The Hopper by Alex Brüel Flagstad

Clay-Motion, Stash House Stick-Ups, West Baltimore, and fluffy pancakes.

The Hopper is not your average clay-animation story. 16 year old Dexter lives with his grandmother in west Baltimore, Maryland. One night Dexter and his friend Kevin rob local drug dealers, but things do not work out as planned and violence spins out of control.

“Most people regard clay animation movies as children’s movies. They take a certain cuteness and naivety for granted with animated characters acting in a funny story. I knew this from the very beginning of the project and thought this offered a great opportunity to catch the audience off guard. I wanted to tell a story in a clay-animated universe where the premise of the real world is somehow maintained – "realistic” violence and “real” people with “real” problems (i.e. “real” hallucinations from “real” drugs).
The Hopper aims at capturing the mood and feeling of West Baltimore, Maryland. In a way it is paying tribute to The Wire, a series which completely blew me away: so perfectly written and realistically told. I grew up with HipHop and rap music and have a deep rooted love for this music and culture. I think this kept me going, making every nerdy detail as real as possible. Normally I am very impatient person but stop-motion and clay-animation is unbeatable, you just can’t rush it.
I’d be very happy if people watching The Hopper would at some point forget that they are watching a clay-motion movie.“

Alex Brüel Flagstad

The Hopper will be shown at the 10th Berlin International Directors Lounge:

DL selection VII

Tues 11 | 8pm | space A

DIGITAL CRYSTAL BALL: THE FUTURE, NEAR AND FAR FROM PARIS

At 7pm, the first of three Urban Research curations by DL’s Klaus W. Eisenlohr hits town… or rather, city. “The Future, The City” explores future and futuristic redfinitions of urban space, in terms of both loss and gain. Then at 8pm, Argentinian filmmaker Gustavo Postiglione takes a single city and digs to its depths with an eye for humour: Rosario, Argentine crossroads metropolis and birthplace of Che Guevara, is dissected for irony in “Lejos de Paris” (“Far From Paris”). At 9pm, another heady brew of shorts, DL Selection V, takes Space A with six premieres, including German first screenings of the black humour “5 Ways to Die” from Cyprus and “The Big Leap” (PL/SE), with its director Kristoffer Rus in attendance. Rounding all this up, Directors Lounge fittingly presents Deep House Lounge from the spinners of DJ Jense, who embraces deep/deeper/deepest sounds in Nu Disco and more, as he has done in travels across Finland and Germany. Be there, Sunday doesn’t get better!

Day 4 program

the complete program, 6 – 16 Feb

pictured: Gustavo Postiglione “Lejos De Paris” (Far From Paris); Urban Research curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

WILDLIFE AND… WILD LIFE (ANIMATED & HUMAN ANIMALS)

Directors Lounge boomerang contributor Kim Collmer carts a jungle of joys to the Naherholung Sternchen tonight. Kicking off at 6pm, her self-curated “Wild at Heart: Animations about Animals and ‘Nature” includes dragons and a minotaur in the zoo.The filmmaker will be on hand to administer first aid in the form of illumination. At 8pm, DL Selection III tumbles love and home around like a badger in a spin-dryer, with a couple of World Premieres in the lot, and more than a couple of thought-provokers. Four shorts take over the screen at 9pm with DL Selection IV, including Max Sacker ’s eye-seducing take on Bunuel’s (and others’) film language, “Belle de Lyon,” with the director in personal attendance to hear your reactions to this sliced serving of b/w and colour pain and pleasure. Kate Maveau is also on hand to present her “Shimi”. At the shank of the evening, Herr Blum (neither man nor flower, but a son-and-father frontal attack on the senses) bring their visual/acoustic “music and action painting” performance assault to the boiling point. Their aim is “provocation and ecstasy,” and you can never get enough of either. After that, anything can happen… and probably will. Open end, the best end there is (!)… tonight at Directors Lounge.

Day 3 program

the complete program, 6 – 16 Feb

pictured: Max Sacker “Belle De Lyon”, Steven Subotnick “Hairyman”, “Chaingang of Love” by Nicolas Maidana

PEQUEÑOS ELECTRODOMÉSTICOS by Manuel Arija

First dates tend to be awkward. You don’t know each other, but it’s fun to explore. You first meet for a coffee, and then you end up in her apartment. It’s all good, she’s got good refreshing alcohol, you’re liking each other and it’s gonna work out. Red lipstick, red mini skirt, curly hair – almost Almodovar and you’re ready for some passion. Yet the Spanish director, Manuel Arija, decides to prevent the obvious and get it a bit trashy. She is special, but so he is. They are a perfect match, like a plus and a minus on a battery, like a nut and a key. This surreal story of the two strangers won’t leave you thirsty.

