An experimental documentary comprised of regional vignettes about faith, force, technology and exodus. Eleven parables relay histories of settlement, removal, technological breakthrough, violence, messianism and resistance, all occurring somewhere in the state of Illinois. The state itself is a convenient structural ruse, allowing its histories to become allegories that explore how we are shaped by conviction and ideology. The Parables consider what might constitute a liturgical form. Not a sermon, but a form that questions what morality catalyzes. Technological and religious abstraction are linked and placed in conversation with governance.

Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work that investigates issues of power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Recent projects have addressed freedom, expansionism, surveillance, sonic warfare, public speech, ghosts, sinkholes, levitation, propagation, orthoptera, raptors, comets and faith. She has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA NY, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Mercer Union, Witte de With, the Whitney Biennial and festivals including Sundance, Viennale, CPH/DOX, Berlinale, Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, Full Frame and Rotterdam. Stratman is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins fellowships, a Creative Capital grant and an Alpert Award. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.

Une nuit d’été, dans un Japon plutôt tropical, plusieurs personnes isolées se retrouvent prises dans un jeu d’ombres et de lumières plus ou moins menaçants. Des opérateurs vêtus de noir semblent les manipuler alors qu’elles s’abandonnent à l’idée d’être des marionnettes. Pourtant ici pas de ventriloquisme, tout au plus quelques larmes, un rire caché derrière un cri, déchirant le silence de la nuit. Avec la participation de Junko (artiste-noise, membre de Hijokaidan)

Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky partagent leurs connaissances théoriques du cinéma et de la musique pour réaliser des films créant un espace dans lequel la réalité rencontre les mythes, fables et utopies associés à un territoire donné ; enregistrant ainsi les survivances, trahisons et métamorphoses des résistances du passé. Chaque film s`ancre dans une géographie particulière, et convoque plusieurs signes historiques, politiques, mais aussi littéraires. Tous les films ont la particularité de suive un personnage marginal qui, dans sa solitude, délire de façon lucide le monde et le cosmos, et parvient par des moyens détournés, à se « brancher » sur le collectif.

The Coat loosely adapts Aristophanes’ The Birds from the Athens of 414 BC to contemporary Calabria. Here the two people who leave their home looking for a better life are a young man and his daughter arriving from Albania in search of a swimming coach who fled the collapse of Communism in the 1990s. They search for the coach among Italy’s Arbëresh community, descendants of an earlier Albanian exodus of the 1450s. Along the way the pair intercept two actors touring the rural south in an attempt to resuscitate the long dead street hero Punchinella. Here histories are invoked only to be folded in on themselves and diffused back through the Calabrian landscape. The characters, naive to the terrain that surrounds them rely predominantly on cartographies of their own desire while the birds fly overhead taunting their imprudence. Co written with, and employing professional and amateur actors, The Coat‘s itinerant figures don’t so much drive narrative as walk it slowly along.

CORIN SWORN was born in London, England, and raised in Toronto. She studied psychology and integrated media before earning her master’s at the Glasgow School of Art. Sworn has exhibited internationally, including at the Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Britain, the National Gallery of Canada, and the 2013 Venice and Sydney Biennials. Her film work has appeared at Rotterdam Film Festival and the Centre Pompidou. TONY ROMANO was born in Toronto and earned his B.F.A. from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. His film installations have been exhibited internationally, with solo and group shows at MoMA, Night Gallery in Los Angeles, Articule in Montreal, Kulturhuset in Stockholm, and MOCCA and The Power Plant in Toronto.

LA VILLA  Etre dans sa maison L’été 2016, je filme le caveau familial à peine achevé. Cet ouvrage minimaliste, projet de mon père, est bâti dans le cimetière d`Oletta en Corse. Le  marbre de Carrare, reflète dans sa permanence l`architecture du village dont certaines villégiatures. 

Mélissa Epaminondi est née en 1977. Elle vit et travaille entre Paris et Oletta (Corse). Elle est diplômée de l’Ecole d’Architecture de Marseille Luminy. Architecte et artiste, elle poursuit sa pratique initiale et réalise des films, vidéos et installations. Depuis 2008 elle mène son activité d’architecte au sein du collectif L140. Elle enseigne l’art-vidéo à l’Université de Corse Pascal Paoli. Dans le prolongement des bâtiments qu’elle construit, ses films, vidéos et installations sont des architectures projectives révélant l’inconscient individuel ou collectif. Les références à la culture populaire sont présentes dans ses oeuvres dont l’univers part d’un regard alternativement amusé et grinçant sur le monde. Tout dans son travail est à la faveur des projections mentales. Chaque non-dit, chaque manque, chaque vide permet l’ambiguité. Les objets y sont transitionnels, faisant appel à la mémoire, à l’interprétation, au désir à la faveur d`un renversement du regard. Les mouvements de caméra sont synthétiques. S’ils ne suivent pas la trajectoire du corps qui porte la caméra ils s’opèrent grâce à un mécanisme présent sur place au moment du tournage.

