The 4th edition of Slow Film Festival took place online on the 31st of October and 1st November 2020. Programme highlights included artists in focus Ben Rivers and Kevin Jerome Everson; a retrospective of the work of Eli Hayes; a moving image commission made by Daniel & Clara; and competition shorts and mid-lengths from artists including Pedro Peralta, Andrijana Stojkovic and Jeroen Van der Stock.
SFF 2020 Trailer
American Motor Company by Kevin Jerome Everson
Still from American Motor Company (2010) ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy of the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures
(US | 2010 | 12:00 | 16mm)
Two men install a billboard alongside a road outside Buffalo, NY. The billboard, created by the artist in collaboration with Carmen Higginbotham, is based on mid-20th century advertisements geared towards African Americans in the South to migrate to northern states to work in automobile factories during the industrial boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The title refers to 'American Motor Company', a defunct automobile company.
Catalogue Vol. 2 by Dana Berman Duff
(USA | 2015 | 08:44 | 16mm scanned to digital)
This film (the second in a series of 16mm black-and-white films) considers the time it takes to look at desirable objects presented in a catalogue of knock-off home furnishings. Catalogue Vol.2 focuses on the ‘Rugs’ section and uses diegetic sound (actual sound in the space) to expose, in contrast to the silent images of display rooms, the room behind the camera. The centerfold of the catalogue is a touch point between these different spaces and the illusory space of the projected image.
Condor by Kevin Jerome Everson
Still from Condor (2019) ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy of the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures
(US | 2019 | 8:00 | 16mm)
Condor captures, in 16mm, the July 2, 2019 solar eclipse over the skies of coastal Chile in 100% totality. Part of a series of films documenting the solar eclipse including Polly One (2018) and Polly Two (2018) featuring the 2017 eclipse over North America.
Cursed Objects by Daniel Watkins
(US | 2019 | 45:12 | VHS)
Cursed Objects is a landscape documentary about the Hillside Stranglers - a notorious serial killer duo that stalked suburban Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Like James Benning’s Landscape Suicide this film neither fetishizes the murderers nor foregrounds the victims. Instead, Cursed Objects concerns itself with the residual trauma that lingers in the locations where these crimes took place. An off-kilter, far too often forgotten, geography overlaps with the ubiquitous spaces of our lives.
Eli Hayes Retrospective
In celebration of the life and work of Eli G Hayes, Slow Film Festival programmed a retrospective of his work, including A Florida Melancholy (2019), Not Dead Yet (2019), Barbara (2018), Retreat (2018), Pharos (2018), The Growing Glow (2018), The Unchanging Sea (2018), Sedation (2018). The programme was put together with the help of Andre De Nervaux, Jordan Mumford and Eli’s family.
En Plein Air by Daniel & Clara
(UK | 2020 | 18:20 | 4K)
En Plein Air was Slow Film Festival’s 2020 Moving Image Commission. In a series of eight moments captured over a single day in Mayfield, artists Daniel & Clara engage in a process of psychological orientation. Their state of mind becomes inexplicably linked to the countryside and shifting weather conditions.
Erpe-Mere by Noemi Osselaer
(Belgium | 2019 | 20:44 | HD)
A pastoral tableaux of agricultural fairs, haystacks and silage clamps turns uncanny in Noemi Osselaer’s Erpe-Mere. If the SFF team were to pick one work that encapsulates Mayfield Village it would be this rural dream, from the omnipresent cow to the sensations of temporal and geographical dislocation.
Ghost Nursery by Brandon Wilson
(USA | 2019 | 6:46 | Digital)
This is a beguilingly simple film - the camera pivots slowly and returns to where it started. At some indefinite point in this arc of movement, time begins to flow backwards. The passage of time and the retreat into darkness are imperceptible processes. In our routine existence these transitions escape us - we only come upon them with hindsight. Brandon Wilson’s oeuvre attempts to place such imperceptible moments at the forefront of the filmic image.
