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Kran Film Collective

Kran Film Collective

Past is Not Post exhibition in Oldenburg

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Past is Not Post
Curated by Lasse Lau and Benj Gerdes, Kran Film Collective
February 2–March 19, 2017

Opening: February 1, 7pm
Curator’s talk: Benj Gerdes: February 2, 7pm
Curator’s talk: Lasse Lau: February 28, 7pm

Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art
Katharinenstraße 23
D-26121 Oldenburg
Germany

www.edith-russ-haus.de

Artists:
Pia Arke & Anders Jørgensen, Petra Bauer, Matthew Buckingham, Kajsa Dahlberg, Michelle Dizon, Benj Gerdes, Andrea Geyer, Regina José Galindo, Jan Peter Hammer, Sven Johne, William E. Jones, Lasse Lau, Maha Maamoun, Robert Ochshorn, Rania Rafei & Raed Rafei, Benjamin Tiven, Sarah Vanagt & Katrien Vermeire, Raed Yassin, Akram Zaatari

Past is Not Post examines a growing number of artists working in relationship to archival research or investigations of historical memory. While the sites, methods, and circumstances of these practices remain diverse, there is a common artistic impulse to work through history as a backdoor when options in the present seem closed. Given the ambiguous role of artists in contemporary societies, particularly the difficulty of connecting to existing political and social struggles, the intersectional and incomplete stories of the past offer alternate approaches. Can this engagement of the past create spaces to rearticulate our collective possibilities and demands, spaces emblematic of both resistance and retreat?

Read more here …

Last weekend of Rewriting Histories at Fotografisk Center Copenhagen

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Don’t miss the exhibition Rewriting Histories curated by Benj Gerdes and Lasse Lau from Kran Film Collective at Fotografisk Center in Copenhagen. See images here Opening images

CineSource on Film Collectives

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Check out CineSource new article about film collectives.

Click for CineSource here

ECHOES at the Smithsonian NMNH

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On the 8th of May ECHOES will be shown at the opening of the ‘Arctic Spring – Arctic Matters’ festival at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. The event is from 1PM – 5PM and starts with a Panel discussion, followed by the film screening.         Address: Baird Auditorium, Ground Floor, 10th St. & Constitution Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20560

Greenland Eyes @ Smithsonian National Museum

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We are delighted to announce that the Smithsonian Institution has invited Greenland Eyes to the National Museum in Washington D.C. in May, when the USA takes over chairmanship of the Arctic Council.

Further details to follow: www.greenlandeyes.com // https://www.facebook.com/greenlandeyes

Greenland Eyes international film festival is the world’s largest festival on contemporary culture from Greenland.

Greenland Eyes premiered in Berlin in 2012 and took place at the Arsenal Cinema, HBC and Humboldt University. In 2014 Greenland Eyes travelled across the Nordic region with nine stops in Greenland, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Iceland, Sweden, Finland and Norway. It featured film, photography, music, performance and academic symposiums.

 

 

Sound from the Hallways @ the British Museum

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Sound from the Hallways is screening at the British Museum November 22nd.

Ahdaf Soueif, writer and British Museum Trustee, introduces two short films, Sound from the Hallways(2012, 25 mins) and Two Faces in the Landscape (2000, 15 mins), that probe familiar narratives of Egyptian culture and history.

The screenings will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers of Sound from the Hallways, Lasse Lau and Mostafa Youssef, who reflect on their atmospheric tour of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and how the their artistic decisions enable new realities to overlay the narrative of the grand halls of history.

British Museum website

November Resident: Olga Kopenkina (BY/US)

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18 November, 5pm – lecture: New Feminism and Media
RITS School of Arts, Antoine Dansaertstraat 70, Brussels 1000

21 November, 8.30pm – screening: Feminism is Politics!
Beursschouwburg, Auguste Ortsstraat 20-28, Brussels 1000

PussyRiot

Olga Kopenkina is the second Kran Film Resident who will pay a ten-day visit to Brussels in order to explore Flemish video and film archives, meet film professionals, give a lecture at RITS School of Arts, and organize a screening programme at Beursschouwburg Brussels. Kopenkina’s residency programme is developed around the theme of gender. She will be exploring the relationship between gender and cinema and will question how women-filmmakers respond to the various living conditions shaped by capital, state politics and war; how they ultimately contribute to discussion about significance of an organized action and creation of feminist activist networks through the use of film technologies and internet.

