

Buharov Brothers on Re:Voir DVD

Delighted to have contributed the booklet text for Re:Voir's new release of these masterpieces from the Buharov Brothers...

"The anarchic, fractured and extremely surreal lms by Ivan and Igor Buharov (Kornél Szilágyi and Nándor Hevesi) might seem a perfect t for this “outsider” paradigm. Darkly playful hallucinations that share the aura of having been discovered forgotten in someone’s granny’s attic like a book of now troubling childhood drawings, they reveal in precise terms a world perhaps subconsciously suspected but hitherto indescribable. They have in common an improvised quality and a sense of the homemade. This not only stems from their beautifully rough-hewn visual textures but often from the people, objects and spaces that appear before the camera. The casts are composed of extraordinary ordinary people rather than film star types: lived-in faces bringing their own stories to the films. The props, which sometimes conspicuously reappear in different films, can likewise seem to have a real-world existence of their own carried over into the picture. This helps lend the films the weird intimacy of children’s games, in which familiar people and places are made alien and the weirdly alien becomes immanent to the everyday. The feverish and disorienting experience of watching a Buharov film was probably best described in the 2008 Offscreen Film Festival catalogue as “getting lost in someone else’s dream." 

Buy your copy here.