Catalogue 2024
Below, browse the 2024 Rencontres Internationales catalogue, or search the archives of the works presented since 2004. New video clips are routinely posted and the images and text are regularly updated.


Amanda Rice
The Flesh of Language
Experimental film | 4k | color | 16:32 | Ireland | 2023
THE FLESH OF LANGUAGE draws connections between zoological research related to the extinct ‘Irish Elk’, parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive’s EVP tape recordings and tactics of media preservation as explained by an archivist. Analogies are drawn between extinct deer and dying media formats which come head to head in a choreographed, exuberant species-resurrection scene.
Amanda Rice is as artist and filmmaker based between London and Belfast. Her films have been presented at the BFI London Film Festival (UK) Eva International Biennial (Ireland), Flux Factory (New York), Eastlink Gallery (Shanghai) CCA Glasgow, Arebyte Gallery (London) M8 Space Aalto University (Helsinki), Irish Film Institute (Dublin), the Wrong Biennale and aemi's 2024 international touring film programme 'Spirit Messages'. Awards include Edward Allington Memorial Prize, awarded by UCL Slade and Next Generation Bursary, awarded by the Arts Council of Ireland. She is an MA graduate of the Slade School of Art. Her film 'The Flesh of Language' is in the permanent collection of the Arts Council of Ireland.

Mykola Ridnyi
The Battle over Mazepa
Video | 4k | color | 26:43 | Ukraine | 2023
The Battle Over Mazepa conceptualises the historical significance and contemporary perception of Ivan Mazepa, a political and military leader of the Zaporizhian Sich and Left-bank Ukraine in the late-17th and early-18th century. Addressing codes of hip-hop culture, Ridnyi borrows the popular form of a rap battle to collide two great works of world literature associated with this historical figure: Mazeppa by Lord Byron in 1819 and Poltava by Alexander Pushkin in 1828–29. While Byron envisions Mazepa as a romantic hero, seized by love, Pushkin portrays him as a traitor in accordance with the colonial attitude of the Russian Empire. Highlighting the confrontation of these two texts, Ridnyi invited four rappers from different national and cultural backgrounds to write and perform their response to the poets’ lyrics.
Mykola Ridnyi (born in Kharkiv, Ukraine) is an artist, filmmaker and educator. He lives and works in Berlin where he holds a guest professorship in the Lensbased class at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). His works reflect social and political realities by drawing on the contrast between fragility and resilience of individual stories and collective histories. The body of his work created within the last decade address the question of how to talk about violence and war but not multiply its brutality in the visual language. Ridnyi's works has been shown internationally including the Schinkel pavilion, Transmediale and DAAD gallery in Berlin, Albertinum in Dresden, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, the 56-th Venice Biennale, The Kyiv Biennale and other venues and events.


Simon Ripoll-hurier
The Signal Line
Documentary | dcp | color | 68:0 | France | 2024
Some fifty years ago, while looking for new ways to gather intelligence, the CIA launched a secret program on clairvoyance and extrasensory perception. Is it any coincidence that this took place at the same time and in the same place as the birth of the Internet? Before our astonished eyes, well-trained individuals open up to invisible signals, and describe the contents of sealed envelopes (their “targets”) with astonishing acuity. Reproducing the protocol set up by a CIA agency during the Cold War, Simon Ripoll-Hurier and his co-writer Myriam Lefkowitz choose neighboring locations as the objects of these clairvoyance sessions, moving in concentric circles towards the seats of power in Silicon Valley. Two relationships to information collide: the archaic, corporeal and fallible method of remote viewers vs. the more or less legal collection of data and its storage in a cloud destined soon to replace the brain, itself scrutinized in a nearby lab. The mediums trained here are on the verge of obsolescence: with eyes closed, they let their hands drift across a sheet of paper, offering a poetic interpretation of their targets. The information they capture doesn't have the clarity of bits, and summons reality from an angle. When will our technologies be able to replace Loretta Mears, a chiropractor and healer who uses her intuition to visualize her patients' ailments and heal them better? Spurred on by a narrator who presents herself as an embodied “I”, The Signal Line sketches out the prospect of an information society that will leave no room for the mists of life. Yet wherever data comes from, it can be manipulated, and the film itself, through its editing, produces a reality that belongs to it alone. Tense between subjectivity and objectivity, it reminds us that the answer to any question depends on how it is formulated. (Text: Olivia Cooper-Hadjian)
Simon Ripoll-Hurier (b. Mont Saint-Aignan, 1985) is a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Rouen, and holds a Master's degree in Arts and Politics from Sciences Po Paris. At the crossroads of music and the visual arts, his work revolves around the practices of listening and transmission through the voice. He is co-founder of *DUUU, an online radio station dedicated to contemporary creation. His work was presented at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen in 2009, at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2010, and at the Fabrique des arts in Carcassonne and the FID Marseille in 2017. His films will also be screened at Cinéma du réel 2020 and Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin in 2021. Between 2014 and 2017, in Diana, he brought together various amateur practices linked by the question of listening (radio amateurs, birders, ghost hunters...). In 2020, he will portray a Macedonian symphony orchestra (Age of Heroes).


