News, Notes, Stories and Screenings - Page 12 of 59

SHOTS IN THE LIGHT AND THE DARK:

Directors Lounge at Mitte Media Festival, 5 – 6 May, 2017

The lights are on and the gloves are off for this sensory assault of choicest knock-out punches from around the world of DL. Stories are told, implied or avoided in a rush of shorts spread over two venues and three programs. Everything you need to reactivate undernourished cinema-hungry brain cells will be served up – plenty of DL premiere gems in the bunch, plus other bright lights from a slew of bright minds.

We are pleased to participate in the Mitte Media Festival, a two-day, multi-venue celebration of video, film, publication and performance works through a spectrum of media starting on May 5th and ending on May 6th.

We will be presenting two screenings at Z-Bar, Bergstraße 2, Berlin at 6 pm and 8 pm, presented by André Werner and Kenton Turk: A buffet of tasty tidbits from 10 years of Directors Lounge, films about self -esteem, aliens, art, moms, toasters and the whole universe. An Urban Research program curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr will take place at the Fata Morgana Gallery.

We will hit you, in the best way possible!

DL at Mitte Media | Program One (80 min) curated by André Werner, 5 May, 6 pm at Z-Bar: all about reception, pictophagia and the autopoietic beauty of images.

Stefan Adamski (PL) Induction 3 min 2007
Neil Needleman (US) Meeskeit 7 min 30s 2009
Jes Benstock (GB) Phosphenes 10 min 2002
Michael Betancourt (US) The Kodak Moment 2 min 2013
Xavi Sala (ES) La Parabólica 12 min 2007
Sasha Waters Freyer (US) An Incomplete History of Pornography, 1979, 8 min 2013
Jean-Gabriel Périot (FR) 21.04.02 9 min, DV, 2002
Faith Holland (US) RIP Geocities 2 min 31s 2011
André Werner (DE) The Custom of Eating Pictures 9 min 1997
Santiago Parres EZO (ES) Sinecdoquanon 7 min 29s 2011
Tokomburu / Zisis Kokkinidis and Ion Papaspyrou (GR) I Am Not Here Now 9 min 30 s 2013

DL at Mitte Media | Program Two (96 min) curated by André Werner, 5 May, 8 pm at Z-Bar: A wild rollercoaster about the eternal question “Have you ever seen an experimental film?”

Alexei Dmitriev (RU) Dubus 4 min 9s, DV, 2005
Coleman Miller (US) Uso Justo 22 min 2005
Matthew Lancit (FR/CA) 16 Reasons Why I Hate Myself 03:32
Alexandru Ponoran (RO) Isac Inca Doarme 17 min 2012
Samuel Blain (GB) In Dreams 3 min 57s 2011
Bryan Konefsky (US) Miss Yummy Yummy 4 min 2012
Guy Maddin (CA) Sombra Dolorosa 7 min 35s
Nina Lassila (FI) Günter und Mutti 3 min 17s 2011 (Distributor: AV-arkki)
Chema Garcia Ibarra (ES) The Attack of The Robots From Nebula-5
6min 20s 2008
Javier Chillon (ES) Decapoda Shock 9 min 15s 2011
Luca Zuberbuehler (CH) Lothar 13 min 2013
Oliver Smith (GB) Bob by Oliver Smith 2 min 31s 2013

DL at Mitte Media | Program Three, curated by K.W. Eisenlohr (91 min), 6 May, 4 pm at Fata Morgana Gallery: Exploring the boundaries where video art and cinema merge.

James Harrar (UK) Vlaamperd 2014, 5:54min
Clemens Fürtler (AT) Bildmaschine 07, Transit 2015 3:30min (silent)
Elaine Tedesco (BR) Leme Posto 2011 2:59 min
James Edmonds (DE) Movement and Stillness 2015 10:52min (silent)
Eric Stewart (US) Rah Rah 2013, 3:58 min
Petra Lottje (CN/DE) Questions to the Moon, 2017 4:46min
Doris Schmid (DE) LEG- 2012 5:00min
Katya Craftsova (IN/DE) Time Conservation 2012, 6:19 min
John D´Arcy & Deborah Uhde (DE/UK) Back ande Vor 2014 5:32 min
Bernd Lützeler & Kolja Kunt (DE) Unterwegs mit Maxim Gorkiy 2014 10:14 min
Sandra Becker 01 (BR/DE) 4 Clips for Loops 2015 01:17min
Mélissa Faivre (DE) The Space in Between 2016 11:48min
Gabriele Stellbaum (DE) Honest Lies 2011 9:45min
Mark Street (US) After Synchromy 2015 5:11min
Felix Brassier.Thanos Chrysakis (FR/UK) Day Two Hundred Seventy Nine Trails 2014 4:22min

