Media Contact: Laine Slater, laine@viff.org or 604.685.0260 x 809
Media Resources

NEXT: Documentary Perspectives in
Contemporary Art

May 19 - 26

Rodakis (Olaf Nicolai, 12 min, 2008, Germany)
The portrait of a person in the form of an architectural documentary. A house built during the end of the 19th century on the Greek island of Aegina becomes the screen for a narration allowing a ghostly absence to become the starting point for a biography.

Der Speigel (Keren Cytter, 4 min, 2007, Israel/Netherlands)
Cytter's work analyzes the way in which mainstream films are constructed, the narrative devices and editing tricks they employ. In Der Spiegel , her characters refer to these devices, commenting on their own subtitles or congratulating each other on a smooth edit.

Time Lines (Runa Islam, 17 min, 2005, India/UK)
Time Lines focuses on three early 20th century structures in Barcelona: the once iconic cable car of Montjuic, now used primarily as a tourist excursion; and two rides in the antiquated Tibidado fairground a plane that moves in a fixed circle overhead and a crane that rotates upwards to what was formerly the highest point in the city.

The Great Message (Omer Fast, 27min, 2007, Israel/Germany)
The borders of the documentary genre begin to melt when Fast links and manipulates collective imagery and the individual unconscious, presenting the overlapping and simultaneously contradictory narratives of four Flemish couples caught in a time loop.

The New Terrorism (Dani Gal, 11min, 2006, Israel/Germany)
"The New Terrorism" was an educational kit from the 1970s used to teach US high schoolers about the threat of terrorism. Gal taped the slide images and slowed the footage to match the length of the accompanying record, resulting in an unsynthesized presentation that makes the process of creating historical narratives evident.

The Head (Deimantas Narkevicius, 13 min, 2007, Lithuania)
Narkevicius was studying sculpture in Vilnius when the Velvet Revolution halted the genre of socialist realism. Within just a few days, almost all of the monuments from the Soviet era had been removed. The Head presents people's reactions to the monuments, then and now.

Sand Quarry (Raphael Grisey, 6 min, 2006, France)
A group of friends trip into the forest to unearth a slumbering history. The video explores the publicly manifesting forms of remembering: it looks in an urban environment for traces of the historical events of left-wing resistance and their participants.

Rosa's Letters—Telling a Story (Pia Rønicke, 44 min, 2006, Denmark)
Rønicke's film is centred on the letters of Rosa Luxemburg, but rather than documenting a historical personality, she appropriates the letters in a deliberately subjective manner. The voice in the film is embodied in an investigator, who contemplates and acts out the scenario.

Alles wird wieder gut (Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger, 20min, 2006, Switzerland)
Taking Lenin's "Farewell Letter to the Swiss Workers" as its starting point, this video looks at the question of utopias today in a society that is witnessing a decline in solidarity and the rise in the power of the media and economic manipulation.

Jeanne Faust's film and photographic works are examinations of authenticity, all playing with our patterns of expectation, playing on our familiarity with stories told by film images. Her small-scale, very meticulously portrayed stories are not really stories at all, they only become so through what we anticipate as viewers. Each film features a small about-turn: The interviewed film star reverses the roles and starts interrogating the interviewer, the hands onscreen follow the instructions we hear off screen, or the action is shown twice from different angles. Asking people to act out their actions in front of the camera makes it clear just how great our desire to continue to believe that what the camera records is "real."

Rodeo (Jeanne Faust, 9 min, 1998, Germany)
In her debut, Faust shows how our usual way of looking at film can serve to intensify reality. Two young men have a boring job counting passers-by on a remote road. How they speak (and stay silent), their description of an exciting adventure that will probably never take place, even the way in which one of them orders drinks in a bar, seem to bring a life as a film hero within reach.

My Own Private Satellite (Jeanne Faust and Jörn Zehe, 9 min, 2001, Germany)
In a soulless suburb, the actors real area inhabitants turn their circles. They play on the grass, they cycle on the smart paths, they steal a car. Originally intended as a loop, the film provides a view of a routine that has lost all function.

Interview (Jeanne Faust, 9 min, 2002, Germany)
Faust interviews Lou Castel, the aging star of films by Garrel and Fassbinder. Is this a conversation or are they both playing a role—she the insistent female interviewer and he the grumpy old star on the wane. The extremely uneasy conversation is reminiscent of our need for authenticity and "real" answers.

Sonst wer wie Du (Jeanne Faust and Jörn Zehe, 9 min, 2003, Germany)
A field, a town in the distance, mountains. In this landscape, a boy stands working in the field. He is addressed by someone offscreen, where the spectator is. What looks like an innocent conversation soon turns into an uneasy cat and mouse game, in which it is no longer clear whether these two really are strangers.

The Mansion (Jeanne Faust, 10 min, 2004, Germany)
A sound recording studio. It is not clear immediately whether the four characters (Lou Castel, father; Sandro Mabellini, son; Bill Parton and Jeff Turk, gangsters) are there to dub a script or to plan something nefarious. Since the setting hardly offers any possibility for drawing conclusions, their relationships are manifested through language alone. The rhythm of the dialogue, the way a single theme is revolved around, varied and reiterated is echoed in the subsequent musical composition, a canon.

IV (Jeanne Faust, 9 min, 2005, Germany)
The woman on screen does her best to describe a film still from Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep as objectively and completely as possible. Our observation, we discover, is so much more complex and more adequate than language can describe. And yet language is our only instrument to communicate what we see.

Repeter alba negra (Jeanne Faust and Jörn Zehe, 7 min, 2006, Germany)
A shell game has to be practised before it can be used to seduce tourists. Once again Faust uses real people who play out their daily routine in front of the camera, evoking a double game with reality.

Excuse me Brother (Jeanne Faust, 7 min, 2006, Germany)
On a work bench, a praying mantis is being prepared by a not very experienced taxidermist. A precious task, with instructions being handed over from offscreen by a more experienced and obviously very trusted person. Faust: "The everyday nature of the unravelling dialogue contrasts with the loaded pictures."