Lecture: New Feminism and Media
The lecture will depart from early feminist critique, which responded to the lack of action in feminist and women’ groups in the late 70s and 80s, its limited and self-referential discourse, and focus on works by women-filmmakers and artists who endeavoured to give the film and media-based art a palpable sense of energy, driven by visions of radical action. Filmmakers like Alice Guy (France), who pioneered feminist film, and Lizzie Borden (USA), female members of Paper Tiger TV activists and contemporary cyber-feminists introduced the new ways for feminist critique and possibility of organized action through the use of media technologies – from independent TV stations and pirate radio of the early times to contemporary internet. Contemporary media-based feminists artists explore the potential of new feminism to attack, to act from the antagonistic position within the wider social and political terrain, responding to various living conditions, cultural and material productions from women living in different parts of the world. Focusing on artistic and political lessons inherited from the past, contemporary feminist filmmakers and cyber-feminists propel them to the new circle of formation and activation of political subjectivity.

Screening: Feminism is Politics!
Drawing the references to history of feminism and queerness, the film program embraces the wide spectrum of art and activism: from performance and video to documentation of direct action, redefining notions of “riot”, revolt, autonomy, emancipation, revolution, and other concepts that shape radical feminist philosophy.

1. Lana Čmajčanin, Female President. 2005, 3,17 min.
2. Iqaa the Olivetone, Locusts, Detroit, 2008, 11,27 min. Produced by Invincible for EMERGENCE Media.
3. Pussy Riot, Punk Prayer – Mother of God, Chase Putin Away! 2012, 2 min.
4. Bureau of Melodramatic Research, Protect Your Heart at Work. 2012, 25 min.
5. Kasja Dahlberg, Female Fist. 2006, 20 min.
+ surprise

Olga Kopenkina is Belarus-born, New York-based curator and art critic. Her work focuses both on historical and contemporary art practices within the wide spectrum of art and political expression that resulted in projects such as Sound of Silence: Art during Dictatorship, exhibition at EFA Project Space, NYC, 2012; Reading Lenin with Corporations, ongoing seminar and film production; Terror Tactics, film program at apexart, New York, 2007; exhibitions Russia: Significant Other at Anna Akhmatova Museum, St Petersburg, Russia, 2006 and Post-Diasporas: Voyages and Missions at the First Moscow Biennale, Moscow (2005). Kopenkina contributed to such publications as Art Journal, Moscow Art Magazine, ArtMargins, Manifesta Journal, Modern Painters, Afterimage, and others. She currently teaches at New York University, Steinhardt School for Arts and Art Professions, Department of Media, Culture and Communication.

October Resident: Amit Mahanti (IN)

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21 October, 5pm – lecture: Threading Looms, Weaving Cinema
RITS School of Arts, Antoine Dansaertstraat 70, Brussels 1000

26 October, 8pm – screening: Labour and cinema
Beursschouwburg, Auguste Ortsstraat 20-28, Brussels 1000

Malegaon Times-1

Amit Mahanti, an independent researcher, filmmaker and visual artist from New Delhi, is the first Kran Film Resident who will be visiting Brussels for 10 days in order to explore Flemish video and film archives and the scene, give a lecture at RITS – School of Arts, and organize a screening programme at Beursschouwburg Brussels. Mahanti’s residency programme is developed around the theme of labour. He will be exploring the relationship between labour and cinema, and question how labour can sometimes exercise its own sense of creative agency and push us to re-imagine the characterization of the term “labour” itself. In which way cinema may be a powerful creative and political tool to transcend existing conditions of labour? How these cultural expressions often throw up a challenge to the hegemonic discourses of corporate media? Can the labour be understood as an active creative and cultural force that generates its own expressions, reflective of its engagement with the larger world order?

LECTURE : Threading Looms, Weaving Cinema

Amit Mahanti particularly explores indigenous filmmaking industry in a working-class town Malegaon (270 km northeast of Mumbai, Western India). Malegaon has over 3 lakh power-looms, the mainstay of the town, which process raw cotton into finished cloth that feeds the textile industry in Western India. The loom-workers of Malegaon also produce their unique brand of cinema, low-cost films using low-end technology, which has a flourishing audience in and around Malegaon. In many ways, Malegaon typifies a working-class unorganized labour ecology in a developing country – a workforce shaped through waves of migration from Northern and Western India since the 19th century, a trend which continues till today; a town which is extremely divided on communal lines (the merchant class is primarily Hindu, while the loom-workers belong to the Muslim community); an everyday life of drudgery through the repetitive nature of loom-work, poor working conditions and inadequate remuneration.