The Mitte Media Festival program

Mitte Media Festival partners include: FATA MORGANA, Leo Kuelbs Collection, coGalleries, Last Night in Berlin, Chased Magazine, Directors Lounge, Z-Bar, BRLO and more.

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pictured: “Uso Justo” by Coleman Miller; “Decapoda Shock” by Javier Chillon, “16 Reasons Why I Hate Myself” by Matthew Lancit , “Questions to the Moon” by Petra Lottje

Directors Lounge Screening
Thanos Chrysakis
Amber Gaze

Thursday, 27 April 2017
21:00
Z-Bar Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

The artist, musician and composer Thanos Chrysakis was born in Athens. He lived for sixteen years in London until he moved to Belarus in 2015. He is a trained musician who performs his music internationally in festivals, in concert halls and alternative places. He always had a strong connection with images and thus has created his own videos, or has found people for sound/image collaborations. Since 2007 he operates the record-label ‘Aural Terrains’ focusing in electroacoustics, composed and improvised music.

The program thus presents the composer/musician – Thanos Chrysakis – working with his own visuals and with the audio-visual collaborations of film director Félix Brassier. In our perception of video, or film, of audio-visual material, sound guides the reception of images, sound creates the continuity of space and time or its disruption more than any visual effect, even though the sound editing rarely comes to the surface of our perception. Chrysakis with his sounds on the other hand loves to work with the thresholds of our perception, with the fragility and ambiguity of sounds, and the edges of discernibility. The images of his films, and of those of Brassier, thus play on a similar congenial level of ambiguity on the picture layer, as Chrysakis’ sounds. The visuals may even take up some of the functions, “music for film” traditionally has: a marker for the continuity of space and time. However, the stream of ambiguous consciousness between industrial urban spaces and dreamy imaginations the films provoke, are a product of a fine tuned balance of sound and image creation.

Artist Link:
http://auralterrains.com
http://www.auralterrains.com/chrysakis/en/bio/

Links:
Directors Lounge http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar http://www.z-bar.de

Snaps from the screening:
https://www.pinterest.de/directorslounge/directors-lounge-screenings-berlin/

photo: Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Michael Ballhaus, the German-born cinematographer—known for using the camera’s movement to give a sense of the psychological and emotional states of a film’s characters—has lent his distinct eye to many of the world’s best filmmakers, perhaps most famously the German wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with whom Ballhaus influenced the style of the New German Cinema movement. During the 70s he developed his signature 360-degree tracking shot while working on the claustrophobic melodrama Martha. After Fassbinder’s passing in 1982, Ballhaus went on to work with many other filmmakers (including Martin Scorsese and James L. Brooks), both in Germany and the United States.

After fifty-plus years behind the camera, Michael passed away on 12 April 2017, aged 81. He will be deeply missed.

MITTE MEDIA FESTIVAL

5 – 6 May, 2017

Locations:
FATA MORGANA, Torstraße 170
Z-Bar, Bergstraße 2

Mitte Media Festival is pleased to present a three-day, multi-venue celebration of video, film, publication and performance works through a spectrum of media starting on May 5th and ending on May 6th.

The realization of an idea, as it winds its way through the human mind and body, then is communicated to other creative entities, and finally translated and presented in other media is the process from which Mitte Media Festival draws its conceptual energy.

Hosted by Fata Morgana and its partners and presented in a small group of venues in Mitte, Berlin, Mitte Media Festival also shines a light on the neighborhood’s role as a hub of creation and presentation of multi-media work, as well as the start-up culture that often powers these dynamic permutations. The sheer change and transition that has occurred in Mitte in the last 10 years makes the area a perfect example of the collision between the terrestrially creativity and ever-expanding digital processes and platforms.

Book presentations, experimental video shows with discussion and other events will typically be presented in two-hour slots, allowing viewers to encounter a variety of work in a variety of settings. Mitte Media Festival is also planning its own online LIVE STREAM providing viewers across the globe access to selected content.

FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

Directors Lounge at Mitte Media

Mitte Media Festival partners include: FATA MORGANA, Leo Kuelbs Collection, coGalleries, Konstantin Kopietz, Last Night in Berlin, Chased Magazine, BRLO, Directors Lounge, Z-Bar and more.

Sponsored by BRLO, FATA MORGANA, coGalleries, Leo Kuelbs Collection, Z-Bar, Last Night in Berlin, Chased

More information at: www.leokuelbscollection.com

Directors Lounge Screening
Ana Bilankov
Night Riders
Thursday, 30 March 2017
21:00
Z-Bar Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Ana Bilankov, Berlin based artist with Croatian background, creates videos connected with peculiar places in different European cities, Moscow and New York, connected with the geographies and stories of those places, mostly interwoven with her own biography or experience. Her short films often combine a brittle visual poetry with rarified narratives on the soundtrack. Her training in art history and German studies in Zagreb together with her Master in Art in Context in Berlin seem to give her the intuition to pick out places and situations that become metaphors for things unspoken or stories untold. It may also have been her biography, which sensitized her for the hidden traces in human geographies, namely her escape from war while it spread over former Yugoslavia. The artist on the other hand calls it her “search for Roland Barthes’ punctum” in the geography of the city.

Her video pictures are conceived like extended snapshots that unfold, and become meaningful over time. Sound and text work complementary and associative to the pictures and are often from more divers sources than the image. When she points to the former Transatlantic slave trade connected with the sugar manufacturing in Bristol in her film “Sweet Home”, to the poisonous wreckage of Newtown Creek of East River NY in “New Town Future Film”, or to the story of an old broken Jewish House in Vienna (“I want to get out”), the artist never uses a traditional documentary style or storytelling. Instead, the films often comprise a poetic multi-layered audio-visual composition that leaves it open to the viewer to follow all the laid-out traces or to create their own associative connections.

Her film “U Ratu i Revoluciji / In War and Revolution” goes back to Croatia to visit her grandmother and to look for the traces of a book about education during the resistance against the Nazi occupation written by her grandfather, which disappeared as “communist and inappropriate” during political changes an the war of the early 1990s in Croatia. Her grandmother’s fading memories become a metaphor for those lost historical memories of the past, when books are eliminated from the libraries.

The artist will introduce the screening and will be available for Q&A. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Artist Link:
http://www.anabilankov.com/

Links:
Directors Lounge http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar http://www.z-bar.de

Snaps from our screening

Bergstraße 2, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Morgenröte Im Aufgang (Aurora at its rising or The rising of Dawn) by Max Hopp, Jan Korthäuer, Ronald Steckel and Klaus Weingarten is a cinematic hommage to Jacob Böhme (1575 – 17 November 1624), a German Christian mystic and shoemaker. He was considered an original thinker by many of his contemporaries within the Lutheran tradition, and his first book, commonly known as Aurora, caused a great scandal.

More snaps from the screening

In Zusammenarbeit mit der Roten Loge und Filmgeist Freundeskreis e.V.

Mehr auf nootheater

Z-Bar, Bergstraße 2, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Directors Lounge Screening
Urban Research – Private Affair
Thursday, 26 January 2017 | 21:00
Z-Bar | Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

In the times of public intrusion into the private sphere, right wing populists and religious fundamentalists threatening the freedom of expression and diversity, and conservative politicians pressing for control and surveillance, the expressions of private life become a political affair again. Related to the slogan of 1968 “The personal is political”, the here presented films talk about personal or private affairs in relation to the public sphere and the urban space.

Many of the Urban Research films submitted in 2016 are dealing with private stories, that are related, in one way or the other, to the urban space and expressing the importance of freedom and solidarity for the divergent, the subversive and the liberal mind. The films present the small stories with high artistic aspiration, the nuanced views and the subjective diversity, which are even more important at times when populist positions start to replace distinguished sentiments in culture and politics.

