Competition: Essay-3

3xShapes of Home

Director: Elisabeth Brun
Norway, 2020, 7’, HDD, Color
English with Turkish Subtitles

3xShapes of Home (2020) is a 7 minute experimental video in the intersection between an essay film, a structural experiment and a visual poem. In this video, the filmmaker revisits her place of origin, the small village of Strengelvåg in the Arctic North of Norway. Over a period of two years, she explores through her camera, how the architectures and topographies of that place, that is: the mountains, oceans and built environments, has shaped the filmmaker´s attachment to her childhood place, as well as her thinking. Hunting for insight beyond the subjective, she renders her experience through three sets of film techniques, such as camera position, superimposition and algorithm, and tests her relation to place, against the agency of the camera, the agency of the algorithm and the subjectivity of other creatures, such as a fish and a crab. We hear her voice-over shift from poetic, to analytical, to playful, and numb, as she responds to the way her village is portrayed through the formal operations of the moving image.

Choose Your Own Father

Director: Madyha J. Leghari
Pakistan, 2020, 11’ 31’’, HDD, Color
English with Turkish Subtitles 

Choose Your Own Father is an essay film that derives from extensive archival research into John Latham’s early history in Zambia, describing personal histories of Latham’s father and interweaving these with those of the filmmaker's own father. John Latham (1921 - 2006) was a Northern-Rhodesian born British conceptual artist. His father, Geoffrey Latham, was a colonial administrator who was instrumental in implementing the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Under this program silent educational films were produced and screened to ‘native’ people via mobile cinemas in the British territories in East and Central Africa. It signaled the British Empire embracing soft power and indirect rule in late colonial period. The filmmaker's own father, Muhammad Jan Leghari, comes from a Baloch tribe that was nomadic till a generation ago. His own military career has continued with this itinerant way of being. 

Watching The Pain of Others

Director: Chloé Galibert-Laîné
France, 2019, 31’, HDD, Renkli / Color
French, English with English, Turkish Subtitles 

In this deeply personal video diary, a young researcher tries to make sense of her fascination for the film The Pain of Others by Penny Lane. A deep dive into the discomforting world of YouTube and online conspiracies, that challenges traditional notions of what documentary cinema is, or should be.