Jem Cohen

USA, Germany | 2004 | 99mins | DV Cam | Colour

The best way I learned English in school was to sing songs. Sometimes I try to sing the company statement in my mind like a song. I still read the statement. I read it before meetings and sometimes also in the hotel before I sleep.

Echoing many of the concerns of Chris Marker such as travel and consumerism Chain is a journey film that offers the illusion of travel. Shot in various locations around the world the overall impression is that we are not seeing cities but corporate strongholds.

The lives of two women: a Japanese businesswoman set adrift by her corporation while studying the international theme park industry and a young drifter, living and working illegally on the fringes of a shopping mall are tracked amid the backdrop of anonymous hotels and fast food outlets.

The quaint notion of a 'global village' has become a bloated urban sprawl. Random places in the world merge into a monolithic ‘superlandscape' and yet through Cohen's lens it looks exquisite. This is a sobering, poignant and beautiful film that leads us to believe that the more things change the more they remain the same.

Michael Brynntrup

Germany | 2003 | 101mins | Beta | Colour | Subtitled

Immanuel Kant Hospital in Neukölen, Berlin. Midnight. A patient is being admitted. TV journalists are on the spot. The beginning of a story that tells itself.

A dramatic narrative is suggested at the beginning of the film. During the course of the film, it develops into a reflection of storytelling itself. The making of films and images itself comes into question. The engagement with images is highlighted, visualised and documented on various internal narrative levels, from the conception and shooting (of the film production) to the TV reportage of this very film, which the spectator sees in the present and in the original format, live at the cinema.

I understand experimental film as self-reflection; formally as metafilm (film about film), and content-wise as personal film. I understand film as personal commitment, with the required self-irony. In my work, I always start from my personal, definable, direct and immediate environment, and arrive at universal, sometimes very abstract subjects, themes and topics. E.K.G. Expositus poses ethical questions concerning the image. - Michael Brynntrup

Rémy M. Larochelle

Canada | 2003 | 70mins | Beta | Colour | Subtitled

A grandfatherly voice over places us in ‘the land of dreams’ but this is no fairytale this is a world populated by nightmarish beasts bent on the destruction of the organic world. Having enslaved the human race they turn people into deformed mutants and guinea pigs. They are motivated by their search for ‘the embryo of the universe,’- the origin of everything. They need to destroy it in order to assert their supremacy. When the last freeborn man discovers the embryo inside a bird his impulse is to hide it - inside his belly.

In their relentless quest for the embryo the beasts leave no stone unturned going as far as having scientists under their control perform vivisection upon humans. The beasts capture the man but he refuses to yield the embryo. They skin him and extract the object from his belly. From embryo rises a woman figure that unleashes her wrath upon the mechanical world.

A mixture of Georges Melies, Jan Svankmajer and Eraserhead, Mécanix exudes primitive dread through its ominous soundtrack and lurid tones.

Mike Hoolboom

Canada | 2004 | 80mins | Beta | Colour

Perturbed by the realisation that the thoughts she follows don't belong to her a woman tells six stories to show the different personalities in order to constitute her work as a young writer: A gay man reminisces about the role cafes and restaurants play in his relationships; another recounts a moment of epiphany when he encounters Philip Glass; a HIV Positive man writes a letter to Madonna; a thirty-five-year-old woman suspects she is reliving the same life; a photographer prowls the streets, camera at the ready; a model imagines that everyone on TV looks and talks like her.

A structure that seems jarring on paper flows smoothly on the screen: A Philip Glass composition segues into Madonna's Vogue in such a way that doesn't seem incongruous. Public Lighting is about knowing how to live and knowing how to die. It’s as much about celebrating life as it is about expressing ideas. It is pithy, joyous, beguiling, nostalgic and wise. Words, text, music and image flow into each other in such a hypnotic way that one wishes one could fit as much into life that Hoolboom fits into film.