Yet, the prevalence and primacy accorded to the creation of cinema in Malegaon does not allow us to view the town only through the lens of exploitation or inequity. Through their films, Malegaon workers often subvert existing dominant codes of mainstream big-budget films of the Mumbai film industry (Bollywood). This subversion is enacted in various ways – parodist narratives, primarily comedy, of mainstream Bollywood films; miniscule costs compared to Bollywood budgets (the average budget of a Malegaon film is about $750, saved up by a worker through many months of loom-work); localized narratives, and viewing and distribution mechanisms outside the theatre system (more than 100 films are made every year which dominate the VCD/DVD market in the region).

Even within the context of a developing country like India, the labour class in Malegaon resists traditional definitions of labour and provokes us to think on other lines – of how despite being a tiny cog in the wheel of capitalist production, labour can sometimes exercise its own sense of creative agency and push us to re-imagine the characterization of the term “labour” itself; of how forms of cultural expression can sometimes be powerful creative and political tools to transcend existing conditions of labour; of how these cultural expressions often throw up a challenge to the hegemonic discourses of corporate media.

SCREENING : Labour and cinema

Besides Mahanti’s and Negi’s film Malegaon Times (2012, 27min), which uses Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936) as a starting point to explore the relationship between cinema, labour and performance in Malegaon, India, few other Indian and Flemish films will be screened. Detailed programme is to be announced soon.

Modern Times (2012) by Amit Mahanti and Ruchika Negi
(27min/ DV PAL / 4:3 / Hindi with English subtitles)
Malegaon Times looks at the idea of performance in the working-class, power-loom town of Malegaon (Maharashtra, Western India). Malegaon thrives on power-looms, cloth and cinema, all inextricably linked to each other. The film moves between these worlds with Asif Albela – a stage performer, a mimic and a film actor whose specialty lies in comedy. He is known for his ability to carve out characters from the everyday fabric of his town, and present them through his lens of comedy- the preferred way in which the town likes to see its realities revealed.

Narayan Gangaram Surve (2002) a film by Arun Khopkar
(45min/ English subtitles)
Narayan Gangaram Surve, who passed away in 2010, was one of India’s leading poets. He was a foundling, raised by a mill-worker until the age of ten and then left to fend for himself. Working as a waiter, helper in textiles mills, a peon in a Municipal school, he finally retired as a primary school teacher. A Marxist by conviction, he forged a new idiom of the spoken word in Marathi poetry. His poems mix dialects of Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, English to catch the pulse of the life of the underprivileged. The film shows Kishor Kadam, playing Narayan Surve, but meeting the real poet through his journey. The poems are ‘interpreted’, without words, through non-linear montage of visuals and sound effects.

Biography

Amit Mahanti (1978) is an independent researcher, filmmaker and visual artist residing in New Delhi. He is particularly interested in human ecology, culture and social processes, which he has explored through documentary films (Malegaon Times 2012, No One Has Come Alone 2008, ML-05-B-6055 2007), and community art projects and installations (Rain Is For Free 2013, When Hunger Feels Good 2012, Restless 2010, Disconnect 2009-10, Zariyein 2006-08). Together with Ruchika Negi, Amit Mahanti is the founder of Frame Works, a media and research collective based in New Delhi. Frame Works Collective uses interdisciplinary practices to investigate the relationship between art and social processes; their methodology applies theory, documentary film, public art and new media.

KRAN FILM RESIDENT

By merging film and video art practice with theory, Kran Film residency wishes to raise questions of citizenship in a migrating, multinational and multiethnic society, about neo-liberalism, labour and economy, migrations, populism, ethics, gender and the like. How Eurocentric and multipolar vision of the world order can contribute the creation of new forms of subjectivity much more appropriate for the contemporary migrating society?

The OPEN CALL selection committee which consists of representatives from Beursschouwburg, RITS School of Arts, BAMart Flemish Institute for visual, audiovisual and media art, Argos Centre for Art and Media, and Kran Film Collective, has chosen Amit Mahanti to be the first Kran Film resident. The next resident is Olga Kopenkina, a curator and professor at the New Your University (12-22 November 2013). Her focus is on the gender theme.

Kran Film Collective is a Brussels and Copenhagen based network of international visual artists and film makers from outside the traditional realm of filmmaking. Kran Film is engaged in a critical approach to society we live in through film and video art.

Kran Film Resident is supported by the Flemish authorities.

