19. UNDER|DOX 10-16 OKT

2022: A Spaced-Out Odyssey. A trip experience that enables exactly those levels of consciousness, or rather their dissolution, that the consumption of certain intoxicants also makes possible.

At a first glance, nothing seems to be missing in the life of Patrick Navaï – painter and poet – his wife Sylvie, and their musician son, Yvan. They live in a medieval village near a big & misty forest in France. Their daily routine is filled with enchanting hours of painting, playing music, reading poetry, and long family walks up the green hills. However, an unfulfilled desire for belonging echoes in every corner of Patrick’s life.

Around 50 five-second clips, which have been created regularly over the last three years, document the daily mood. The challenge was to create an animation lasting exactly five seconds almost every day using the simplest means. It is possible that many a stormy, changing mood of a midlife crisis-stricken filmmaker flashes up between the seconds.

Experimental documentary featuring Japanese urban architecture. A time capsule of sorts, centered on (biological or artificial) brain states, it makes different themes and voices converge and connect in a rhizomatic, multitasking structure reminiscent of musical counterpoint.

The film based on ”L’Atalante” (1934) by Jean Vigo focuses on the scenes in which cats appear. The artist/painter Harald V Uccello manufactured 140 drawings of them. The young actor Anton von Lucke speaks the original dialogues off-camera. The musician Tobias Giezendanner rearranges the music of Maurice Jaubert and plays it on the bandoneon off-camera as well. The film is a representational discourse between cinema, painting, music and poetry.

Onscreen, we see wild hamsters with X-ray eyes, a zombie soldier on the telethon phone, a grandiose performance in a song contest, and at the center, a talk show offering an alternative to the heteronormative TV mainstream, featuring interviews and workplace portraits of the two guests Em Gruber (of the Office of the Monitoring Committee for the rights of people with disabilities) and Iris Kopera (Self-Advocacy Center for People with Learning Difficulties); and in between, quotes by the late artist-author Ianina Ilitcheva interpreted in sign language, which give C-TV a kind of chapter structure while the whole thing is framed by newsroom reports about mysterious seismographic tremors to society.  

Oleksandr Hoisan deploys new technologies – specifically ”open universe” video-games – for cinematic ends. His preferred location: cyberspace. Here he stages a masterful détournement on 2004 classic Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, minutely exploring a simulacrum-ersatz American city with quizzical, anthropological and decidedly European detachment. – Neil Young

Zhili, the Chinese garment capital. Life is bustling in all directions, to the rhythm of sewing machines. Here is where all the rural youth living along the Yangtze River come to find work. ”Qingchun” – ”Youth (Spring)” immerses itself in this precarious and intensely hard-working society, where hope is still allowed. For five years, from 2014 to 2019, Wang Bing took his camera and filmed these textile workers up close and personal.

“Water & Coltan” deals with the consequences of mining on landscape and communities in West Germany and Democratic Republic of Congo. While ”Water” sketches posthuman near-future scenarios for the former coal mining Ruhr area, ”Coltan” transports its audience directly to the places of the struggle of women in artisanal coltan mining camps in South Kivu in Democratic Republic of Congo. Based on a shared research of the filmmaker with social worker Yasmine Bisimwa, lawyer Olande Byamungu and engineer Christian Muhighwain in the cassiterite and coltan mines of Chosho and ZolaZola, near Nzibira, South Kivu, the 360° documentary immersive experience, by referencing Homer’s Tantalus myth, combines two local sides of one and the same violent global phenomenon: the extractivist relation to natural and human resources with its long-term consequences for the environment and society.

Two couples in their thirties have heated discussions on the essentials of life unfolding between Madrid and the neighboring countryside, imbued with enchanting melancholy and gentle humor.

In Spain there is a tradition called “la hora del vermut” (the vermouth hour) which refers to a little stretch of time before lunch when you sip vermouth to prepare your stomach for the meal to come. Spanish director Jonás Trueba’s “You Have to Come and See It” only just crosses la hora mark, but it is as sociable and swiggable as a draught or 10 of sweetly fortified wine. In fact, it’s an aperitif that proves so satisfying, so simple and sunny and sage, that you might find yourself filling up on its drowsily erudite, oddly nourishing pleasures and forgetting about lunch altogether. – Jessica Kiang, Variety