The (S8) unveils the full programme and puts the carnival mask to the lucky cat
The fifth edition of Peripheral Film Festival brings to A Coruña the newest of Spanish expanded cinema from the hand of Esperanza Collado and Colectivo Crater, Jodie Mack’s recent work -the queen of filmic collage- and a selection of films from the famous Canadian film festival Media City to celebrate its twentieth anniversary. The programme is completed with a wide range of parallel activities. For professionals, there are conferences and workshops from the hand of Zemos98 and its European Souvenirs project at Contemporary Art Museum Gas Natural Fenosa; for kids, the Mini (S8) with the Action! Film Workshop; and the exhibition Lost&Found. Arquivos (Re)Colectados (never before exhibited in Spain) to be installed at NORMAL University of Coruña. The final touch will be a meeting of film laboratories such as LaborBerlin, L’Abominable from Paris, Double Negative from Canada and Worm-Filmwerkplaats from Rotterdam.
GALICIA – JAPAN CULTURE FUSION. POSTER OF THE FIFTH EDITION
Between Galicia and Japan, the myth is the underground thread that leads the fifth edition of (S8) this year. You can see a maneki neko with a carnival mask on the poster for this edition. A cultural nod whose meaning goes actually along more leafy paths. Here the mask does not work as a way to hide the identity but recovers its original use. The “peliqueiro” (traditional Galician carnival mask) can be seen as an entrance for making up the maneki neko (symbol of good fortune and wealth). Both elements also reflect the ideal of cinema that the Festival defends, which like myth, is a representation of the inexplicable, of what words or reason cannot understand. The ties between the two cultures, Galician and Japanese, reach even geography itself. The Mount Louro and Mount Fuji, source of legends, are not as far as one might think. There are also similarities in music, percussion -leading to trance- which accompanies the carnival dance, for example, and is not very different from the sound of the Japanese taiko (drums).
Thus you can see, digging beneath the surface, the underground currents that connect both sides of the planet. The undeniable relationship with nature in the work of Takashi Makino, Rei Hayama, Teruo Koike and Saïto Daichi links, along winding roads, to Eloy Domínguez Serén’s homesickness or Lois Patiño’s connection with the landscape, for instance. The dissolution of the individual “I” of the “peliqueiro” also has to do with Iimura’s identity questioning. In A Page of Madness the Japanese mask acts as the carnival one, releasing those who carry them from the neuroses of civilization. And the oral tradition, on the roots of the Galician ancient culture, is what caught the early Japanese film by means of the katsuben.
SPANISH EXPANDED CINEMA: ESPERANZA COLLADO AND COLECTIVO CRATER
The fifth edition of (S8) brings a representative sample of the recent work in the field of Spanish expanded cinema to A Coruña. On Thursday night, June 5, we will have the performer and also expert in avant-garde cinema, Esperanza Collado and the members of Colectivo Crater Luis Macías and Adriana Vila, from Barcelona. At the Luis Seoane Foundation venue, Collado will show We Only Guarantee The Dinosaurs, a performance in which the film is linked with sculpture and dance in a process that involves 16mm screenings in combination with elements like a red carpet, a flashlight, a palm tree, 20m red lace and a raincoat. The aim is to tackle the film issue while the space between the screen and the projector is explored.
Then, on the patio, we will enjoy two works by Colectivo Crater: Reels and Lights (2012) and 3QUIN0X (2013). The group, formed in 2010, explores the possibilities of the screening as an event, taking advantage of the qualities of the analog format. Even their performances are an important spur for the senses they are also supported by a precise formal and conceptual search and make use of resources ranging from the strobe, the phantasmagoria of found material, the use of color, the film manipulation and the constant rupture of conventions concerning the screening identity.
However, expanded film will also use the bridge given by the Dual Year between Spain and Japan so that we can enjoy the artistic show by the legendary Takahiko Iimura with his video installation As I See You You See Me, which, according to the artist, is “the premiere of this work in a film festival.” On Friday evening, June 6, back to the patio of Luis Seoane Foundation, the audience will enjoy a double film + performance session with the young filmmaker Takashi Makino. The screening of the movie 2012 will be the prelude to the final cosmic storm with the work Space Noise 3D.
JODIE MACK: COLLAGE, FABRIC PIECES AND A COLOURFUL WORLD IN STOP MOTION
On Saturday June 7, the closing night, the British Jodie Mack will orchestrate a session with her latest work, on which she will play in real time with songs and music in “Let Your Light Shine”, a compendium of her recent works carried out for the 43th edition of the famous International Film Festival of Rotterdam. By bringing into play discards from the mass production culture, from cliché and popular design, Mack blurs the thin line between art and everyday life, turning scraps of wallpaper, t-shirts, postcards and gift bags into movies that combine the most accurate formal experimentation with visual enjoyment and also some sense of humor.
Crazy stop motion collages, strobe inventories of prints, vaporous and kaleidoscopic choreographies of light, lysergic journeys and unpublished sensory experiences make up a programme with a structure of rock show where we will see the most abstract animation, a kind of 16mm tribute, singing live, to a dying posters store (Dusty Stacks of Mom). Quite a festival of light and color.