Ghost Children, presents seven reminiscences of early childhood, read in seven different voices, as the camera presses close against the faded dye and exaggerated grain of family photographs from the early 1980s. Whose faces and memories are those ? The film encourages the audience to interrogate assumptions about gender, memory, performance, and death.

João Vieira Torres is a Brasilian-French artist/filmmaker, born in Recife, Brazil. Lives and works in between Brazil and France . He has shown his work among other places at: New York Film Festival 2016(US) / Kinoforum São Paulo (BR) / Edinburgh International Film Festival (UK) / Uniondocs New York (US) / Art of the Real Lincoln Center (US) / Ann Harbor Film Fest (US) / FIDMarseille(FR) / Olhar de Cinema (BR) / Rencontres Int. du Documentaire de Montreal (CA) / Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (FR/DE) / Museu da Imagem e do som de São Paulo (BR) / Anthology Film Archives(US) / CentrePompidou(FR) / Palais de Tokyo (FR) / MIS São Paulo (BR) / LABoral (ESP) / IndieLisboa(PT) / Tampere Short Film Fest (FI) / Vilnius CAC(LT) / Alexandrina Arts Center (EG)…

High in the mountains of Lesotho, Mosaku is anxiously awaiting the return of his older brother from an initiation ceremony. The initiates spend 5 months in a remote secrete location. When the boys return, they are grown men.

Teboho Edkins was born in the USA in 1980 and grew up in Lesotho, South Africa and also in Germany. He studied Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, followed by a 2-year post-graduate residency at le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains in France and then a post-graduate film directing program at the dffb film academy in Berlin. His films show at film festivals, television, museums, win awards and have been acquired by private art collections. He currently lives between Berlin and Cape Town.

Is it the oldest dream? Giving birth to my father. Shot on a single starry afternoon.

Mike Hoolboom is a Canadian media artist living in Toronto.

Giang visits her aunt Mười in the Mekong delta (Tien Giang) for the summer to give her mother personal space and time to sort things out. The slow rhythm of countryside life, children’s games, and close relationship within the neighborhood help Giang forget about her personal troubles and the hot Mekong sun. Seeing her 60-year-old aunt constantly busy with farm work, Giang decides to help out. The film develops through Giang’s perspective, weaving documentary foot- ages with a fictional storyline. Through Giang and aunt Mười’s developing relationship we get a sense of the slow and drawn-out rhythm of life in the rural South of Vietnam, the close contact between human and animals, the switch from traditional methods to reliance on industrial feed, concerns sur- rounding food safety, and the perception and interests of a typical farming household in the Mekong Delta. The film also introduces a new angle into the relationship between human and animals, and the inseparable ties be- tween life and death.

Born in Danang, Vietnam, 1985. She spent part of her childhood in Thailand before completing secondary and high school in Saigon, Vietnam. She has a B.A in East Asian Studies from Wesleyan University, USA and since 2009 has moved back to live and work in Saigon as a full-time visual artist. She is happy to tell stories using whatever medium available, from words, images, to sounds and space. She has exhibited in various museums and art spaces in Vietnam and abroad. Her experience with moving images started with video art works: Passage of the mass, 2014; The process of purifying, 2013, Where birds dance their last, two-channel installation, 2012. Flat Sunlight is her first film.