Ghost Strata by Ben Rivers
(UK | 2019 | 45:00 | 16mm)
Ghost Strata (2019) is a visual diary chronicling a year of curiosity around the world. Outtakes from other projects (a gloriously deadpan caveman from Krabi, 2562), a tarot reading and a midnight private view of William Hogarth’s Rake's Progress map the filmmaker’s personal movements through time and space. This sketchbook collage of sights and sounds, staged and found, meditates on the in-between spaces and lacunae of the things around us.
Green Thoughts by William Hong-xiao Wei
(UK | 2020 | 28:23 | Digital & 35mm)
Green Thoughts was shot on an island off the coast of Scotland but now the geographical markers, trigonometry points, and contours of place are scrambled. Cinematography traditionally creates the illusion of three-dimensional space, but this film embraces the truth of its two dimensionality. Our world is only ever mediated, whether through the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the lens of a camera, or the cartographer’s protractor. Place in this film is pre-expressive, fragmentary, unpredictable; as much an inner world as it is an outer world.
I Speak to My Demons by Tommaso Donati
(France, Switzerland | 2020 | 24:10 | HD)
Patrice is an inmate in the French prison Bois d’Arcy. As an actor and at the same time a silent spectator he hides his drama through a routine of daily gestures and ambiguous postures.
Night Horse by Jeroen Van der Stock
(Japan, Belgium | 2019 | 18:30 | HD)
Night Horse began when artist Jeroen Van der Stock stumbled upon an article on unsecured surveillance cameras. He trawled the internet for such footage, not to compile a voyeur’s catalogue or to question the ethics of privacy, but to discover human absence and natural and digital contingency. The CCTV cameras may have been erected by humans, but they see with an indifferent and alien eye: a sleepy village, a hallucinogenic crossroads, a restless horse glowing in the dark. These cameras record the oblique and ambiguous - a world un-seen and unintended.
No Archive Can Restore You by Onyeka Igwe
(UK, Nigeria | 2020 | 5:54 | HD)
The former Nigerian Film Unit building was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine. Now the building stands empty in the shadow of the Nigerian Film Corporation. The rooms are full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. Amongst these cans, a long-lost classic of Nigerian filmmaking, Shehu Umar (1976) was found in 2015. The films housed in this building are hard to see not only because of their condition, but also because people do not want to see them. They reveal a colonial residue as palpable as the walls of the building itself.
Now, At Last! by Ben Rivers
(UK | 2018 | 40:00 | 16mm)
Now, At Last! is a de-facto monologue from a sloth. In 40 minutes we’re introduced to its daily routine, its favourite tree, its adoration for three-colour separation techniques set to an iconic romantic American ballad, and - perhaps most prominently - it’s favourite everyday sleeping positions.
Perpetual Night by Pedro Peralta
(Portugal | 2020 | 17:23 | HD)
Castuera, Spain, April 1939. During the night two Falangist Guards appear at the door of the house where Paz is taking refuge with her family. They request her presence at the police station. Paz immediately understands the fatality of this visit. With no chance to escape, she asks to breastfeed her newborn daughter one last time.
Recovery by Kevin Jerome Everson
Still from Recovery (2020) ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy of the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures
(US | 2020 | 10:19 | 16mm)
An Airman trains to be a pilot at Columbus Air Force Base 14th Flying Training Wing in Columbus, Mississippi.
Sakhisona by Prantik Narayan Basu
(India | 2016 | 26:08 | 35mm)
Near Mogulmari in West Bengal (India) lies a mound known locally as Sakhisona. The stories about it are still sung by local musicians. A dig nearby recently uncovered the remains of a monastery as well as some objects dating back to the 6th-century. The film shows the objects unearthed and re-enacts the folklore in fragments.