Dominik Ritszel
The Body Dissolver
Experimental doc. | 0 | color | 11:0 | Poland | 2023
“The Body Dissolver” is based on interviews with professional boxers recalling the moment they were knocked out. The Film combines documentary and fictional elements into a dense parafiction, tinted with body horror genre. Unreal 3D animations generated by the artist are confronted with found footage and the images of human bodies with the representations of imaginary, hyperbolic machines. The storyline reveals the recurring fantasies about the abandonment of the body and the visions of ecstasy, exploited in various spiritual discourses and pop-culture alike.
Dominik Ritszel was born in 1988. A visual artist who creates films, objects and video installations. In 2013, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice at the Faculty of Workshop Graphics. In his works, he refers to phantasms and images of masculinity set in historical, cultural, and political contexts. His creations constitute a critical reflection on issues related to power, institutions and mechanisms of exclusion.

Dylan Rizzo
Nogooddream
Experimental film | 35mm | color | 3:14 | USA | 2024
A man wakes up in a nightmare where he finds his grandmother's favorite tree burning outside his window, and is haunted by whispers of his childhood. The text is adapted from a page in my notes app dedicated to things my younger sister says that I find strange, or sad, or hopeful. The images are from a recurring nightmare. This film was shot on 500 ft of 5219 Kodak 35mm film stock.
Dylan Rizzo is a filmmaker and photographer based in New York City. He is currently pursuing his MFA in directing at Brooklyn College’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. His work draws from his experiences as a native New Yorker and Chinese - Italian American, often dissecting the meaning of memory and how reconciling the past informs the process of becoming. Last year he completed a 18 min short film titled “One Day I’ll Open My Fist”, shot on location in NYC’s Chinatown on 16mm film. It is currently being submitted to festivals.


Hector Rodriguez
The Uncertainty Principle
Video installation | hdv | color | 0:0 | Spain, Hongkong | 2018
The Uncertainty Principle consists of videos and an interactive application about information and uncertainty in the domain of image analysis. The various elements of the work are produced by applying certain filters, known as 2D Gabor filters, to images. Gabor filters identify various kinds of edges -- horizontal, vertical, and diagonal – by responding to specific visual frequencies in an image.
Hector Rodriguez is a digital artist and theorist whose work explores the unique possibilities of computational technologies to reconfigure the history and aesthetics of moving images. His animation Res Extensa received the award for best digital work in the Hong Kong Art Biennial 2003. His 2012 video installation Gestus: Judex received an achievement award at the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Awards and was a jury selection of the Japan Media Art Festival. He received a commendation award from the Hong Kong Government for his contributions to art and culture in 2015. He was Artistic Director of the Microwave International Media Art Festival, and is now a member of the Writing Machine Collective. He currently teaches at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. He has taught courses on art and science, game studies, generative art, software art, media art theory, contemporary art, and film history.

