Kran Film is presenting a selection of films by its members produced from 2010.  Out of 9 short films we are screening 7 Belgian premiers by filmmakers from Lebanon, USA, Egypt, Belgium and Denmark. The programme which will be on screen at Bozar on 22 and 23 June is divided in two categories: documentary/narrative and art/experimental.  Although different in approach, all the films in a critical way observe social, political and cultural actualities and their local expressions in Greenland, UK and Armenia, either in Alexandria, Brussels and Cairo, touching upon issue of memory, otherness, migration, art, economy and personal history.

Programme

I – 22.06. 2012, at 20pm

Total duration of the programme: 79min

1. Echoes (Belgian premiere) by Ivalo Frank

2010, color, sound, 24’, HD

Honorable mention at Los Angeles International Film Festival 2011
the Best Documentary – London Underground film festival 2011

English spoken, English subtitles

2. Side Walk by Binevsa Berivan

2011, color, sound, 17’

Kurdish and French spoken, English subtitles

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3. Fifth Column (Belgian premiere) by Vatche Boulghourjian

2010, color, sound, 22’

Cannes Film Festival competition 2010:

3^rd award Prize by the Cinéfondation, La Sélection

Armenian spoken, English subtitles

4. Blue Dive (Belgian premiere) by Mostafa Youssef

2011, color, sound, 16’

Selection: Film Festival Rotterdam 2012

Arabic spoken, English subtitles

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II – 23. 06. 2012 at 20pm

Total duration of the programme: 65min

1. The Corridor (Brussels premiere) by Sarah Vanagt

2010, color, sound, HD, 6’45”

Award: 1st at the Courtisane Film Festival – Gent in 2011

english spoken

2. Sound from the Hallways (Belgian premiere) by Lasse Lau

2012, color, sound, 25’

no dialogue

3. Populus Tremula (Belgian premiere) by Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida

2010, 16mm, silent, 9’

Selection:  Rotterdam Film Festival 2011

4. Rice city (Belgian premiere) by Sherif El Azma

2010, color, sound, 19’

Arabic spoken, English subtitles

5. Disco (Belgian premiere) by Raed Yassin

2010,  color, 5’35”

no dialogue

Films

22.06. 2012, at 20pm

(79 min)

Echoes (Belgian premiere)

by Ivalo Frank

2010, color, sound, 24’, HD

Honorable mention at Los Angeles International Film Festival 2011
the Best Documentary – London Underground film festival 2011

ECHOES is a film about the American presence in Greenland, about abandoned airbases and radar stations from WWII. It’s also a love story about two people who have met in the stunning landscape of history, in the sounds of drum dance and music.

Echoes captured a kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of the vast and unnervingly beautiful east Greenlandic vista, with the decaying remnants of mankind’s greatest moral and ideological struggles – and utilizes the wonderfully unique visual and aural representations of Greenland as a canvas on which to paint the echoes of history and time.

Side Walk

by  Berivan Binevsa

2011, color, sound, 17’

This is the story about Mémo, a Kurdish immigrant living with his wife in the basement of a Brussels house. To avoid eviction from Belgium, Mémo remains secluded in his basement, peeping on passers-by through the window and waiting for his wife to return.

In this dance of feet walking in front of his basement window, Mémo finds himself witness to stories and daily dramas without having the opportunity to take a stand.

Fifth Column (Belgian premiere)

by Vatche Boulghourjian

2010, color, sound, 22’

Cannes Film Festival competition 2010:

3^rd award Prize by the Cinéfondation, La Sélection

Set in the Armenian quarter of Burj Hammoud, Fifth Column tells the story of a young boy, Hrag, and his unemployed father. A poignant scene of the film shows the boy begging an old shoemaker in a decrepit shop to give his father back his job. However, the old craft of making shoes is no longer in demand… The tools used for making shoes are contrasted with the gun the boy carries – instruments of creativity being replaced by the instrument of death.

Fifth Column stands out for its haunting portrayal of cultural and economic desolation and hopelessness. It explores the problem of a new generation that can no longer understand the importance of heritage; it explores the meaning of culture as it impacts both individuals and the community to which they belong.

Blue Dive (Belgian premiere)

by Mostafa Youssef

2011, color, sound, 16’

Selection: Film Festival Rotterdam 2012

As Selim, a diver bewitched by the sea, dies on a hospital bed, and as Mokhtar, a failed painter, contemplates on the color of death, Dalia, a nearby nurse, remembers her father’s drowning. Set in the Mediterranean Alexandria, this is a story of a brief encounter which compares death to the sea and life in contemporary Egypt.