Semi-Live Sound Design Lecture by Graeme Cole
“Something About Sound Design, Gardening, and Mutants“
Unfound Peoples Videotechnic is an itinerant absurdist film and video academy. Graeme Cole is a former student of Béla Tarr and an inactive filmmaker in his own right. In this semi-live slow lecture, Mr Cole introduced ways of artificially introducing sounds into the environment of our images; how to use alternative sound structures, associations, and textures to infect the minds of unsuspecting ‘viewers’ through their ear-holes.
To discover other bizarre courses, lectures and deprogramming programmes visit unfound.video.
Shivering Wall by Tseng Yu Chin
(Taiwan | 2019 | 10:01 | HD)
Shivering Wall discovers solitude in a crowd; a moment of lucidity in a hubbub. A house party is paired down to somnolent bodies and throbbing noise and in the midst a person gains an indefinite and individual experience.
Sirio by Davide Palella
(Italy, Spain | 2019 | 38:10 | 16mm)
There’s a strain in film studies that’s terrified of symbolism and demands we read images as indexical samples of the world. Sirio, however, is unapologetically symbolic. A dog pants at the mouth of a cave, then enters and disappears, a thumb sparks a lighter, once, twice… over and over again in that same cave, or that same symbolic darkness.
Sunken Cave and a Migrating Bird by Qiuli Wu
(Canada, China | 2020 | 10:32 | HD)
Between a dilapidated building and a zoo, humans and animals are trapped. Out of boredom two siblings decide to steal a fish from the artificial lake.
The Barrel by Kevin Jerome Everson
Still from The Barrel (2019) ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy of the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures
(US | 2019 | 5:21 | 16mm)
A proprietor of a liquor store in Mississippi takes an inventory.
The Brother by Léa Triboulet
(France, USA | 2016 | 9:00 | HD)
Three sisters go about their daily lives in New Orleans in the absence of their missing brother.
The Close River by Marta Hryniuk
(2020 | 27:17 | Ukraine | 16mm)
Shot over the course of three weeks, in various locations in western Ukraine, The Close River is a poetic investigation of a region with multiple overlapping temporalities of colonisation and exploitation. The film traces shifting borders and markers of power, exploring how the histories of coexistence, violence and resistance are carved into the landscape and culture of the region, and ultimately how they shape contemporary ways of living.
The Eyes in the Woods and the Taste in the Water by Luciana Mazeto and Vinícius Lopes
(Brazil, Germany | 2020 | 36:00 | 16mm)
The inhabitants of Teewald remain resolutely German even though they live in a small village in South Brazil. Using a combination of archival footage, hand processed 16mm and old colouring techniques from toning to tinting to hand-made-emulsion to hand painting and contact printing, Luciano Mazeto and Vinícius Lopes explore the bifurcated identity of this extremely particular community. The film is a delightful admixture of irony and indirectness.
The Flow by Chahat Mansingka
(India | 2019 | 20:56 | HD)
A young woman lives and works in the city to support her family in the country. Struggling with the city environment, she endures an acute sense of longing for her home, her lover and her river.
Walking Cinema Workshop by Emre Çağlayan
Walking Cinema Workshop explored the elusive relationship between walking and cinema, asking whether cinema has the capacity to recreate, simulate or capture the meditative experience of walking. The event was broken into three parts: a pre-recorded lecture by Emre Çağlayan, an active walk taken by festival attendees, and a live discussion with all participants.
Wongar by Andrijana Stojković
(Serbia, Australia | 2018 | 60:00 | HD)
Serbian-Australian writer Wongar lives a secluded life in the suburbs of Melbourne taking care of his 6 dingoes, who he believes embody the spirits of his Aboriginal family. His latest novel is about to be published but at the same time his longtime companion, dingo Timmy, has fallen sick. The vets suggest to Wongar that the dog should be put to sleep but he strongly resists. He believes that he can look for help for Timmy elsewhere: he dives deep into his own memory to summon the spirits of the Aboriginal ancestry.
2020 Jurors
Scott Barley | Maureen Gueunet | Silke Panse | Sarah Perks | Nico Raffin