He who walks down the street, over there, is immersed in the multiplicity of noises, murmurs, rhythms. […] By contrast, from the window, the noises distinguish themselves, the flows separate out, rhythms respond to another. […] No camera, no image or series of images can show these rhythms. […] The observer in the window knows that he takes his time as first reference, but that the first impression displaces itself and includes the most diverse rhythms on the condition that they remain to scale. […] Rhythms always need a reference, the initial moment persists through other perceived givens. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis

Daniel Kötter is a director and video artist whose work oscillates deliberately between different media and institutional contexts, combining techniques of structuralist film with documentary elements and experimental music theater. It was shown in numerous galleries, video festivals, concert halls and theatres all over the world. Between 2008 and 2011, he developed the video-performance trilogy Arbeit und Freizeit. His music theatre performances in collaboration with composer Hannes Seidl are shown at numerous international festivals. Between 2013 and 2016 they developped the trilogy Ökonomien des Handelns: KREDIT, RECHT, LIEBE. Kötter`s series of films, performative and discursive work on urban and socio-political conditions of theatre architecture and performativity has been under development between 2009 and 2015) under the title state-theatre: Lagos/Teheran/Berlin/Detroit/Beirut/Mönchengladbach (with Constanze Fischbeck). His film and text work KATALOG was shot in twelve countries around the mediterranean sea portraying sites and practices related to the definition of the public sphere. It was presented at the Venice Biennal for Architecture (2013/14). He is currently working with curator Jochen Becker (metroZones) on the research, exhibition and film project CHINAFRIKA. Under Construction. (2014-2018) www.danielkoetter.de www.state-theatre.de http://katalog.danielkoetter.de

Watching four species of paradise perform in four phases of noonlight reflecting on four film rolls, in four acts

A lyrical filmmaker as well as a sound and visual artist, Robert Todd continually produces short works that resist categorization. His visually stunning body of work, which comes from a deeply personal place, takes a variety of poetic approaches to looking at the personal, political, and social ways in which we choose to live. His films have been exhibited internationally at a wide variety of venues and festivals. He teaches film production at Emerson College.

Appréhendées comme un voyage mental, visuel et sonore proche de l’esprit surréaliste, les images se succèdent au rythme de l’énonciation mystique du thème astral de Ersnt dressé par un astrologue de Sedona, également saxophoniste, qu’il a lui-même dressé après avoir constaté une erreur dans l’heure de naissance de celui commandé par Breton en 1930. Sa voix off accompagne le spectateur. À la fois atmosphère sonore et piste narrative, elle pa rait guider cette chasse au fantôme - probablement celui de l’esprit de Max Ernst qui, partout, imprègne les lieux. Tandis que la mélodie rappelle les bandes sonores de méditation disponibles dans les boutiques de souvenirs de la ville, la désynchronisation répétée des rushes dans le temps évoque, tel ce chat dont le corps se dédouble, le « voyage astral » cher aux surréalistes, l’expérience de hors corps, la sensation de flottement. Dans son film Real Estate Astrology (2015), Maxime Rossi développe une réflexion à facettes pour portraiturer un lieu. Il confronte deux états de narration entre lesquels le spectateur peut osciller, du diagnostic des traces objectives d’une quête, real estate, au pronostic à valeur prédictive d’une vie dressé d’après l’interprétation stellaire, astrology.

Le travail de Maxime Rossi contourne les limites de genre prédéfini comme de style pour puiser ses formes et son inspiration dans de multiples sources : l’histoire de l’art, l’ethnographie ou la littérature. L’impressionnant éventail des registres provoque une étrange narration, que l’artiste utilise pour dévoiler des vérités en portant un nouveau regard sur des sujets que nous pensions connaître avec certitude. À travers le prisme kaléidoscopique d’une pratique complexe et hétéroclite mêlant la sculpture, l’installation, la performance, la scénographie et la vidéo, Maxime Rossi ignore l’idée même de catégories et propose une discipline singulière qui convoque la « beauté convulsive » chère aux surréalistes. Maxime Rossi est né en 1980, il vit et travaille à Paris, France. Son travail a fait l’objet de projections au Centre Pompidou, Paris et au MUMOK, Vienne (Autriche). Il a notamment été montré dans le cadre d’expositions personnelles et collectives au Palais de Tokyo, Paris, à l’Emba / Galerie Édouard-Manet, Gennevilliers, à la Fondation François Schneider, Wattwiller, à La Halle des bouchers, Vienne, à la 19e Biennale de Sydney, au S.M.A.K. de Gent ou au Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève, Suisse.

Avant et après ce second baiser.

Born in 1974 in Portugal, Sandro Aguilar studied film at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema. In 1998 he founded the production company O Som e a Fúria. His films have won awards at festivals, such as La Biennale di Venezia, Gijón, Oberhausen and Vila do Conde, and have been shown in Torino, Belfort, Montreal, Clermont-Ferrand among others. Retrospectives of his work have been programmed at Rotterdam IFF and BAFICI.