The Laboratory Aim Density* of Prisme #6 is a program of three screenings showcasing films shot recently on Super 8, 16 or 35mm.
Each year our open call receives more and more films, culminating in whooping 300 submissions in 2023 ! We have selected 18 from all over the world (Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Austria, Canada, USA, Argentinia, Australia, Bolivia, England, Czech Republic) and, as this is very important to us, the great majority will be projected on film !
This year’s L.A.D. explores visions of temporality beyond our too human approach, visions of time as embodied by fauna and flora, in a secular manner, overtaking our calendar and our fleeting appearances by their endurance and discretion. When an extinct specie seems to only belong to the past, it still shines in the pleats of our memory. Thus nature, battered by our overplanned everyday lives and our concrete habitats, blooms from all sides, in spite of everything, around and within us. Its rhythm is a profound respiration which knows no end. This eternal return, that science aims to dissect but is rendered powerless without poetry, is offered to us by these films who are rendered all-powerful with their poetry.
* « L.A.D » or Laboratory Aim Density is a Kodak printing control method : a standard control patch specifies densities midway between the minimum and maximum of those typically obtained for a normal camera exposure, utilizing traditionally the face of a woman.
PROGRAM L.A.D. 1 :
Light and Land by Kyath Battie
CA / 2023 / 16mm to DCP / 7’10
The contrasting topographies in Light and Land disrupt familiar visions of Canadian landscapes so that the specifics of each scene is understood in more complex terms. Lingering somewhere between fantasy and realism, this futuristic documentary underscores atmospheric phenomenon within mysterious environmental incongruence.
Water, clock by Zach Parrinella
USA / Black Hole Collective / 2021 / 16mm / 8’23”
Water, clock is an interpretation of the velocity of our modern world. Through layering of images, sounds and text, the film explores how rapidly human society has been moving for the last century plus. Industry, building, and “progress” of humankind onto newer and newer frontiers of innovation never cease. At least, if anything we can seek some beauty within the absurdity of all the perpetual movement constantly surrounding us.
Aries by Elian Mikkola
CA / 2020 / 16mm / 3’20
A single window frame; a portal. As the circular nature of time begins to reveal itself, a new decade begins.
Filmed during the first lockdown in Montréal, spring 2020. This collage film compiles together the 30 days leading up to the filmmaker’s 30th birthday. Through repetition, color and juxtaposition, the time experienced takes a new shape on the celluloid.
The West Pole by Olya Korsun
NL / 2022 / 16mm vers DCP / 34’04”
A nameless protagonist travels with no map through the landscape full of chance encounters and bizarre creatures. Every day brings her only more bewilderment – shadows of dinosaurs and singing dunes, tourists hunting for worms and fierce winds bending metal. She disappears, leaving behind a box of 16 mm films which are arranged to reconstruct this hypnotizing and somewhat futile odyssey.
Hula by Amy Halpern, music composed and played Henry Franklin
USA / 2022 / 16mm / 6′
“Abstract music notation and something very obvious.” — A.H.