Competition 1

23 March, 2012 - 17:3025 March, 2012 - 15:30
KASKCINEMA

Recent film and video by artists and filmmakers who open up new directions in the expanded field of contemporary moving image practice.

Paulina, Franz & Maria

Ute Aurand
,
DE
,
2011
,
16mm
,
colour
,
13'

Three portraits of loved ones – family and close acquaintances – as seen through the caring and patient lense of Ute Aurand’s 16mm camera. “Paulina Buda and Franz von Lucke are my two godchildren. I have filmed them since they were very young. Paulina is now 16 and Franz 28 years old. Maria Lang is my very close filmmaker friend who lives in the southern German countryside. We see her gardening and visiting an exhibition of female impressionist painters.” (UA) 

Nana

Valérie Massadian
,
FR
,
2011
,
HD
,
colour
,
68'

“Intimate and sensitive – and completely devoid of sentimentality – Valerie Massadan’s debut feature Nana is about the basic questions of life and death as experienced directly in the middle of the process of awakening. Four-and-a-half year old Nana lives in the French countryside, apart from all other children, on a daily basis only interacting with her mother, her reserved grandfather and the natural world itself, its beauty and its violence. Massadian’s extremely confident camera is often placed low, on the eye level of the child, a device that might stem from the filmmaker’s attempting to gain confidence from her lead, but one that also places the audience as if we, too, were children, sense-remembering the experience of discovery. Or, perhaps, as if witnessing the act of discovery through the gaze of the filmmaker, as if we were new parents. Children may be natural performers, but Massadian’s goal was to make a film with a child, not about one, capturing on camera the particular animalistic nature of her blossoming consciousness, and the combination of power and fragility represented in her body, in the most unobtrusive way possible”. (Mark Peranson)