Katja Avant-Hard

“Pequeños Electrodomésticos / Little Appliances” will be screened during the 10th Berlin International Directors Lounge [DLX], Feb 6 – 16, 2014 in DL Selection III:Sat 8 | 8pm | space A

the complete program

RUSSIAN’S SEXXX ON THE DANCE-FLURR

Space A plays host to a double-header of DL Selections (I and II, 6:30 and 8:00), a flavour bag from four continents, more film treats than you can swallow without undeniable pleasure. Meanwhile, Space B goes “Concrete” with nonstop film premiere presentions and loops at 6:30pm. Russian man-about-the-continent (and occasional DL import) Alexei Dmitriev, here in the flesh, puts desires of the flesh back where they belong… off the laptop monitor and onto the big screen (8:30, Space B) in Alexxxei’s Program. Bring that unsupecting friend… this could be the ice-breaker you’ve been aching for. Then, as live as it gets… when people say “indescribable,” they probably mean to say Petra Flurr, the “queerpunk” who picked up two awards at BMVA 2013, and who will pick you up, too. Maybe literally. Petra does it (exactly what, you wonder?) at 10:00. Danceteria with a surprise DJ starts around 11:00pm. What a trip. All tonight at Directors Lounge.

Day 2 program

the complete program, 6 – 16 Feb

pictured: Edina Csüllög “Hearts in Vain”, Robert Arnold "Morphology of Desire 1998”, Petra Flurr

HUNTING DOWN ECSTASY

Buñuel, Bergman and Genet meet in Max Sacker’s Belle de Lyon

by Kenton Turk

“I should punish you.” The line comes later in the film, but could just as well accompany the initial shots. Opening with dank halls, a caged rat and Nikolai Kinski setting up a miniature guillotine, you could expect to be soaked in dreariness in Max Sacker’s ten-minute short, but it soon turns to the distance of a cinema setting and a turnabout of the standard roles, with beauty sitting firmly in the audience, and not flickering up front, larger than life. This turns again and again, so that it not always clear if we are watching the audience from the screen or vise versa. In this way, the tone is set for the ambiguities that the film explores in pictures and words Belle de Lyon is a determined collage of moments, the sort of images that accompany a night sweat. In large part a take on Buñuel ’s out put, spanning his black-and-white earlier works and culminating with his first colour feature, Belle du jour, Sacker’s film honours beauty and implied horrors.

The disturbing (Un Chien Andalou’s infamous eye-slicing scene) jockeys for attention next to the comforting (fields bathed in pastel sunsets), the connection being that every scene, every moment is a picture, literally, with an ever-present camera reminding of the viewer of his voyeurism, and that of film in general. Indeed, this is watching the watcher watch the watcher, layers of voyeurism draped over layers of film references. Midway through comes a sequence of Bergmanesque arrangement and stares, making the relative fluidity of the opening and closing sequences bookend swaths in a formal symmetry. Defining direction throughout is an aphoristic romp through words whispered, spoken and occasionally printed out to fill the frame, banners of proclamation that feel like poetic penetration. Jean Genet’s and Harry Crews’s askew logic on love and its attendant pain get headline treatment: ecstasy in betrayal, ecstasy in vengeful annihilation. Valeria Piskounova (Deneuve/Séverine), a Candy Darling clone, strolls through like a work in soft marble. Kinski’s face complements hers with a bevelled angularity that matches his nuanced and shifting earnestness. There isn’t a moment you couldn’t frame; few you wouldn’t bathe in. Even if pain necessarily attends or even intensifies ecstasy, you rarely see the two look better partnered to each other than here.

“Belle De Lyon” will be screened during the 10th Berlin International Directors Lounge [DLX], Feb 6 – 16, 2014  in DL Selection IV:Sat 8 | 9pm | space A

the complete program

Tomorrow you bring the eyes, we provide the rest!

The 10th Berlin International Directors Lounge [DLX], the festival for contemporary media and film.
6th to 16th of February, Naherholung Sternchen, behind the Kino International (map)
U Schillingstrasse | Berolinastr. 7, Berlin Mitte

Daily from 6pm till dawn. Opening reception Thurs. 6th, 8pm


no admission till 8 pm
Accreditations only on location. Please ask at the counter.

DL X the full program

DL is chaos in progress, everything is subject to change.

