one not to miss if in Rome tonight: Hidden Cities & Hybrid Identities

Hidden Cities & Hybrid Identities, an international videoart festival and photography exhibition, will be held at the beautiful place of our friends in Rome,  The Ripa Hotel & Riparte Cafè. The venue of the event, will open its doors on Friday, July 06th until Sunday, July 08th.

Forty-one artists, twenty-six video artists and fifteen photo artists from different countries have been selected to be part of this project.

The selection, curated by Fabiana Roscioli and Luca Curci, has been based on the concept of “Hidden Cities & Hybrid Identities” that analyses the hybridization of physical and socialidentities in the contemporary cities.

The theme is about all the cities and places around the world. The colors of the hidden cities with his hybrid Identities merge: the day and the night, the neon light that illuminates the facades, the patchwork ofcontaminations, the passers, layers from top the bottom, undergrounds, built geometric shapes in which to play and invent memories. The urban landscape,and his human bodies, is not only formally captured but also perceptually. Its dynamics and features: into excess, in the immobile, or in the unfinished.

Riparte cafè & Spazio Suite , Rome – Italy

opening: July 06, 2012 at Ripa Hotel & Riparte Cafè (h. 6:30 pm), via degli Orti di Trastevere, 3 – Rome

photo exhibition:July 06 – August 05, 2012 /video screenings:July 06–07–08, 2012

via artresort

OTTICA ZERO

by Maja Borg, featuring Nadya Cazan

As mentioned, some years ago, during the 4th Berlin International Directors Lounge, we had the pleasure to screen the film Ottica Zero

Nadya Cazan’s unapologetic nature is surprisingly the sort of attitude that Madison Avenue tends to co-opt for commodification purposes. She’s beautiful, cool, enchanting and she doesn’t seem to need much. If I saw her in a commercial for perfume or yogurt, I would probably immediately go out and buy some.

In the film Ottica Zero, Swedish filmmaker Maja Borg relies heavily on the muse like qualities of Nadya Cazan. The film is half biography, half futurist fantasy. Nadya is (or plays) a woman who was on the brink of major commercial success when she turns her back on the star system (‘I didn’t want to make anything that had no purpose,’ she says) to live as an ascetic amongst modern society. She does not touch money. She wears a Muslim-style body covering. She lives on kosher food and fish heads. As Nadya speaks about her past and what has led her to her present, their is a second monologue from a 90 year-old futurist (can somebody say oxymoron) who has dedicated the rest of his life to offering an alternative resource based economy. No more money and all the messy social strife that goes along with it. In his Utopian vision, people would trade useful resources for other useful resources and we would all be free from judgement.

The film is breathtakingly beautiful. Borg captures Cazan as some sort of modern day Alice in Wonderland and asceticism hasn’t looked this good since Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.  Somehow these three films orbit each other in their relationship to judgement, consumerism and the feminine ideal and I suspect beauty is at the heart of this constellation.

Sandra Small

Now, the follow up, Future My Love is shortly before it´s world-premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival, 21st of June. >> read more

Future My Love by Maja Borg, featuring Nadya Cazan

Some years ago, during the 4th Berlin International Directors Lounge, we had the pleasure to screen the film Ottica Zero, by Swedish filmmaker Maja Borg with Team Directors Lounge member Nadya Cazan as the female lead.

Now, the follow up, Future My Love is shortly before it´s world-premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival, 21st of June.

Future My Love is a unique love story challenging our collective and personal utopias in search of freedom.

At the brink of losing the idealistic love of her life, filmmaker Maja Borg takes us on a poetic road trip through the financial collapse, exploring a radically different economic and social model proposed by 95-year-old futurist Jacque Fresco. How much freedom are we prepared to give to the ones we love? And how much responsibility are we ready to take for our society?

“I have always been an outlier and I don’t see myself as primarily an actress. Neither am I an activist or a visionary like Jacque Fresco, whom I admire with all my heart. I am something without a name. My hope is to be a catalyst for positive change, and so I choose to engage in a different way than the one expected of me by my society.“

Nadya Cazan

Carefully weaving a texture of archive footage, black and white Super 8 film, and colour HD, Borg poignantly depicts the universal struggle between our heads and hearts in times of big change.

preview: confrontations at Interfilm

In this 11th edition of the International Competition Confrontations, expect to see another memorable compilation that unites themes of social and world political importance in three programmes of extraordinary short fiction films and animations. Social injustice, intolerance, violence, war, exploitation and migration are just some of the themes that confront us every day in the media. Despite, or perhaps because of the constant onslaught of these and other complex topics, they run the risk of becoming outworn expressions that conceal the real consequences facing the individual.

The aim of the Confrontations competition is to fill these empty phrases with stories that convey a sense of relatedness, confront us with their authenticity and call for our empathy. Themes explored in this year’s programmes include people on the margins of society, everyday heroes, border crossers, refugees and those whose lives are dominated by external influences.

We’re pleased to announce that this year’s Confrontations Competition is supported by the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”.

Well-known Iranian director, Jafar Panahi, whose second-last film The Accordion will be shown in Confrontations, has been banned from his profession for 20 years and sentenced to 6 years imprisonment. This was confirmed by the Iranian government shortly before going to press. We vehemently condemn the fact that the work of an independent filmmaker can lead to the total loss of his/her freedom.

interfilm FESTIVAL 2011

Directors Lounge Screening

Steven Ball
Travelling Practice
video works
Thursday, 27 Oct. 2011
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte

Travelling Practice

Digital video works by Steven Ball 2003 – 2010. These works travel near and far, across physical and virtual space using material collected en route. Travel determines form, subject and object are fluid entities, digital experimentation becomes landscape study, hyperlocal excursion, and experimental documentary, as they explore and exhaust species of spaces and media.

Steven Ball has worked in film, video, sound and installation since the early 1980s. In the late 1980s he accidentally migrated to Melbourne, Australia. There he continued his practice making a number of film, video and sound and installation works, as well as being engaged in various curatorial, administrative, teaching and writing activities. Since returning to the UK he has worked predominantly with digital video, producing a series of works, which among other things, are particularly concerned with digital material processes and spatial representation.

Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Artist Links:

home: http://www.steven-ball.net

blog: http://directobjective.blogspot.com

videoblog: http://directlanguage2010.blogspot.com

Public Water: http://www.publicwater.net

More infos:

http://www.directorslounge.net

http://www.richfilm.de/currentUpload/

http://www.z-bar.de/Inhaltsseiten/kulturprogramm.html