Internationaler Wettbewerb 7

A man (A QUIET MAN), just fired, persistently remains sitting in front of the company building. Why doesn’t he leave, what else does he want? His desperate action unsettles the rest of the employees. He is one of several wounded souls we will encounter in this program. When media and advertising are constantly blasting us, as in MINDSET,  it’s not so easy to keep a clear head. STORGETNYA offers an antidote, an old mine tunnel, which is now used for therapeutic purposes. Or one looks for a miracle healer, but so that he can do his things well, the performance must be well rehearsed (REHERSAL). Another solution for the mental imbalance can be the occupation with art (THE WORLD WITHIN). Or perhaps one should simply not care about anything and bury one’s head in the sand, which today means as much as being concerned above all with one’s own ‘Instagrammability’ (OSTRICH THEORY). But in the long run this won’t do any good, the evil spirits always return, even if you are the only one who can see them (CAN YOU SEE THEM?). Seven films about the inner (im)balance and various attempts to find healing.

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Monday, 21. Mar 2022 // 20:00 Uhr @ Leerer Beutel Filmgalerie


A quiet Man
France 2021, color, 14 min, OV, Engl. sub
Director: Nyima Cartier
Production: Joséphine Moularque, Antoine Salomé
Paris-La Défense, the business district: From the 17th floor of an office building, Pierre is staring out the window. Down below, a colleague who was dismissed that morning, has been sitting on a bench for hours, alone in the cold. Why won’t he go home? From the heights of his office, Pierre wonders what to do.

Mindset
Austria 2021, color, 6 min, OV, Engl. sub
Director: Veronika Schubert
Production: Veronika Schubert
Like in a modified computer game of times long past, we glide through an animated labyrinth in point-of-view perspective. First around the corner over and over again, the walls tiled with circular set pieces from various advertising brochures. The flow is accompanied by a voice-over collage that brandishes motivational and revivalist slogans from social media channels: "In the forest, we don’t need a psychologist." "With the stones that are put in your way, you can build beautiful things." "If you stand still, you stand in the way."

STORGETNYA
France 2020, color, 21 min, OV, Engl. sub
Director: Hovig Hagopian
Production: Astrig Chandèze-avakian
Yerevan, capital of Armenia. 230 meters underground, the Avan salt mine is used as a therapy center. Physical activities and medical examinations determine the rhythm of this timeless world in the underground clinic, where lives intersect and stories are told.

Rehearsal
Nigeria 2021, color, 14 min, OV, Engl. sub
Director: Michael Omonua
Production: Don Paul Umana
A group of students rehearse a play about a miracle healing. What is real and what is an act? More and more the boundaries between theater and reality, faith and superstition, church and credibility dissolve.

The World within
France 2020, color, 18 min, OV, Engl. sub
Director: Jean-charles Finck, Sandrine Stoïanov
Production: Daniel Sauvage, Jérôme Barthelemy
While preparing for her first exhibition, a young painter commits so passionately to her creations that she loses touch with reality and descends into hallucinatory chaos. Confined in a clinic, she progressively rebuilds herself through painting and the daily observation of a squirrel under her window.

Ostrich Theory
United Kingdom 2020, color, 8 min, OV, Engl. sub
Director: Simon Ellis
Production: Simon Ellis
Something is coming. Nobody cares. A pre-pandemic harbinger of public indifference to troubled times, digitally depopulating and re-orchestrating documentary footage frame-by-frame.

Can you see them?
Croatia 2021, color, 10 min, OV, Engl. sub
Director: Bruno Razum
Production: Vinko Brešan
Here and there is film structured in such a way that it’s beginning also makes it’s end, creating a form of "endless day". The focus of the plot is a boy suffering from schizophrenia. After witnessing the killing of a deer in the woods, he flees home in panic. Along the way, a series of strange situations occur that further effect on boy’s condition. Home security is just an illusion. A series of visual stimuli forces boy to return to the beginning, in the forest, to change course of events.