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23.06. 2012, at 20pm

( 64,78 min)

The Corridor (Brussels premiere)

by Sarah Vanagt

2010, color, sound, HD, 6’45”

Award: 1st at the Courtisane Film Festival – Gent in 2011

For 5 days Sarah Vanagt followed a donkey during its weekly visits to old people in nursing homes in England. From home to home, from room to room. Time and again the donkey was welcomed warmly, with greetings, songs, strokes, childhood stories, poems, and laughter, until the donkey entered the room of Norbert, a man who lost his ability to speak.

Even though Vanagt initially followed the donkey‘s steps in search of reminiscences brought about by the animal’s mute presence, she came home with an altogether different film. While editing, the film became shorter and shorter, as if the words that had accompanied the donkey’s visits got in the way. What is left is perhaps a bas-relief disguised as a painting, disguised as a film.

The donkey visits to residential homes are an initiative of The Donkey Sanctuary in Sidmouth, England.

Sound from the Hallways (Belgian premiere)

by Lasse Lau

2012, color, sound, 25’

With his latest film Lasse Lau revisits history at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and challenges concepts of historicism and museology from a time of the early 20th century when history was still seen as universal, and man believed in its abundant truth, to times where several histories challenge each other for the semblance of reality. The film in addition documents the atmosphere in one of the must classic and visually dense and unique museums in the world before it becomes history.

“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”

(From Walter Benjamin “On the concept of history”)

Populus Tremula (Belgian première)

By Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida

2010, 16mm transferred on DVD, silent, 9’

Selection:  Rotterdam Film Festival 2011

Populus Tremula originates from artistic research into Swedish “Match King” Ivar Kreuger (1880–1932), whom The Economist in 2007 called “the world’s greatest financial swindler” and who was the founder of Svenska Tändsticksaktiebolaget (the Swedish Matchstick Corporation), today called Swedish Match. Both factory locations have been active since the 19th century, and while the manufacturing process is now almost fully automated, beyond the removal of human labor, it has changed little since the early 20th century.

While the film follows the linear progression of match manufacture from timber to shrink-wrapped package ready for export, a series of superimposed textual interventions point to the ability of both capital and the nation-state to legislate and assert the monopoly capitalist’s desire to not only exploit natural resources but to appear to surpass the power of nature through myth.

Rice city (Belgian premiere)

by Sherif El Azma

2010, 19’

In an old-fashioned apartment, in an atmosphere of tension and unease, located somewhere between the real, the uncanny and a state of dream-like delirium, suggestive symbolism and insinuations fester in dark corners of rooms where Rice City unfolds. A self-conscious young woman, anxious, haunts the corridors; we encroach on a young black man lounging in his bed, building a city from blocks; an older man played by Count Federico de Wardal, recounts a story of selling rice to his friend, who appears as a ghost. A tight lipped scene around a dinner table, with its ripples of tension spilling beyond the bounds of this exquisitely shot film noir featuring an equally beautiful soundtrack, transfixing, full of suspense.

Disco (Belgian premiere)

By Raed Yassin

2010,  5’30”, VHS, silent

“Disco tells the story of the artists’ father, a disco-addict and a fashion designer who leaves his family to find work abroad, eventually becoming a film star in the Egyptian horror industry. This quickly spirals into a fiction, however, in which the father becomes Egyptian film star Mahmoud Yassin (who shares the director’s family name). The interplay of image and text explores a generation’s fascination with celebrity, forging a story about abandonment, voyage, longing, and stardom.”

Like every year Kran Film General Assembly is going to be held during Berlinale, Berlin Film Festival, which last from 9 to 19 February, 2012.
The General Assembly will be held on 11 February, at a location in Berlin, that we will notify you about later on.
General Assembly will overview activities in 2011, programme for 2012 and propose new Kran Film members!

The General Assembly will be held on February 11th at a location in Berlin, that we will notify you about early next year.
General Assembly will overview activities in 2011, programme for 2012 and propose new Kran Film members!

28th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival (November 8 – 13) nominated works by two Kran Film members for this year awards. The Corridor, a film by Sarah Vanagt, has been nominated for the A38-Production Grant Kassel-Halle, while the film Echoes, by Ivalo Frank, has been nominated for the prize The Golden Key.

On 21, August, 2011

at the Casa Vecina, cultural center. Centro Histórico, Mexico city

Kran Film presents:

1. Populus Tremula, by Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida; 9min, 16mm on DVD, 2010.

2. Intelligence Failure: Minutes 39-54, by Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida; 7min, 2003.

3. Journey 110, by Khaled Jarrar, DVD 12min 15, 2008.

4. The New Film,, by Raed Yassin, DVD, 13min, 2008.

5. Ghost Town, by Steven Day and David Pushkin, DVD, 30min, 2008.

6. Foire du Midi, by Hugo Van der Vennet, 28min, 2007.

Ghost Town: Victor, 2008, 5 min, film still, David Pushkin and Steven Day

(un)translatability

Giving priority to visual language above utterance to develop narrative, the screening program at the Casa Vecina tickles the notion of the (un)translatability. Focused on language either in its own absence, either when its presence plays the secondary role, the (un)translatability does not imply the process of destruction and transformation as evoked by the translation (Benjamin); it rather speaks in terms of an original, as a fixed and inalterable event which offers a room for a viewer to inscribe his/her own thoughts and feelings within its content (Debord).

