LYRIC ISLAND

Beyond lines on a map, borders are a mosaic of stories. Lyric Island Is a creative documentary exploring the United Kingdom’s internal boundaries through bold expressionistic portraits. A poetic journey along each border reveals the unexpected traditions and forgotten lifestyles that arise in between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

MOUNDS, MYTHS AND MEANINGS

The experimental research film Mounds, Myths and Meanings explores an archaeological site in Nicaragua as a site for the negotiation of truths. A landscape in central Nicaragua covered in earthen mounts and scattered with stone statues, petroglyphs and sherds form the basis for archaeological speculations and local narratives. This film explores the creation of myths and truths surrounding this mysterious landscape. It forms an epistemological excavation into different paradigms.

LA MAISON

What happens to his dreams when his childhood home is about to be destroyed?

I walk one last time through my childhood home, damaged by time and humidity. As I come into contact with its rotting walls, doomed to disappear, vivid memories come back to me, forgotten sensations. In this place that shelters so many dreams, games and imagined worlds, I see my childhood again, my friends, my first times, my loved ones. I decide to invoke all these reveries. With the physical decay of this house, too big; I find the trace of the fracture of my family. What it has become. How it has lost its luster. Like all families surely.

In homage to this house, a vestige of past glories, joys and dreams, memories are scattered across these images, reminding of what childhood is like. The dream house takes on an extreme sensitivity. Without vulgar nostalgia, an effort not to forget, to celebrate, and to move on to adulthood.

BYE-BYE, ITTE RASSHAI

This film is about the joy of filmmaking and the joy of falling in love. When you start a new relationship you discover all these new things.

Bye-bye, itte rasshai wants to research all these elements and connect them through cinema. My partner is gonna teach me how to surf, I’m gonna teach her some stuff about filmmaking, she’s gonna teach me how to speak Japanese. Learning new stuff is doing them over and over again. This film is a confluence of these rhythmic, repetitive actions. Bye-bye, itte rasshai is Japanese ‘Bye-bye come back soon’. This focuses on our relationships with our fathers. They both left our family when we were young. It’s always a farewell and the uncertainty when we will see each-other again. The absence of men, in this relationship and in our youth, will be examined in Bye-bye, itty rasshai.

IN HET SPOOR VAN ZONNEROOS

“The body was transforming itself into a gift. And she felt that it was a gift because she was experiencing, from a direct source, the unquestionable blessing of existing materially.” (Clarice Lispector)

This is a film about looking at other lives and organisms in order to find a way to live that makes sense. This is a film about rooting and uprooting. In search for a rhythm that suits, I breathe along with another. Where am I moving towards? What haunts the place that makes one stay? Or leave? Two Belgian men reside in a remote valley of southern Portugal, one has been living along with the land for 40 years and awaits the return of his daughter, the other is visiting for an undefined duration. They clean the soil of redundant trees. Elsewhere in the Algarve a young Polish musician is stranded with his camper and newly adopted dog. In voicemessages he recounts his actions of the day as well as his desire for a way to land.

MANUAL PARA INMIGRANTES

In the late 70s, Daniel H., a theater director, is mistaken for my father, Horacio D., a leftwing militant exiled in Sweden during the last Argentine dictatorship. 40 years later, in turbulent Patagonia, Daniel rehearses a play about this story with two young actors. He will feed on my families's Swedish archives to rewrite it. While the play deals with the '70s lost dreams of the revolution, the experience of the two young actors playing the namesakes will confront us with new questions and conflicts that arise in today's Patagonia, echoes of the past in its updated version.

THE REPLACEMENT PROJECT

This videoqueste is told by the headless narrator, also known as the freelancer: “On September 5, 2020 visual artist Karina Beumer posted a vacancy in which she offered her own artistic practice as a job (paid). From the 36 application letters (and 5 job interviews) she chose a substitute who took over her artistic practice for five consecutive weeks. Karina Beumer had become interested in working conditions, more specifically in her own shaky existence as a freelancer, and wanted to fire herself.”

