Competition: Personal Cinema

Hear Me Sometimes

Director: Sofia Theodore-Pierce
USA, 2020, 14’ 22’’, HDD, color
English with Turkish subtitles

Butterfly as verb, Butterfly as birth control, Butterfly as precarious achievement, Butterfly as speed, Butterfly as sleeping dram, and someone to love in 157 years. The monarch migration and an unearthed cassette tape correspondence form a storm speaking towards motherhood, loss, expectation, care and legacy. 

I Was a Free Dog

Director: Yuula Benivolski
Canada, 2020, 11’, HDD, b&w
No Dialog 

Two sisters meet in a dream, and swim together for the first time since they were kids. Sound recordings from their childhood accompany this landscape: an orchestra of air raid sirens, barking dogs and tropical birds exist all at once, and indicate that we are within multiple realities.

The Flame of the Spent Hour 

Director: Roger Deutsch
Hungary, 2020, 8’, HDD, color
No Dialog

Hour by hour the ancient face of repeated / Beings changes, and hour by hour, / Thinking, we get older. / Everything passes, unknown, and the knower / Who remains knows he knows not. / But nothing, Aware or unaware, returns. / Equals, therefore, of what isn’t our equal, / Let us preserve, in the heat we remember, / The flame of the spent hour. Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa) 

Wellow

Director: Sally Waterman
UK, 2020, 11’, HDD, color
English with Turkish subtitles

‘Wellow’ dwells upon place, ancestry, mortality and religion, triggered by the redevelopment of the filmmaker's late Grandfather’s Baptist church on the Isle of Wight, UK. Extracted quotations from T.S Eliot’s poem, ‘Four Quartets’, along with a telephone conversation with her mother, recorded during lockdown illuminate themes of time, memory, life cycles through this English village community.