Director
Yann Chapotel meticulously rearranged live-action shots from a multi-story residential building into a formally rigid montage movie—featuring a slew of surprising twists and turns along the way. At the same time, we observe people oscillating between interiors and exteriors, performing everyday activities on balconies and by the open window, which Chapotel combines into a collective choreography.
Editor
Saturday focuses on the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church, an evangelical Christian denomination with an apocalyptic expectation, that celebrates the Sabbath and practices immersion baptism rituals on Saturday. Through the figure of the SDA Church appear the themes of hope for a better life and the desire to flee the daily mundane, which here manifests in a religious mode, but takes form elsewhere in the practice of particular dietary rules and extreme sports. Shot mostly in 3D, the film combines scenes recorded at SDA Church sites in the USA, Polynesia, and the Kingdom of Tonga with images of food, surfing, and medical tests; together, they immerse us in a parallel world of hope and belief – of transparencies and opacities. Meanwhile, text scrolling at the bottom of the screen materializes both a source of information and a desire to escape from it.
Editor
Regimes of dominance and subjugation are explored in Tuesday, which interweaves footage of racehorses being groomed before and after training with scenes of Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighters interlocked in combat. In Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a martial art developed from Judo, which focuses on grappling and ground fighting, positions of dominance and weakness form a dynamic structure in which physical strength is not a decisive criterion. Power structures are translated into a sporting struggle with an open output, in which the roles of domination and submission are reversed from one moment to the next. Shot primarily in slow motion, the competitive nature of the jiu-jitsu fighters and racehorses is paralysed by an extreme aestheticization, transforming scenes of action into objects of contemplation and visual pleasure.
Cinematography
VORTEX TEMPORUM sinks into the temporality of an image, the one from an American university campus filmed by a webcam. These images from the University of Oregon were collected between August 2009 and June 2010.
Director
VORTEX TEMPORUM sinks into the temporality of an image, the one from an American university campus filmed by a webcam. These images from the University of Oregon were collected between August 2009 and June 2010.
Director
Stop motion short about love and a city square.
