Double-Blind in EFS @ Muestra Internacional de Cine Experimental, Ecuador

The Langan / Le Cain film Double-Blind will screen as part of a programme of Experimental Film Society films at the second edition of Muestra Internacional de Cine Experimental at Cinemateca Nacional del Ecuador Ulises Estrella in Quito, 6th-13th February 2019. This edition of the festival is dedicated to the memory of the great Jonas Mekas.

1_Raquel Times Ten By Chris O’Neill (2017) / 10mins / Ireland

This portrait of actress Raquel Nave is at once a structuralist formal exercise and an emotionally engaging meditation on memory and decay. The deterioration of a VHS image as it is copied and recopied evokes distance and a breakdown of intimacy.

2_ Homo Sapiens Project (161-170) (2013) By Rouzbeh Rashidi / 8mins / Ireland

Rashidi’s Homo Sapiens Project (HSP) is an ongoing series of personal film experiments that range from cryptic film diaries and oneiric sketches to fully polished features. Installments 161-170 link a formally aggressive repurposing of Hollywood reels with an idiosyncratic appreciation of the wonder of science fiction.

3_Ghoul (2018) By Michael Higgins / 8mins  / Ireland

The ghosts of a man and his dog haunt a rural Irish field in this claustrophobically atmospheric plunge into unsettling nocturnal textures. Higgins’ penchant for immersive explorations of the sensory overlap between the materiality of the filmed image and its contents has never been more compellingly expressed.

4_Olive (2019) By Michael Higgins / 11mins / Greece – Ireland

Although clearly filmed in our time, Olive uses the scratchy beauty of hand-processed celluloid to help evoke a mood of ancient ritual. A group of people gathered in the remote countryside are absorbed into frames that often resemble the hand tinted colours and decaying textures of unrestored early cinema. Cinema is made to haunt the present like a ghostly vision from the past.

5_Double Blind (2018) By Vicky Langan / Maximilian Le Cain / 36mins / Ireland

Filmmaking duo Langan & Le Cain embrace the mood and iconography of classic Gothic literature and cinema to their raw, mysterious and often erotically charged universe. Two isolated storybook characters wander through the remains of a shattered B-movie found abandoned half-edited on a mouldy VHS tape.

6_The Underworld (2019) By Jann Clavadetscher / 17mins / Ireland

This hallucinatory trip through the psychedelic recesses of science fiction begins in the flickering bowels of the earth. An explorer played by Cillian Roche undergoes a bizarre mutation in which cinema itself might possibly play a part. Clavadetcsher’s gorgeous 16mm colours and dazzlingly intense editing are underscored by a characteristic lightness of touch.

7_Antler (2018) By Atoosa Pour Hosseini / 15mins / Ireland

Pour Hosseini’s work with Super-8 conjures a mysterious territory that exists between memory, subjective perception and the objective materiality of the filmed image. Antler pushes deeper into this realm, seamlessly combining archival footage of animals and reptiles in their habitats with newly filmed material of the artist and an assistant at work in a botanical garden.

Total running time: 105mins