Medium Cold

IFFR 2019

An exploration of the collective fantasies about 'Siberia' and 'Communism' in the forbidding state archives of the former Soviet Union.

A random seventies newsreel from the artists&rsquo; hometown in Soviet Siberia forms the substratum for a relentless exploration of representational and narrative strategies: without ever collapsing into a &lsquo;story&rsquo; or abstraction, the film recants the relationship between analogue and digital, surface and reference, sense and experience, past and present.      

horizōn

Deep Focus

Drawing upon cinematic memories: restored classics, films about film(makers), experimental works, installations and retrospectives.

Regained

Trailer

The title is the only understandable word in this footage that was re-used to evoke a surface that functions as a membrane.

(to) preserve

A few trucks hit a road that eventually leads to a hallucinogenic crossroads and a stable with a psychedelic horse.

Night Horse

David Letterman’s ghostwriter indulges in a curious hobby: he collects industrial musicals on vinyl, and even revives this largely  underrated genre.

Did you know that the composers behind Cats, Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret once earned their keep with assignments for McDonald's, Ford and Xerox? Ghostwriter Steve Young wants to put the forgotten genre of company musicals back on the map. What started as a jokey item on the Late Show with David Letterman developed into an obsessive quest.

Bathtubs Over Broadway

A documentary film about the great ‘primitive’ painter Niko Pirosmani, a Georgian equivalent to Henri Rousseau, and a role model for Parajanov.

Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme

Portrait of a key figure from New York's underground film scene, a rising star who disappeared as fast as she appeared.

Rubin was a hyperactive spider in the web of the New York art scene in the late 1960s until she embraced Judaism; a rising star who disappeared as quickly as she appeared. Her oeuvre remained limited to one film, which nevertheless earned her a permanent place in the canon of the avant-garde.

Barbara Rubin & the Exploding NY Underground

The polarity between physical marks on celluloid and the photographic image these support challenged the artist to create a stereoscopic illusion.

Stains and Scratches

From a phone recording made during the Trump election campaign to an eyewitness account of the bombing of Hiroshima: how to articulate an awareness of the world?

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025