Three contemporary film work programmes carefully composed from the rich corpus of some 300 works received in response to a call for submissions launched within the international network of artist-run film labs, filmlabs.org. The L.A.D.s provide an opportunity to take the pulse of a creative scene that remains as vibrant as ever.
In the presence of the following filmmakers: Nicole Remy, Carole Thibaud, Eva Claus, Laurence Favre, Lichun Tseng
* Kodak standard film strip to measure colour and density
PROGRAMME
18:30 – First session
Back and forth between inside and outside, documentary forms and the substance of the image.
A journey from the flights of a camera capturing light to the gravity inevitably linked to death.
Fluttering in a field of brightly coloured flowers.
Appearance, disappearance, reconciliation, repair.
Unique encounters, or even Close Encounters of the Third Kind?
‘Cinema is a wonderful means of transport.’
A Certain Light, Nicole Remy – Nanolab – ES / AUS – 2024 – 16mm – 15′
“A Certain Light is a journey through different processes of capturing light using pinhole cameras (pinhole camera in Super 8 format), accompanied by a cassette recorder during my residency at Nanolab (Daylesford, Australia). It represents a step between the interior and the exterior, between moving forward and going back. It is about the space I inhabit, the one I walk through and capture over and over again.”
A Shifting Pattern, Isaac Shermann – Fotokem – US – 2024 16mm – 6′
Music credits: Nicole McCabe ….. saxophone Alex Babbitt ………. flute Isaac Sherman …… synthesizers, composition
Please note: This film contains strobing images
“A collected geography of local flowers; appearing, disappearing, reappearing. Afterimage becomes before-image, physiology and pathology at play. An ode to the neighborhood, an entrapment that offers small moments for escape. The will to walk aimlessly is rejuvenated as stasis turns to movement and back again.”
The Instability of Clouds, Zazie Ray-Trapido – Fotokem – US – 2023 – 16mm > digital – 15’
Two neighbors bond after a shared traumatic event, continuous home developments creep into nature’s threshold, and a community celebrates freedom. The Instability of Clouds navigates a suburban ecosystem in decay and growth while traversing its spaces of comfort, spectacle, and disaster. Through observing and constructing facets within a suburban neighborhood in Southern California, connections between landscape, neighbors, and environment ruminate on the American Dream and its resonances.
Super, Natural, Kyath Battie – Niagara Custom Lab – CAN – 2025 – 16 mm – 7′
Vancouver Island, supernatural by construct and memory, is experienced though landscapes represented by colonial icons, mysterious brilliant fountains, and a curious peacock. A tableaux of sorts, each encounter is singular yet united by stunning and devastated beauty.
Transalps, Olivier Dutel – Film Base – FR – 2025 – 16mm – 7′
Cinema is a wonderful means of transport. By plane, train, underwater, at 200 kilometres per hour or bumping along in a horse-drawn carriage… Along with walking, it is filmmakers’ favourite mode of transport. This film cuts into the rushes from the original journey (probably technical images) and plays with the sound.
Trilogie Carnassière (2), Carole Thibaud – Mire, L’abominable – FR – 16mm – 14′
The Trilogie Carnassière is a triptych about meat.
This is animals, humans, killings, always in an intimate context, in farms, following a certain tradition, with what has been transmitted and what has been lost, with joy, improvisation, chaos, but also this gravity necessarily linked to death.
The first film is a weave of chicken wings, feathers, and blood.
The second is a killing of pigs, filmed in 16mm in a collective place, where we feel the strong importance of transmission and sharing. From a distance you might think seing a feverish, confused agitation, but it is on approach that you discover the precision of the gestures and precious know-how, and it becomes like a dance of boots, hands and knives. There is both this feeling of the serious, almost solemn moment, because we have killed and it must be done well, and this joy which augurs the conviviality to come, the intense pleasure of the shared meal.
Made in Mire, L’abominable and Color by Dejonghe.
Snack between the two screenings.
21:00- Second session
Sunlight on 16mm film.
Immensity of landscapes, centrifugal forces.
Mineral, cosmic, human.
Cycles and transformation.
To Be a Day, Eva Claus – Dejonghe – BE – 2025 – 16 mm – 8′
“A window to the outside world, just like the camera’s frame. Through this window, I watch the sunrise. To Be a Day captures the sun casting its light over a vast seascape on Fogo Island, Canada. Between sunrise and sunset, a series of white dots appear. These white circles reflect the moonlight, guiding fishermen as they walk across the pier to their sheds and boats in the early morning.”
Estrelladistante, Celeste Rojas Mugica – Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola – ES – 2023 – 16 mm > digital – 13′
“A strange weapon of optical complexity is able to project an enormous dazzling light over the territory. Precisely aimed, the ray can cause the spread of colossal heat, enough to destroy everything. The night is extinguished, the earth burns, the creatures run away groping towards the depths of the world. In the dark holes the space expands enough to imagine a refuge where another imaginary may appear.”
Tooborac, Richard Tuohy & Dianna Barrie- Nanolab – AUS – 2025 – 16mm – 9′
“Granite tors scattered over 20 square kilometers around Tooborac in central Victoria dance in ecstatic celebration of their own endurance.”
Zerzura, Laurence Favre – LaborBerlin / Andec – DE – 2024 – 16 mm – 11′
How do we perceive ‘nature’? Is it a ‘thing’ to which we humans are external? Or are we all part of a mesh where there is no centre nor periphery? Can an assemblage of sounds and images invite us to see ‘nature’ as living, sentient and endowed with agentivity? Following ‘Resistance’ (2017) and ‘Osmosis’ (2022), ‘Zerzura’ closes the trilogy ‘Corpus Animale’.
Morphosis, Lichun Tseng & Mick o’Shea – Filmwerkplaats – NL – 2025 – 16 mm – 15′
“A journey in flux—shifting between memory and reality, between past and present—where sound and image move sometimes in parallel, sometimes in cohesion: independent, yet interlaced.
Change unfolds within the process of creation—between us, in us, within this piece—in the continuous, transforming line of morphosis: across time, through time.”