Thursday at the Festival

Today's program offers two competition blocks, 'Remnants and Keepsakes' and 'Dark Light', a retrospective by the jury member Eve Heller, and a specially curated program by the French-Australian filmologist Charlie Hewison, part of the festival's Analogue Film in the Digital Age Symposium.

The first screening of the day is a selection by the filmologist Charlie Hewison, a film researcher whose work deals with cinematic materialism, contemporary photochemical practices and eco-criticism. The screening starts at 2 p.m. and features seven varied experimental films that draw attention to the materiality of film and use biochemical reactions to “create new vibrant, mysterious and hypnotic forms before our eyes”.

At 4 p.m., there will be a retrospective program by the American filmmaker and Grand Jury member Eve Heller. Heller will present eight of her films that were made over the period of thirty and more years – “eight existential puzzles”, as she calls them, that arise from the accumulation of images in the (sub)consciousness.

The third block of films competing for the Grand Prix, Remnants and Keepsakes, is scheduled for 6 p.m. The main theme connecting the five films revolves around widespread and/but sunken images of culture, scenes of excess, of what comes to the fore when the show ends. The screening will be followed by a Q&A, where we’ll be joined by the director of Lick a Wound, Nathan Ghali, and one of the directors of The Sun to Me Is Dark, Oscar Mangione.

At 8.30 p.m., we’ll be watching Dark Light, the fourth competition block, featuring five films about the literal and metaphorical interplay and interdependence of light and darkness. After the screening, there will be a Q&A with the filmmaker Asako Ujita (Fade), and the producers of Ivan Faktor’s last film, Pain – Jelena Duh and Damir Čučić.