Katya Ev & Azad Asifovich

Ox(working title)

Ox(working title) is a fictionnalized documentary about Ukrainian feminist activist, “sextremiste” and artist Oksana Shachko, shown through the lens of two of the people who were closest to her - personally and intellectually - before her suicide in 2018. The movie complexifies the common caricature image of the known FEMEN activist: It tells a story about Oksana that does not abide to a linear temporal narration nor to a strictly historical account of her existence but rather a poetic experimental approach blurring the lines between past, present and future, reality and mythology, personal existence and artwork.

TEMPORARY COMMUNITIES

The subject of my project is the power and the potential of ephemeral belonging. My personal journey living with 5 different groups, filming the group's internal life, and death, will expose wider social phenomena; temporary communities.

Temporary communities are a social form that fascinates me. I believe they are a kind of pockets of potential, microcosmoses of different dimensions, they inhabit and create exceptional places: protest camps, tents, foster families, festivals, temporary occupation zones, dormitories, islands, caravans, residences, and theaters. They tear and puncture the linear settled lifestyle, strengthen people's ability to return to reality, or inspire people to change it. They are an important part of the ecology of life.

BRUXELLES, DE 5 À 7

Brussels, 5 a.m. The first tram drives out of the tram depot, construction workers are waiting to be picked up, businessmen- and women are trying to get ahead of the traffic jam, a man is eating in his car, a woman is smoking in her car, the piles of e-steps unravelling, the traffic jam thickening. Everyone is tired. Eternally searching for her own rhythm, filmmaker Margo observes the rhythm of the early morning in Brussels. What do the movements and motivations of people awake between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. tell about the society we are living in? Man's rhythm has always been influenced by the times in which he lived. By arranging various puzzle pieces of the morning, collecting them, and placing them in a timeline, Margo not only pictures Brussels and its inhabitants but also the rhythm of an economic system in which we all take part, even if we fall 'outside' of it.

LOLA OU LES CABANES

Lola is eleven years old, she lives in France and she writes me letters. She recounts her expeditions in the woods, she draws maps of an imaginary world, she tells me about her nine cabins. I am also eleven years old and have a big cabin in the ruins of a marble factory in a small town in Switzerland. Little by little, Lola's letters take another turn. Her fantastic stories are replaced by the account of her failed suicides and her attempts to run away. One day, Lola disappears. From her wandering, I will only have distant echoes, then nothing.

DEEPDRIVE

Deepdrive is an experimental documentary projet which will investigate the power asymmetries and neocolonial exploitation involved in the training of autonomous cars. The film will start with a service of autonomous taxis within a gated community of wealthy retirees in Florida, USA. The service was run by a startup and it operated between 2018 and 2021 when it was acquired by another company and the service was shutdown. In 2018, when the tests began in the USA, a terrible economic crisis struck Venezuela and thus a lot of people there lost their job and had to rely to online gig work to survive the hyperinflation. Many of them ended up labelling images used to train self-driving cars in the Global North. My film will take a thorough and critical look at how the service was marketed and used and put that in contrast to the process of training the AI of the cars, thus asking what is the global cost for so-called "disruptive" technologies ?

LIFE

Life is a short experimental fiction film: A group of teenagers are preparing a revolution in the middle of an underground parking lot. They film each other, skate, write slogans on walls, dance, rest, and read texts, slowly turning the space into a playground from where life can ‘restart’.

STATE OF SAN ANDREAS

San Andreas is a shifting geological fault line, located in California, where the Pacific and North American tectonic plates meet. It has already caused very large and devastating earthquakes in California, but seismologists are predicting that The big one is still to come - an earthquake that could wipe out the region.

San Andreas is also a fictional state in the Grand Theft Auto video game series, entirely composed of islands and peninsulas. Its topographic and urban characteristics are constructed on a free meta interpretation of several regions of the United States.

State of San Andreas is a hybrid film, between documentary and fiction, real and virtual, which explores the diversity of narratives around San Andreas. The work addresses themes of destruction, protection, experience, and resilience in the face of natural disasters.

This project addresses the concept of failure in a literal and metaphorical sense. As well as probing some of the rifts and the instabilities of the San Andreas Fault, it will explore a fracture of the fiction. The project will ask how to approach a reality and create narratives in a Post-truth era?