The “Some Like It Short” section is a space for independent filmmakers that choose a more concise way to express their reasoning. The theme of this year’s selection focuses on memory and archival language, emphasizing that image must constantly struggle to do more than what language does. Each testimonial film is an act of memory, where the image captures what words fail to express.
In 1946, eight months after the atomic bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a crew shot a documentary in Japan. The reels were instantly classified as top secret by the authorities of North America. Mirabelle Fréville found the reel number “11004” and decided to reveal what censorship hid. Combining documentary and fiction in an extraordinary way, “Bella” by Thelyia Petraki, explores a moment in time. A moment right after the end of the Cold War and right before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when everything was changing for both the world and the characters of the film. In “Ink In Milk” by Gernot Wieland memory doesn’t have a factual nor a linear truth in childhood, it can be poetic or absurd, like ink poured into milk. Children’s drawings, school traumas and super 8 images construct a complex web of childhood memories. A personal journey is also proposed in “A Bright Summer Diary” by Lei Lei, a film inspired by an old family photograph that triggers memories of the past and embarks into a journey of nostalgia and melancholy. In “Rubicón” by Manuel Muñoz, the bossa nova music and the memories of a woman that swam all the way to an unnamed coast, become the entrance into an unknown country in South America. The film is a cinematic poem of uncertain movements in the departing hearts of humans without a passport. Finally, “In Her Steps” by Anastasia Kratidis, is a social realist film referring to the redressing of the relationship between a released mother with her imprisoned minor son.
Curation, programming: Nina Veligradi, Maria Komninos
Introduction: Nina Veligradi