A fine selection of Urban Research films shown at 48h Neukölln in addition to a brand new film by Penny Lane. And, films by Petra Lottje, Vladimir Turner, Rob Santaguida, Anna Okrasko, Doris Schmid, Salise Hughes, Eleonore de Montesquiou, and Ezra Wube

Links:
Directors Lounge http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar http://www.z-bar.de

Snaps from this screening

Directors Lounge Screening
James Edmonds
The Material Question
Thursday, 24 November 2016
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

“The cinema of James Edmonds (1983) explores the complexities of the real not as a mere substance named ‘reality’ but in its most fluctuating and Turnerian correlation, in those uncertainties that make it impossible to fix it in any specific point in space.”(Toni D’angela, La furia umana 28, 2016)

James Edmonds is an artist filmmaker from the UK living in Berlin and London. His practice centers on a personal poetics in which the nature of recording, when approached from the materiality of analogue film, offers a tangible surface for what is intangible and fleeting – our personal experience, inner worlds, thoughts and reflections.

He has presented screenings and exhibitions at various venues, project spaces, galleries and cinema events, including Fronteira Festival Brasil, The Temenos Screening Kino Xenix Zurich, Another Vacant Space Berlin, Mystetskyi Arsenal Lavra Kiev and ACCEA Armenia. Since 2015 he also curates the monthly film series Light Movement in Berlin.

PROGRAM
– Movement and Stillness, 2015, super 8, 11min, colour, silent
– Inside Outside, 2008/2015, super8, 6min, colour, soundtrack
– Sternwarten der Welt / Sun Documents, 2010-11/2016 (in progress), super8 double projection, 6min, colour, soundtrack
– OVERLAND, 2016, super 8, 22min, colour and black+white, soundtrack
– Patterns of Summer, (in progress), super8, 3 mins, colour, silent

Artist Link:
http://jamesedmonds.org
http://light-movement.blogspot.de

Links:
Directors Lounge http://www.directorslounge.net
Richfilm http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/
Z-Bar http://www.z-bar.de

A GERMAN YOUTH (UNE JEUNESSE ALLEMANDE)

French filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot has screened more movies than any other director at Directors Lounge. Jean-Gabriel has been with us since the very first days, presenting around 16 films during the last years. In 2010 we had a special work show with him attending and introducing his delicate way to work with archival footage.

His latest feature film, A GERMAN YOUTH (une jeunesse allemande), tells the story of the Red Army Fraction, West-Germany, 1965-1977. A story of images and violences; again told solely through original imagery from that time.

The German version, Eine Deutsche Jugend, 93 minutes, is streaming online this weekend (till Nov 20) at German news magazine Der Spiegel.

Highly recommended for our German speaking friends.

Off the Trail on the road to Berlin.

Off the Trail, a short film by Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan is the winner of the prestigious ZEBRA Poetry award as the best poetry film.

Nick Jordan and Jacob Cartwright are well-known names to the friends of Directors Lounge, Their hauntingly beautiful short Edgar was a darling of the very first Berlin International Directors Lounge back in 2005 and had several apperances in curated screenings.

In 2008 we screened New Madrid, a poetic movie shot in the Mississippi floodplain at an area of swampland formed by the earthquakes of 1811-12, an area that was once the town New Madrid.

The 10 min short Off the Trail, adapted from Cartwright and Jordan’s longer work, Headlands Lookout is based on the poem “Endless Streams and Mountains“ by Gary Snyder.

Walk the path, sit the rains, grind the ink, wet the brush, unroll the broad white space….Lead out and tip the moist, black line.

Gary Snyder’s invocation to the muse of a Chinese scroll painter sets the tone as the camera follows a central protagonist, a soldier from another era, as he performs a series of actions and rituals. The uniformed figure paints Chinese nature symbols, chants, meditates and wanders dreamlike through a rolling Californian landscape of fog-shrouded hills, coastal defences and dense woodland valleys. Scenes are filmed in former US military barracks, and in the long-abandoned homes and circular library of Gary Snyder and Zen philosopher Alan Watts, accompanied by haiku and poetry readings from Michael McClure and Gary Snyder, and the disembodied voice of Alan Watts, ruminating upon the passage of time and our perception of the ‘wild’.

Off the trail will be shown, next to the other ZEBRA Poetry award winners, will be shown at the Poetry film gala on Wednesday, Nov 16 during the Interfilm festival.

8pm: Poetry film gala
10pm: Best of

Hackesche Höfe Kino, Rosenthaler Straße 40-41, 10178 Berlin

Entrance: 8/7 Euro