Francisco Rodriguez Teare
Octubre al mediodía
Experimental doc. | 16mm | color | 12:0 | Chile | 2024
A spring afternoon on the San Cristobal hill, in downtown Santiago de Chile. Four friends and a sound engineer talk about the events seen and experienced during the popular revolt that began in 2019 in Chile. The film brings to the surface certain conversations related to any revolution: hope, disillusionment, fire, torture and police violence. The name of the film comes from the poem April Noon by Eileen Myles.
Francisco Rodríguez Teare is a Chilean artist and filmmaker based in France with a moving image practice working predominantly with film, video and installation. Since 2015 he has been creating works and exhibiting them both in film festival circuits and contemporary art contexts. He has directed the shorts Appels téléphononiques, Una luna de hierro, Why are they equipped with eyes ?, Octubre al mediodía, El oro y el pez. The video installations and performances Gois, Colored Procession, This dream is mine and the hybrid feature film Otro sol. Recently his work has been presented at film festivals and museums as New Directors/New Films at MoMA, Toronto FIlm Festival, 62 New York Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, Taipei Biennial, Stedelijk Museum, Cinémathèque Française, Mar del Plata IFF, CPH:DOX, Shanghai IFF, IndieLisboa, FID Marseille, Viennale.

Michèle Rollin
A la recherche du Berlin perdu
Documentary | 4k | color | 90:0 | France | 2023
For almost 30 years, Michèle Rollin has been filming Berlin as it undergoes metamorphosis. A city symbolizing the innovations, convulsions and European tragedies of the last century, it has undergone unprecedented urban transformation since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, the director aims to chronicle these urban upheavals and the memories they erase or transmit, through the protagonists filmed then and now.
Michèle Rollin, born February 28, 1957 in Paris, is a French film director. Trained by Michel Zimbacca, Michèle Rollin worked as an editor with Hubert Knapp, André Voisin, Michel Huillard, Bernard Soulié, Dominique Rabourdin, Michel Vuillermet, Alain Dister, Alain Weiss, Marcel Boudou and Petra Weisenburger. Later, she directed short films. Since 1994, she has devoted herself entirely to documentary filmmaking. Founding member of Ondes sans frontières (OSF) (May 1998), an associative public access channel.

Titouan Ropert
Le Chant des bêtes
Fiction | 4k | color | 24:12 | France | 2023
Conceived as an investigation into the heart of slaughterhouse images, Le Chant des bêtes tackles the question of the missing image: what goes on in these secret places, hidden from view, where thousands of animals are killed every day? The obsession of my journalist-character with the amount of violent archive footage he discovers, gradually leading him from shock to action, also guides the direction, borrowing from Dogme95, a style that is both nervous and instinctive.
Born in Grenoble, Titouan joined La Femis in the editing department after a Masters in cinema. Passionate about both editing and directing, his experience has enabled him to experiment with both practices in his own projects and those of others, with a particular taste for genre cinema.

Peter Rose
A Sign of the Times
Experimental video | hdv | color | 1:46 | USA | 2021
A veiled metaphor for the instabilities of our times shot with a low-res Flip Camera
Peter Rose’s works in film, video, installation, and performance have received extensive national and international exhibition, including shows at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Yokohama Museum of Art, and more recently at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Rose is concerned with new forms of vision, improvisations in fictitious languages, and the pleasures of obscure journeys. The work is included in several major international collections.


