See with your ears, hear with your eyes. Cinematic synaesthesia overwhelms and differentiates the senses. How does the film speak to us when one thing eludes us and the other gets our full attention, when our senses are sharpened? What if the film becomes silent or the images blind?
Everything that needs our attention, everything that sharpens our consciousness: that is the awareness we mean, beyond esoteric contemplation.
Opening: Silence (Alegria)
The Spaniard Oskar Alegria, former artistic director of the renowned Punto de Vista film festival in Pamplona-Navarra, is a master in tracking down the nuances, the unspoken, the invisible. In our opening film ZINZINDURRUNKARRATZ, the filmmaker searches for the path into the mountains that the shepherds used to take with their goats and sheep – but he can no longer find anyone to show him the way. With his family’s old Super 8 camera, which no longer records any sound after 41 years of disuse, he sets off on a search with Paolo the donkey. The forgotten path, the silent camera and the helpless donkey become the protagonists of a journey full of memories, question marks and silence: the opening film of the 19th UNDERDOX generates subtle attention on the threshold of awareness, of raising awareness for our world.
Center Piece: Blindness (Schtintner)
The film magazine ‘Sound & Sight’ called the British avant-garde filmmaker Stanley Schtinter the ‘Witchfinder General of cultural complacency’. And he is really shaking up the complacent film landscape. With an illustrious cast including Julie Christie, Stephen Dillane, Toby Jones, Stacy Martin and Hanns Zischler, he has directed SCHNEEWITTCHEN, based on the drama by Swiss author Robert Walser. The fairy tale is told after Snow White has been rescued: archetypal protagonists and antagonists – the Queen, the Huntsman, the Prince and the King – come together to analyse and comment on the prequel.
The film is a tribute to the eminent Portuguese director João César Monteiro, whose BRANCA DE NEVE is accompanied by the following legend: Allegedly, Monteiro had accidentally hung his coat over the camera while filming, so that no picture was taken. Instead of discarding the footage, however, he took the black film with the off-screen voices and declared it his work. In Schtinter’s film, too, only the great voices of the high-class actors can be heard. Only to be seen, about every ten minutes: coarse-grained 16mm views of a blue sky with white clouds, filmed by independent cameraman Sean Price Williams. Canadian documentary filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta edited the footage. – A film to see in the dark.
Closing: Blurred, Glitch, Neon, Noise (Khavn)
The Filipino filmmaker and musician Khavn, who never ceases to amaze with his powerful film proclamations, acts as a counterpoint to the silence and darkness. For ORPHEA (2020), he collaborated with Alexander Kluge, who is now over ninety years old. The exceptional German actress Lilith Stangenberg plays a role in MAKAMISA: PHANTASM OF REVENGE (2024). The film is powerfully anti-colonialist, a non-sequitur. Or: “A monster of a film, both epic and personal and radical, pamphlet, historical saga, intimate novel and parable.” (Nicolas Féodoroff). Khavn, currently DAAD Artist in Residence in Berlin, is the Artist in Focus at the 19th UNDERDOX. MAKAMISA is our closing film, followed by a Ciné Concert with Khavn (piano) and Babel Gun (drums).