In partnership with Beursschouwburg, RITS School of Arts, BAMart Flemish Institute for visual, audiovisual and media art, Argos Centre for Art and Media, Cinematek, Plus-tot te laat, 68septante.

Kran Film Resident programme director Goran Petrović

Sound from the Hallways @ 5. Cairo Video Festival

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Sound from the Hallways by Lasse Lau is screening this weekend at Cairo Video Festival; Exhibition 3, From 5 to 7 October 2013 http://medrar.org/ 7 Gamal El Din Abou El Mahasen St. Garden City, First Floor, Cairo, Egypt, 11519

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The screening was supported by the Royal Danish Embassy

OPEN @ the 55th Nordic Film Days Lübeck

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OPEN has been selected for the 55th Nordic Film Days Lübeck. There will be two screenings followed by a Q&A with Ivalo Frank
For more information please check: http://www.luebeck.de/filmtage/en/

OPEN @ CPH:DOX

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OPEN has been selected for the CPH:DOX and will screen at the festival on Nov 17th, at 4:30PM. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with director Ivalo Frank

OPEN at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

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Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (DK) will be exhibiting Ivalo Frank’s latest film OPEN as part of the show Arctic running from 25th of Sep 2013 untill the 2nd of February 2014. Louisiana’s autumn exhibition ARCTIC is an account of the descriptions and dramatizations of the magical, cultural and artistic attraction that the Arctic regions in general and the North Pole in particular have had for human beings for generations.ARCTIC is a crossover exhibition about the ways in which people with very varied backgrounds realize ideas, imaginings, dreams and visions of the unknown, and it incorporates both classic Romantic images and contemporary art, authentic expedition photos and scientific specimens, literature and sound.

For more info check http://www.louisiana.dk/uk/Menu/Exhibitions/Coming+exhibitions+2013

OPEN CALL: Kran Film Resident

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In October and November 2013, KRAN Film is organising in Brussels two residencies for cultural operators, with a particular interest in independent, non-commercial video art and art films.

Cinema Premiere of OPEN, Berlin Comment

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The 22nd June celebrates the theatrical premiere of Ivalo Frank’s film OPEN – as well as showing her short film ECHOES – in Babylon Kino in Mitte Berlin, 8PM. Both films deal with Greenland; ECHOES is an electronic music documentary recorded on abandoned U.S. military bases in east Greenland; OPEN deal with the most dangerous, mentally ill Greenlandic patients who have been sentenced to treatment in Denmark. Both films have won several awards internationally, including the Gold Kahuna Film Award at the Honolulu Film Festival (OPEN) and Best Documentary at the London Underground Film Festival (ECHOES).

There will be drinks and snacks at the premiere and Ivalo Frank will be present to answer questions from the audience after the screening.

You can read more about the film at Babylon’s website: http://www.babylonberlin.de/open.htm

You can watch the trailers here:
OPEN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIYfzHgYaxo
ECHOES: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF9-Dbus8A4

Be welcome!

Sound from the Hallways in Ibraaz

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HISTORY AS CONCEPT
Lasse Lau in conversation with Amira GadHISTORY AS CONCEPT
Lasse Lau in conversation with Amira Gad

HISTORY AS CONCEPT

Lasse Lau in conversation with Amira Gad

AG: Space is approached in an interesting way in your film: it has this picturesque attributes (the windows, the light) and its architectural, focusing on the building itself rather than on the museum’s collection. Given your background on museology, how do you justify this choice? Can we speak of monumental history in this case?

LL: Museums are bricks or buildings of collections and we often tend to forget this. To understand the underlying structures, we must think in Brechtian terms and strip the theatre from its techniques of meaning. When you are not entertained, so to speak, you start noticing the lighting, the doors that are closed, the paint peeling, the repetitions of objects, even the bathroom. You wonder about the admission fee and so on.  In this process of stripping bare, the museum becomes apparent to us and the idea of the museum is easily recognised. Here, when I say ‘idea’, I mean the initiators, funders, architects and owners et cetera – those who have an agency in the museum. If you are an Egyptologist you would also notice that I filtered away some of the more unique and important objects of gods and pharaohs in the film to make room for some of the less artistic objects that are no less important: ones portraying the soldier, the housewife, the worker and the slave.

read more at …

Ibraaz Magazine Interview

PREMIÉRE: Elevage de poussière / Dust Breeding by Sarah Vanagt

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Elevage de poussière / Dust Breeding
A film by Sarah Vanagt
52′ / 2013
PREMIÉRE: 16 May 2013, Beursschouwburg / Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, 7 pm
+ 17, 18, 19 May, 7 pm + artist talk: 17 May, 8.30 pm

