Wednesday at the Festival
The second day of the 20th 25 FPS Festival brings a “(prezent) noir” competition block, a retrospective program by the director and this year’s symposium guest Esther Urlus, a selection by the jury member and director Tomislav Šoban, as well as a new film by Ben Rivers, Bogancloch. The experimental director Jan Kulka’s workshop also kicks off today.
Today's program will open at 2 p.m., with a retrospective program by Esther Urlus, a director and founder of the Rotterdam film lab Filmwerkplaats. The program is screening within the Ecoanalogies section, the 3rd iteration of the Alanogue Film in the Digital Age Symposium. Urlus's alchemical works present exciting experiments with colour chemistry and emulsion and as part of the program, she will present seven of her films made in the last fifteen years.
At 4 p.m., the Croatian film director and Grand Jury member Tomislav Šoban will present a selection of cinematic inspiration in his program for Jury's Choice. Šoban will screen two of his own titles and three films by renowned directors, most notably Water Pulu 1869 1896 by Ivan Ladislav Galeta. With this program, Šoban problematises the idea of a “wrong” way of watching, seeing, or creating; he tries to “establish the wrongness” as part of cinematic essence.
The English filmmaker Ben Rivers, whose past magical works have already screened at the festival, returns once more with his new film. His feature film Bogancloch is scheduled for 6 p.m. The film marks Rivers’ return to his old film subject – Jake Williams, a hermit living in the highland forests of Scotland, in harmony with nature and the changing seasons. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the director.
The second competition program, Prezent Noir, screens at 8.30 p.m., featuring four films that tackle the dark and uncomfortable aspects of contemporary age, from the harrowing scenes coming from Palestine, to civil unrest and gentrification. After the screening, there will be a Q&A with the filmmaker and artist Miranda Pennell (Man Number 4), multimedia artist and director Anton Cla (experimental animation Cyclepaths), and the American-Austrian artist Gerhard Treml (Frogtown, Shorts on the New Urban Noir). The final film in this Competition program is Fear of Floating by Dianna Barrie and Richard Tuohy.
Along with the varied film program, the director Jan Kulka's intriguingly named workshop Principles of Cinema and Perception also starts today. The workshop begins with the basics of projection as the articulation of light and follows the evolution of the media from the perspective of media archaeology.