Sergei Rostropovich
Archipelago
Video | digital | black and white | 10:26 | Germany | 2023
ARCHIPELAGO was filmed in the ruins of a former Soviet gulag, where prisoners were forced into hard labor to quarry limestone. After the collapse of the USSR, the infrastructure that prevented flooding fell into disrepair, submerging the prison beneath the waters of Lake Rummu in Estonia. In recent years, Estonian authorities have transformed the area into a recreational park, inviting tourists and families to explore this once-hidden place—a layered testament to collective memory and history. Through a blend of static and weightless filming styles, Archipelago contemplates the passage of time and nature’s quiet reclamation, offering a reflective perspective on impermanence and transformation
Sergei Rostropovich (b. 1986) is a New York-born filmmaker and photographer based in Paris. After graduating from the International Film School of Paris, he began his career as an assistant director on Faust by Alexander Sokurov, which won the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Film Festival. He went on to direct a range of short films, including Ophelia, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2014, marking his shift toward non-narrative video work. Rostropovich’s art explores the fleeting nature of human experience, balancing moments of celebration and ritual against darker themes of violence and inevitable decay. Through his video and photographic work, he contemplates life’s fragile beauty and the quiet, constant force of entropy, capturing a world where joy and impermanence are inextricably linked.

Steven Rowell
Lost Prairie Valley
Experimental doc. | 4k | color | 25:0 | USA | 2023
This is a film about plants. It was made by plants. They transmitted their instructions to the human director through artificially intelligent means. “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.”- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," (1935) in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, (New York: Shocken, 1969) Prior to the nineteenth century, western philosophers thought of eyes as broadcast centers, producing images of the world. As this perceived center of the universe shifted away from humans, and the Earth, it became more difficult to see the natural world exactly at the moment that industrial society’s exploitation began driving entire species towards extinction. Since that time, increasingly complex machines and algorithms do the work of seeing and recording the effects of the global climate emergency. Lost Prairie Valley investigates this moment at ecological research stations in the American state of Minnesota, with a little object recognition help from artificial intelligence.
Steve Rowell is a human, artist, and educator who works with photography, moving image, sound, maps, and spatial relations. His research-based practice investigates terrains of perception, nonhuman intelligence, extinction, and technology, exploring the landscape as a site of political imagination. Steve contextualizes the morphology of the built environment with the surrounding medium of Nature, appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archaeologist.


Georgie Roxby Smith
Just Breathe
Video | mp4 | color | 2:39 | Australia | 2024
'Just Breathe' merges GTAV in-game machinima selfies with AI to probe the intersection of virtual realities and human identity. The work infuses AI-induced physiological functions into a digital avatar, typically constrained by game mechanics, highlighting the duality of entrapment and perceived freedom in digital personas and gaming experiences. The piece is accompanied by an ambient soundscape, drawn from the game itself and IRL sounds to blur the distinctions between the digital and physical selves. It challenges viewers to reflect on the boundaries and interactions between virtual and real identities. Through 'Just Breathe', Smith prompts a re-evaluation of identity, presence, and reality in the digital era, exploring how online spaces both mirror and distort our physical existence.
Georgie Roxby Smith works across a range of disciplines exploring new pathways between virtual and physical worlds. Employing a variety of tools - including 3D graphics, live performance, shared virtual and gaming spaces, installation and projection - these works explore the increasingly blurred border between identity, materiality, reality, virtuality and fantasy in contemporary culture. In 2010 Georgie was selected for The Watermill Center Spring Residency Program, NY, by an international selection committee of cultural leaders including Marina Abramovi?, Alanna Heiss & Robert Wilson. In 2011 Georgie completed her MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Since 2012 Georgie has been focusing on online identity, gender representation and violence in video games, particularly that directed towards women on screen and in online communities. Most recently she has been utilising AI in video collages exploring digital portraits. Georgie has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally including Art in Odd Places, New York, (where her work was featured in Time Out NY), Prospectives International Festival of Digital Art Nevada, Game Art Festival at Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Gamerz Festival (FR), Festival Miden (GR) and Generation i.2 - Aesthetics of the Digital in the 21st Century at Edith Russ Huas for Media Art (DE). Other highlights include curating and showing in NOW13:New Media Art Now, Substation Contemporary Art Prize and Self Help at Rawson Projects Brooklyn, curated by Jocelyn Miller (MoMa PS1). Awards and grants include the Australia Council of the Arts New Work, Artstart, Nellie Castan Award, Australian Postgraduate Award, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, Dame Joan Sutherland Fund and the Eldon and Anne Foote Trust Travel Grant.