What is the value of images as objective testimonies of a conflict? Can we believe what we see? In her new work, Sarah Vanagt turns her attention to an important chapter in recent European history: the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. The artist examines obstacles to reconstructing a war that is nevertheless well documented. She has started from a simple movement of the hand – a pencil being rubbed on a sheet of paper placed over an object – and adapted this “revelatory” rubbing process to the courtroom. The film Élevage de poussière / Dust Breeding offers a penetrating account of her exploration. Measuring the gap between the facts, the material proof of these facts, the images that represent them and their interpretation, she attempts to decipher the secret language formed by traces of war. Sharpening her eye until it becomes a microscope lens, Vanagt reveals a landscape of details inviting us to look at things differently.

Filmed, directed & produced by Sarah Vanagt, edited by Effi Weiss, sound editing by Maxime Coton, sound mix by Rémi, coproducer Cyril Bibas (CVB)
Produced by Balthasar.
Coproducers: Centre Vidéo de Bruxelles (CVB) – Michel Steyaert, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, deBuren, Wiels.

Archive: NEW films!

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TRANSFORMANCE

A film by Nina Kurtela

Transformance (8min, 2010) is a video-event-work that activates and documents a five-month durational performance. Over this period of time, Nina Kurtela establishes a daily practice of visiting and witnessing the changes at the building site of the Uferstudios, Wedding, Berlin – the warehouse for the repair of public trams and buses becomes a dance institution. She is spectator to the making of an institution, an art institution, the making of the theatre stage. The camera acts as a witness to her performing/witnessing. The piece emerges as a case study of an individual subject’s encounter with the radical transformations of social structures and operative models within the performing society. The artist is present at the birth of Berlin’s new contemporary dance centre, an institution that will certainly come to play a part in shaping and organizing the dynamic of the city’s dance community. The work emerges in the force field of a commitment to the daily execution of present-ness in relation to the specific context where this act takes place: the building site of the theatre.  What unfolds is a 8-minute work with multi-faceted implications. The body is rendered a statue through the changes of time.  The screen becomes the performing skin.

The Wave: screenings and expo

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In The Wave the archaeological gaze of the viewer is set in motion: a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) opens and closes itself. In 2011 Sarah Vanagt and Katrien Vermeire placed a camera above the spot where nine victims were buried after their execution by Franco’s supporters in June 1939. On day one of the excavation, a digging crane gently loosened the top layer of soil, until the archaeologists came across a skull with a bullet hole. Then the archaeologists continued their work by hand. The skeletons appeared, then disappeared, as if a strong wind blew that removed the sand and uncovered death, a primal truth.

directed by Sarah Vanagt and Katrien Vermeire, edited by Inneke Van Waeyenberghe, sound by Larry Sider and Gary Sanctuary. Produced by Balthasar, coproduced by Michigan Films.

17 April: Cegesoma, Brussels
18-19 April: Courtisane, Gent
21 April: Dossin Kazerne, Mechelen
18-28 April: IndieLisboa, Lisbon
18-22 April: European Media Art Festival, Osnabruck

2-30 June: Expo The Wave (film + photos), Argos, Brussels

OPEN – expo and international premiére

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OPEN is exhibited at the Museum Ovartaci in Risskov (DK), which opened on April 14th 2013.
OPEN is a one hour film, a skype installation and twelve photographs from R3, the closed ward for psychiatric Greenlandic offenders and patients in Denmark. The exhibition contributes to demystifying mental illness through a thoughtprovoking insight into the fate and lives of people in an otherwise secluded and obscure world. It tells us a very distinctive chapter of Danish history from a psychiatric point of view and reflects the social climate of contemporary society.

OPEN – the film – will celebrate its international cinema premiere in Babylon cinema in Berlin on June 22nd, 8PM. IvaloFrank will introduce the films and be there for Q&A after the screening. Further screenings in Babylon Cinema on the 24th and 26th of June, 8PM.
For more information please visit: http://www.babylonberlin.de/

New KranFilm board members!

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During the general assembly 2013, which took place parallel to the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), new KranFilm board members have been selected: Alfredo Cramerotti, Sophie Hamacher, Lasse Lau and Rie Hougaard, and, as extras, Benj Gerdes, Sarah Vanagt and Morten Dall.

