OFFICAL SELECTION OF FILM ESSAYS 14. PHH

12.6 (Wednesday) 18.00 Cinematheque (free screening)
PERIPHERIA [2023]
dir. Beau Maibaum, DE, 21’

Highways, bridges, warehouses, supermarket parking lots – they provide the backdrop against which contemporary human alienation takes place in Peripheria, the second short film by the 25-year-old German writer, photographer, and director Bo Meibaum.

In search of his missing husband, the narrator [the voice of Max Lamperti] undertakes an expedition through these generic, empty, anonymous spaces (or "non-spaces" in Marc Auger's terminology) that seem like they could be part of any European suburb. Wandering restlessly through the desolate, liminal territories of the city – and through his own weariness and sadness – he is more and more seduced and consumed by the feeling of belonging to them.

A landscape essay film in the style of Patrick Keiller, Jenni Olson, and James Benning, "Peripheria" is a film about the depression, industrial zones, and the slow demise of human civilization that also offers a gently thought-out review of the topic of non-space, from the point of view of the im/possibility of imagining coherent alternatives to the future outside of capitalist realism.

12.6 (Wednesday) 18.00 Cinematheque (free screening)
TO THE EARTHEN RED [Crvenoj, boji žarene zemlje, 2022]
dir. Nika Pećarina, HR, 19’

"To the Earthen Red" is an experimental, ontologically oriented video-essay that, through the narrative of the transformation of clay into an object, poetically questions the relationships between landscape, ceramics, human senses, and the film image. Originally conceived as a documentary investigation of the production process of the ceramic object, Nika Pecharina's film evolves - through references to the origin and philosophical reflections on the character of physical nature - into a unique video-poem that tries to unite several seemingly incompatible topics such as pottery, thermography, and the transformation of creatures into an inspired film record of the miraculous transformations of one of the oldest natural materials: clay.

It, on the other hand – in the palms of the miners and potters, behind Pecharina's eye and camera, under the semi-real, dreamlike cloaks of infrared – seems to be condemned to remember and repeat Creation itself... and everything else that has passed.

12.6 (Wednesday) 18.00 Cinematheque (free screening)
THE MECHANICS OF FLUIDS [La Mécanique des fluides, 2022]
dir. Gala Hernández López, FR/ES, 39'

In 2018, Anathematic Anarchist, a self-proclaimed incel – a phrase borrowed from the English language meaning involuntary celibate – publicly shared his intention to commit suicide on the Internet platform "Reddit". Four years later, deeply moved by his words – and disturbed by the sentence, "America is responsible for my death" – Gala Hernández López sets out in search of accountability and answers. "The Mechanics of Fluids" is the cinematic record of this quest.

Wandering virtually, through the endless spaces of the internet in an attempt to find as many digital traces of Anathematic Anarchist as possible, Lopes delves deeper and deeper into the world of incels (an internet subculture dominated by angry, heterosexual misogynists) and increasingly begins to see him as an inevitable embodiment of capitalist progress, of the dark despair of modernity, of the radical atomization of society produced by the screens and algorithms of digital dating apps. Through the process, slowly but surely, the Anathemic Anarchist turns into more than just a casual companion for Lopes: her negative doppelganger.

The Mechanics of Fluids is an invitation to an honest inner journey through loneliness and despair to the desire for connection and interpersonal contact. "I made the film," says Lopes, "because I wanted to tell incels, 'You're wrong, it's not the women's fault!' These stupid apps are to blame, the ubiquitous superficiality, the fact that we are so alienated from each other... Sex, after all, is a simple thing; love is much more complicated."

12.6 (Wednesday) 18.00 Cinematheque (free screening)
DEEP IN THE EYE AND THE BELLY: CHAPTER I [2023]
dir. Sam Williams, UK, 23

In 1865, the inhabitants of the Askim district near Gothenburg are awakened by an unusual sight: a young blue whale, distressed and snarling among the reefs of an outfall. "I will bring him ashore whole, in one piece, and his body will be in my power," August Wilhelm Malm, a famous zoologist, preparer, and opportunist, wrote in his diary on the same day. Over the course of the next day and night, the giant creature would be methodically shot, hacked to pieces, and stabbed with harpoons and spears—until it finally gasped and died in a sea of its own blood.

Carefully dismembered, dissected, and reassembled, the whale becomes a dramatic museum exhibit, whose open jaw also allows access to its interior, lavishly embellished with starry decor. Sometime in the 1930s, a couple was found inside in the act of making love, and the entrance to the whale's belly has been closed to the public ever since. Sam Williams, a London-based artist, wonders: Isn't this just an episode in a larger story, one about our need to inhabit and own other people's bodies?

"Deep in the Eye and the Gut: Chapter I" is the introductory segment of a large-scale, multidisciplinary project with an eco-background that, in its current incarnations (two long monologues, a choreographed one-act play, and a lament for the last whale), tells the story of the inevitable climate collapse accompanied by an imagined future in which the ionic descendants of today's humans – forced to return to the oceans from which their distant ancestors once emerged – find refuge in the bodies of the same giant whales they once dissected for their museums. In addition to moving images, the project also includes two miniature wax sculptures made of cerumen: the resin that, accumulating in the ears of whales, just like wooden years, carelessly preserves their age and history, their intimate, personal story.