Eoghan Ryan
Circle A
Video | 4k | color | 29:11 | Ireland, Netherlands | 2023
Circle A departs from a heavily edited conversation between five strangers in an art bookshop. Their discussion circulates around the term 'Anarchy', including its abstraction and how the word functions in both an imaginary and a real way. It is cut alongside footage from the Las Fallas festival, Valencia, a five-day celebration of fire and pyrotechnics as well as interjections from the late author, social theorist and orator Murray Bookchin, who coined the term ‘Lifestyle Anarchism’. Threaded throughout the film are hundreds of newspaper clippings from an open archive. The soundtrack of drums, pops and explosions fall in and out of syncopation, providing driving rhythm and moments of rupture. Circle A inserts Anarchy as an aspirational conceit both on micro and macro level into the language of the everyday spectator. If Anarchy is affirmed as a response to order, the film puts full emphasis on the word ‘response’. In other words, the work is a thought experiment on how to begin to undo a system.
Eoghan Ryan (b. 1987, Dublin, IRE) is based between Brussels, Amsterdam and Dublin. He works across moving image, installation, performance, puppetry and collage. His process engages collective and personal trauma, power dynamics, double speak, acting and reacting to play out disintegrations of mediated language. This often involves confusing and dismantling notions of ‘European’ states of identity, ranging from nation states and states of being to the cultivation of provisional culture, in art as much as bacteria. Recent and selected shows, performances and screenings have taken place at The Complex (IE), Edith Russ Haus(DE), Centrale Fies (IT), ICA London (UK), Busan Biennale (KR) IFFR, Rotterdam (NL), Visio (IT) Foundation Pernot Ricard (FR) Kunstervein Freiburg (DE) South London Gallery (UK) Serralves Museum (PR) and IMMA (IE). He is currently developing a new project for EVA biennale 2025(IE)

Katherina Sadovsky
Rage
Video | digital | color | 12:36 | Russia | 2023
Experimental video work in which the artist explores how art and culture become tools of military propaganda, working for the authorities. And how in modern Russia, they are trying to start a second wind of Soviet monumental propaganda, justifying and supporting the war in Ukraine. The film is built on alternating long, slow shots of Soviet architecture of the 30s. One place in Moscow is shown - the VDNH park, built by Stalin in the 30s as a utopia for the Soviet people, as a future city in which we were never destined to be. Here architecture is seen as monumental propaganda before World War II. The use of baroque elements, massive columns, and other details of unthinkable dimensions was supposed to inspire horror and a sense of the worthlessness of a person before the authorities. And that means complete submission.
Katherina Sadovsky (1985) is a Russian contemporary artist, now based in Yerevan, Armenia. Her diverse approach to art practice encompasses art media such as video, CGI, 3D, sculpture, photography, AI, installation, sound, site-specific practices.


Miranda Salvador
Life Eternal
Experimental film | 4k | color | 23:19 | Canada, Netherlands | 2022
Life Eternal tells three intertwining stories about immortality. The first story is about Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon and his legendary search for the Fountain of Youth. The second story tells us of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were used to create the first immortal human cell line. The third story takes up James Bedford, the first person to undergo cryogenic freezing in hopes of future revival. Spanning centuries, the film installation explores the desires and emotional entanglements of these stories. At the same time, it touches upon the complex and troubling historical themes that jump out so vividly from them - colonialism, exploitation, and techno-utopianism. This work is a poetic dialogue on the eternal conversation on time, our place in a constructed reality and our attitude toward it.
Salvador Miranda is a Mexican-Canadian filmmaker, artist, and producer. His debut short film, This is my land... (2019), premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). His film installation, Life Eternal (2022), premiered at Kasseler Dokfest, received a nomination for the 2022 Golden Cube Prize, and won the 2024 Hertzog da Silva Award. His latest documentary short, Promised Land (2023), also premiered at IFFR. In addition to international screenings, his films are frequently featured in gallery and art festival settings, including Eye Filmmuseum (Netherlands), Ruhrtriennale (Germany), Proyector (Spain), and IMPAKT Festival (Netherlands). Miranda is an alumnus of the Kunstinstituut Parallel Curriculum programme and holds an MFA cum laude in Lens-Based Media from the Piet Zwart Institute.