The screening presents six shorts split in two programs. The first part of the program includes films by Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hyashida, Raed Yassin and Khaled Jarrar to put the focus on representations of power in the very act of censorship, exclusion and manipulation. Its second part presents collaborative work of Steven Day and David Pushkin, and a film by Hugo van de Vennet. Both films are developed around the subject of amusement park although van de Vennet’s film is silent, while the later presents omnibus of ten different stories wherein the meaning of the language is given in relation to the circumstances under which the conversation takes place (Gauker).

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casa vecina

Casa Vecina is the cultural branch of the Mexico City Historical Center Foundation (Fundación del Centro Histórico de la Ciudad de México AC) specialized in production, display and research in the field of contemporary art. Rather than assuming the identity of a conventional exhibition space, Casa Vecina has adapted a studio concept: focusing on the artistic process, as opposed to exhibiting finished works of art. Exhibitions and displays are a continuous process of experimentation.

All of the projects supported by Casa Vecina are registered and documented; the information about each project is available to the public through our Documentation Center, which also offers specialized bibliographies and journals. Casa Vecina organizes workshops, theoretical seminars and artistic projects are always open to the community.

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Camel Collective in collaboration with Kran Film would like you to attend the Second World Congress of Free Artists, Aarhus as part of the exhibition Modifications curated by Karin Hindsbo at the Aarhus Kunstbygning.

The event will take place Saturday, November 20, 2010, 11:30–17:30.

This congress resuscitates the First World Congress of Free Artists, in Alba (1956) a meeting organized by Asger Jorn and Pinot Gallizio of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus which included members of the Lettrist International and the Nuclear Art Movement, among others. Along with two exhibitions, this first congress presented speeches by six participants on the subjects of “free art” and “industrial activity.” This meeting lead to the founding conference of the Situationist International at Cosio d’Arroscia in Italy the following year.

The Second World Congress of Free Artists, Aarhus responds to Asger Jorn’s call to rethink the professionalization of artists by pointing his historical critique of Max Bill’s Bauhaus at the current professionalization of artists. This takes the form of the artist PhD., the institutionalization of the “educational turn” in artistic practice, and the homogenization and privatization of higher education as a result of the Bologna Process in the European Union.

The Second World Congress of Free Artists, Aarhus is a daylong series of performances of speeches written by a selection of international artists and art educators. Each speech will be performed by an actor or actors addressing the audience on the historical, practical, and theoretical problems of institutional and counter-institutional pedagogies as we live them today. In a potential exchange of positions between the roles of sender and receiver in traditional education, the event aims to mark and transcend worn-out and authoritarian models of pedagogy, opting instead for playful and performative modes of knowledge production.

The speeches of the Second World Congress of Free Artists, Aarhus are written by: Eduardo Abaroa; Mirene Arsanios; Michael Ashkin; Sarina Basta, Karin Schneider, and Simone Leigh; Mary Walling Blackburn (Anhoek School); Zachary Cahill; Mónica Castillo; Sande Cohen; Andrea Creutz, Sebastien Berthier, and Shirin Sabahi; Anthony Davies, Nils Norman, and Howard Slater; Eva Diaz; Stephan Dillemuth; Sean Dockray (The Public School); Eva Egermann and Elke Krasny; Miklos Erhardt; Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida; Sam Gould (Red76); Ashley Hunt; C. Krydz Ikwuemesi; Jakob Jakobsen; Colin Lang; Ditte Lynkaer Pedersen; Carlos Motta; J. Morgan Puett; Johannes Raether; Oliver Ressler and Dario Azzellini; Douglas Ross; Rum46 Collective; Temporary Institute for Witchpower; Javier Toscano; UKK; and The YES! Association.

The Players: Michael Ashkin, Zachary Cahill, Iza Mortag Freund, Wanda Jakob, Ari Godwin Kollontai-Hartz, Zaki Nobel Mehabil, Vivi Nielsen, Rosa Sand Michelsen, Mikkel Trier Rygaard, and Javier Toscano.

About Camel Collective: Since 2005 Camel Collective has produced research-based projects on the subjects of art and pedagogy, archives, and social practice. Camel Collective has been included in exhibitions at Participant Inc., Exit Art, Art in General, and Artist Space in New York City; Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros in Mexico City; and Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen, among others.

Kran Film is hosting with support by the Danish Arts Council Camel Collective in Denmark. Kran Film is engaged in facilitating a film Camel Collective is producing in Denmark. The film is using speeches and historical material from the First World Congress in juxtaposition with new housing development like the one in the Ørestad City.

Camel Collective