Berlinale Forum Expanded Spotlight

Continuing the long standing collaboration with BIEFF, the Berlinale Forum Expanded is honoured to again present a selection of experimental film and video works presented in their most recent festival edition. This year’s selection comprises six short films that investigate institutional and traditional systems of power and division. Their inquiries focus on places and contexts as for ranging as a suburban high school in the outskirts of Lisbon, Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington D.C., the borderlands between Mexico and the USA, a mountain village in the Italian countryside, the South Korean island of Jeju or the rare earth mines of the Congo. While varied in style and content, what unites these films is their probing, poetic gaze, peeling away layers of history, convention and violence. Forum Expanded is organised by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin, through whose distribution efforts the selected works are kept available after their festival presentation, seeking new contexts and platforms to extend the films visibility. (Uli Ziemons)

MAY JUNE JULY

Kevin Jerome Everson | Durata 8 min.

The months of May, June, and July are represented with peonies, fireflies, and the year 2020. A rollerblader traverses Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington D.C.

“THE RED FILTER IS WITHDRAWN.”

Minjung Kim | Durata 11 min.

Numerous colonial places, including coastal caves and military bunkers hidden inside volcanic craters, as well as memories of uprisings and massacres are found in every corner of Jeju Island. .

13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD

Ana Vaz | Durata 31 min.

Taking its title from the poem by Wallace Stevens “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the film is composed of a series of attempts at looking and being looked at.

AUTOTROFIA

Anton Vidokle | Durata 31 min.

Shot in the village of Oliveto Lucano in the south of Italy, Autotrofia is simultaneously a documentation of a very ancient pagan fertility ritual that is still practiced in this region, and scripted fiction, based on writings by the painter Vassily Chekrygin and the scientist Vladimir Vernadsky.

KAPITA

Petna Ndaliko Katondolo | Durata 22 min.

“Ka-pi-ta”is the official job title given to Congolese charged with enforcing their white master’s bidding—through domination—over their fellow Congolese on plantations, in factories, in commerce, and other sites of capitalist extraction and production. In this film, Kapita becomes a simbol for the work of making visibile and decoding colonial representations.

AHORITA FRAMES

Angelika Levi | Durata 22 min.

"Ahorita Frames" moves from New York in 2001 across the border to Tijuana in 2019 the stories of the workers charged with disposing of the residual asbestos after 9/11 , thus reconfiguring the political cartography of power relations in America in the last two decades. The film not only describes the devaluation of migrant women, but also a system of cultural symbolism and its colonial narrative.