FROM SOUTHERN ONTARIO TO THE NORTH OF GALICIA: 20 YEARS OF MEDIA CITY FILM FESTIVAL
In Windsor, the city from which you can see Detroit skyscrapers, a place of extreme weather, endless straight roads and post-industrial air, there takes place one of the most exciting, special and relevant events concerning experimental cinema: the Media City Film Festival. Media City, created in 1994, will be 20 years in 2014, and thanks to a brilliant and daring programme with a life of its own it has become one of the most appreciated art festivals in the world.
Oona Mosna and Jeremy Rigsby, the current directors and programmers, will visit the (S8) to provide a sample of fascinating and unique films that define the spirit of the Canadian festival. Some of them are: Lunar Almanac (Malena Szlam, 2013), Passage Upon the Plume (Fern Silva, 2012), Florence (Peter Hutton, 1975), Menschen am Sonntag (Friedl von Gröller (Kubelka), 2006-2011) and Quartet (Nicky Hamlyn, 2007).
MINI (S8): ACTION! FILM WORKSHOP
ACTION! With this word, which makes us travel to ancient times in the history of cinema, we want to start the Action! Film Workshop that this year we propose for the youngest at the Mini (S8). The Peripheral Film Festival of A Coruña triples their educational film proposal aimed at children. Color, sound and motion, interactive and performative cinema make up three sessions where various possibilities of film language will be explored, in this case by the action of the participants.
Young filmmakers will crowd Kiosko Alfonso the morning and afternoon of Saturday June 7, and on Sunday morning 8 action will move to Luis Seoane Foundation. Participants will learn to play with the basic tools of film language, to dance with the movies, to explore hidden spaces and discover that you can also make films without a camera, without film or display, but with color, sound, body and movement.
LIVE CINEMA, ARCHIVE AND REMIX. EUROPEAN SOUVENIRS OF ZEMOS98
European Souvenirs is a creative project about European identity that the group from Seville ZEMOS98 has been carried out since 2012 in collaboration with Doc Next network, a group of producers, filmmakers, educators, programmers and cultural researchers. ZEMOS98 Festival, now in its fourteenth edition, is the most known face of this group from Seville whose work reaches research, production, creation and communication of critical content about the social and cultural impact of media on thinking and contemporary narrative. With wide international recognition, ZEMOS98 makes extensive use of audiovisual archives, and remix and VJ culture is one of their main exploration routes.
Contemporary Art Museum Gas Natural Fenosa will hold not only the presentation of European Souvenirs project, but also a performance, a lecture and a workshop for artists interested in discovering the secrets of film archive and remixing. Live Cinema in its full potential, and with important people such as Pedro Jiménez Álvarez and Benito J. Jiménez Álvarez, ZEMOS98 leaders.
FOCUS ON ARTIST-RUN FILM LABS
In February 2011, the artist Tacita Dean published in The Guardian an article, almost a manifesto, entitled “Save celluloid, for art ‘s sake”. There, worried about the disappearance of film laboratories, she wondered why it was not possible the coexistence of analog and digital. Given the uniformity raised by the business system of capitalism, the existence of film laboratories can almost be seen as an act of resistance. Fortunately, today the sharing of tools and knowledge has generated a number of independent laboratories worldwide.
With names like LaborBerlin, L’Abomibable (Paris), Worm-Filmwerkplaats (Rotterdam), Double Negative (Montreal) which cluster around filmlabs.org network, these spaces become, in turn, platforms that produce and support the work of new filmmakers and artists. In this session representatives of some of these ‘labs’ will share their experiences with us, they will discuss the way they operate and show a sample of their work, besides discussing the current situation where film (celluloid) is.
NORMAL, A NEW VENUE ON THE FIFTH EDITION OF (S8)
In this edition, NORMAL joins the other collaborating venues of (S8), as a cultural agent in the city at the height of Novacaixagalicia Foundation, Contemporary Art Museum Gas Natural Fenosa or Luis Seoane Foundation. This year part of the Festival programme moves to the venue of cultural intervention of University of Coruña with an exhibition project to be opened on 30 May and entitled LOST&FOUND. Arquivos (Re)Colectados.
On this occasion we will have Munemasa Takahashi, promoter of the archive Lost & Found. The exhibition is completed with the intervention and artistic reinterpretation of images rescued by a large group of Galician artists covering a wide spectrum of disciplines such as painting , film and dance. More information on the presentation that will take place on May 30 at NORMAL.
LILA FOSTER AND THE FESTIVAL CURTA8 IN BRASIL, LUXURY OBSERVERS
The Brazilian ‘film curator’ Lila Foster, festival programmer of Curta8 in Curitiba, will travel to A Coruña to attend the fifth edition of (S8) with the aim of discovering novel expressions of Galician avant-garde film and Spanish film art performance. Foster is an expert in Brazilian amateur film and much of her work is dedicated to the research and preservation of Super 8 experimental production. Since 2010 she has coordinated the activities of Home Movie Day in Brazil, an international initiative focused on small format home movies.
Her visit is supported by Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and their PICE Visitor Program (Program for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture) with which AC/E strengthens the internationalization of Spanish film abroad.