Sound from the Hallways

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2012, color, no dialogue, 25’

This cinematographic work takes us through a series of the museum’s antique collections, as objects of men, women, faros, animals, and armies slowly glide pass the gaze of the viewer something intrusive is on the verge of happening.

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

Sound from the Hallways revisits history of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to challenge 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 a time where several histories and narratives challenge each other for the semblance of reality.

The film documents the atmosphere of one of the most classic and visually dense collections on display in the world before its buildings and modus operandi becomes history.

KRAN FILM GENERAL ASSEMBLY 2013


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Rotterdam Film Festival,

2. february, 3pm



Dear Kran Film members,
the date of the general assembly 2013 is rapidly approaching and it will this year take place parallel to the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). (address will follow soon)



Participate by SKYPE: Please send your skype account address to lasse@kranfilm.net.



We Hope to see you in Rotterdam! 



Sincerely, 


Board members: Alfredo Cramerotti, Morten Dall, Lasse Lau, Rie Hougaard, Sarah Vanagt and Sophie Hamacher.

Kran Film Archive: New Titles

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Kran Film Archive

New Titles

El – Susto, a film by Re’em Aharoni (2011, HDV, 24:43′ )

Fernando Derks Bustamante lost his older brother when he was 3 – an event after which he stopped talking. To heal him from the ‘susto’ (fright), he underwent a ritual that carried a promise for transformation. This film reveals the juxtaposition between accepted cultures to nowadays-denounced traditions.

Up North Right East Down South Left West, a film by Christophe Meierhans (2012, HD video, 20:40′)

Western expatriates comment on what they see from a terrace of the old city of Jerusalem. The commenting off-voices decipher the same images we are also seeing as spectators of this film about the production of differences and identity, about orientation and disorientation.

OPEN a film by Ivalo Frank

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OPEN has been nominated for the California Film Awards taking place in San Diego on January 26. 2013: http://www.calfilmawards.com/

OPEN has been selected for the Arctic Heat Film Festival which takes place in Jyväskylä, Finland 14.-16. of February 2013

OPEN a film by Ivalo Frank

(2012, 1h, B/W, Danish/ Greenlandic with English subtitles)

What kind of person can kill another? What drives a person to murder? Since 1954 Greenland’s most dangerous criminal and psychiatric patients have served their sentences in Denmark, thousands of kilometers away from their families, for undefined periods of time. OPEN is an art documentary film based upon moving, honest, and critical interviews with five mentally ill patients who live their lives in a closed, locked ward in Denmark home to approximately 18 mentally ill Greenlandic people who have been sentenced to psychiatric care in a court of law. Many of the inmates have committed acts of grievous bodily harm resulting in death, and most battle addictions and personality disorders. ”They are intelligent, sweet, ordinary people like you and me. Almost. Things have just gone wrong for them. All wrong. I wished to meet them as people rather than as the monsters conjured up by media descriptions of violent criminals” (Ivalo Frank, 2012)

As the film develops, the viewer is invited into the most intimate aspects of the five convicts lives thereby getting a rare insight into their personal stories of endless grief, sadness and shame. Furthermore, OPEN touches upon the wider political aspects of the Greenlanders serving sentences. The displacement of Greenland’s most dangerous criminals has been declared a violation of their human right to maintain close family ties, a right they are entitled to under Article Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights. However, the construction of a closed ward in Greenland suffers continuous setbacks because of conflict over cost between the Greenland Government and the Danish Ministry of Justice.

ECHOES has been selected for the Associazione Monte Analogo Film Festival in Italy showing in spring 2013: http://www.monteanalogo.net/
ECHOES & Faith, hope and Greenland screening in Paris at the Danish House in Paris, 142 Champs-Elysées, Paris on March 21st 2013. Ivalo Frank will be doing a talk after the screenings.

The Wave and 4 other films by Sarah Vanagt in Paris

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Artists in Focus: Katrien Vermeire & Sarah Vanagt
Centre Pompidou, Festival Hors Pistes, Paris
27 January 2013, 16h

THE WAVE – Sarah Vanagt & Katrien Vermeire
Belgium / 2012 / 20 min.

LITTLE FIGURE – Sarah Vanagt
BElgium / 2003 / 15 min.

FIRST ELECTIONS – Sarah Vanagt
Belgium/ 2006 / 15 min.

HISTORY LESSON – Sarah Vanagt
Belgium / 2003 / 5 min.

THE CORRIDOR – Sarah Vanagt
Belgium/ 2010 / 7 min.