The 10th Berlin International Directors Lounge [DLX]Opening Reception: 6 Feb, 8pm

MIX IT, THEN MIX IT AGAIN… FILMS & MUSIC BOTH SHAKEN AND STIRRED

Jump straight in… and do it twice, with the one-two, in-your-face combo of DL Mix I and II (8pm & 9pm). No corner of the globe unturned here. Seriously bizarre filmlets from far-flung shores and souls… delightfully arranged to play with your sensibilities before letting you shake that groove thang to match your rearranged grey cells. “Alien pop” diva Anna Aliena gets you on the way with her otherworldy mezzosoprano paired with electro chops and maybe a slice or two of Liedgut (10pm). Not enough, the rumbling raunchy rockers Kings of Spreedelta get beat into your bones at 10:30pm, leaving you charged enough to embrace with open arms the Dance Lounge and the turntable wizardry of Pale Music founder Steve Morell (11pm), whose mere glance is enough to stop you in your tracks… and who will can and will seduce you with the choicest tracks. Getting started tonight was one thing, ending could be difficult… doors open to God-knows-when. Dance, discuss and devolve all night at the Directors Lounge opening of openings!

DL Opening Mix I 8pm | Space A
with films by Hussen Ibraheem, Zaoli Zhong, Tokomburu, Engin Kilicatan, Gerhard Schuhmacher, Thiago B. Mendonca and Andreas Goldfuss

DL Opening Mix 9 pm | Space A
Víctor Ballesteros, Sam Bell, Michael Fleming, Naren Wilks, David Turpin and Franz Nurmi, Neil Needleman, Marc Adamson, Luca Zuberbuehler, Daniel van Westen and Oliver Smith

Opening program:
https://directorslounge.net/tag/6th%20Feb%202014

the complete program, 6 – 16 Feb:
http://berlinlounge.tumblr.com

pictured: Michael Fleming “Avalance”

The Kid at Ten:
[DLX], The 10th Berlin International Directors Lounge, 6-16 Feb

Ten years of cult happening, a tenth mad mix of film and related art, a tenth switched-in and turned-on audience that is more than just an audience … ten years of rules turned on their head. Though press and others have tried, it is, we are proud to say, hard to readily define The Berlin International Directors Lounge. So much the better.

Neither a short film nor feature film festival, not strictly for standard screenings nor installational set-ups, not indeed exclusively a film forum or live performance spectacle, “DL” is in fact all of these in one happening, the only event of its kind in Berlin.

There are no lines or barriers. No staff to separate movers and shakers from the moved and shaken. Nothing but films upon films, with interwoven live acts, at turns musical, visual and indescribable, gluing it together. And only one part of a year-round globe-hopping media-art platform… but what a part. 272 visionary film offerings, short, medium and longer, from 54 countries on 6 continents at the last outing, plus 15 live acts and 16 DJ sets, installations, visitors from here and around the planet, in for this lounge/club/art experience.
All in a whirlwind 11 days. All tied together by a nearly infinite exchanges of ideas. And on the upswing. Though international, this is also a real Berlin event, full of the street cred you can’t buy.

Now, the Berlin International Directors Lounge, the “Kid” who is always new in town, is back.[DLX], the tenth festival of arresting, atypical, attention-grabbing film, will be what the daring filmgoer needs, a one-of-a-kind mixture of stimuli, media art of various forms housed under one roof, each vying for its own attention, but without a hint of competition. This is also the perfect backdrop for artists’ interchange, both with one another and with those they may rarely encounter: their audience. All of this is once again only part of a greater whole: the festival is the anchor of the year-round Directors Lounge, which is not content to sit at home, but takes its treasure trove of film gems alongside invited performers to cities here and around the world.

The doors will open on a dazzling new concoction of choicest cuts at the Naherholung Sternchen, the insider in-space a stone’s throw from Kino International. Eleven days, or rather, nights of what you need to see and hear. What you’ve been missing without knowing it.
kt/DL

The 10th Berlin International Directors Lounge, 6-16 Feb
Naherholung Sternchen (behind the Kino International)
Berolinastr. 7, 10178 Berlin-Mitte
U-Bhf. Schillingstraße

Daily from 6 pm – open end
Opening Reception: Feb. 6, 8 pm
No admission till 8 pm

the complete DLX festival program
 
facebook event

See you at DLX!

Yours Team DL

DL X special: Erdal Inci

 Erdal Inci´s mesmerizing loops of cloned motion will be shown on the stage screen in the Lounge area.

You´ll be glued to the screen.

Erdal Inci TR DL X special presentation

Taksim Spiral 0,8s  2013 
Pictogram 1,4s  2013 
Hieropolis Amphitheatre 1,4s  2013
Flood of Light 1,4s 2013
Camondo Stairs 0,4s 2013

pictured: Erdal Inci TR Taksim Spiral 0,8 s, 2013.

DL X program.