Vanja Sandell Billström, Lucia Pagano
Diskret Matematik
Experimental fiction | 4k | color | 15:20 | Sweden | 2024
A passage between two buildings, a nail salon, a stairwell, a badminton hall, an atrium, a hospital culvert. Life takes place. With the small details of existence in focus, rather than the larger narratives and conflicts, fragments are connected to a possible outcome. In mathematics, the word discrete is used to describe objects that are not continuous and separated from each other. Discrete mathematics is applied in a number of different areas such as encryption, databases, game theory, graph theory and algorithms.
Lucia Pagano and Vanja Sandell Billström were educated at the Lodz Film School and at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Discrete Mathematics is their second film as a duo which further explores methods developed in their previous film Park. Park was nominated to the Best Swedish Short at Göteborg Film Festival 2020, Tempo Short Award, 1KM Film Award, and winner of the Tempo Sound Award the same year. Previously they have shown their work at festivals and art venues around the world.

Vladlena Sandu
No Nation Without Culture
Experimental doc. | hdv | color | 16:0 | Russia, Netherlands | 2022
Chechnya, Grozny, spring 2021. The city's landscapes are filled with portraits of Putin, Kadyrov Senior, and Kadyrov Junior. They watch me from every corner, infiltrating my thoughts. It’s almost impossible to believe and accept. I perceive the totalitarianism these portraits convey, viewing them intentionally through a distorted lens. I film the streets of my hometown, Grozny, from behind the tinted windows of a car, knowing that such actions put me at risk of persecution. I document a moment when fascism begins to take root in Russia—a time when, after 30 years of the Chechen people's struggle for independence, the focus shifts to indoctrinating children. In 2022, over 12,000 soldiers from Kadyrov's army are sent to war in Ukraine.
Vladlena Sandu was born in Crimea, Ukraine (USSR), in 1982 and grew up in Grozny, Chechnya, during four years of war. She graduated from VGIK in 2016 with a degree in film directing. In 2019, she completed a postgraduate degree in Art at VGIK in Aesthetics, publishing several academic articles. In 2019 graduated Boris Yukhananov's Studio for theater direction. Her works have been presented at international festivals such as the Rotterdam Film Festival, Berlinale, DocLisboa, GoEast, Movies That Matter, ZagrebDox, Geneva International Film Festival, DOK Leipzig, and others, earning international awards. At the start of the Russian war against Ukraine in March 2022, Sandu fled Russia and is now based in Amsterdam. There, she completed No Nation Without Culture about regime in Chechnya, which won Best Short Film at GoEast IFF 2023. In 2023, she also directed the autobiographical performance The Rainbow Cinema and received the Best Amsterdam Fringe 2023 Award.


Paula Saraste
Let us Stay for a While
Experimental fiction | 4k | color | 30:38 | Finland | 2022
Let us Stay for a While takes its inspiration from Jean-Luc Nancy’s proposal that we could remain exposed to and think about what is happening to us. It is we who are arriving and leaving and we who encounter catastrophic events. In the film the aeroplane as a symbol of human technical development – the human-machine – is destroyed, and a new kind of time begins. Let us Stay for a While is a story about a weekend on a remote island. The protagonists witness a mystical aeroplane accident and rescue one of the survivors. Inexplicable things start to happen, the protagonists are thrown back to an altered mood and the island doesn’t seem to want them to leave. The idea of nature as something veiled is thematized in the film – a mystical stone has been found on the island – and the protagonists’ understanding of each other is only partial. The work stands at the confluence of psychological thriller and less traditional dramaturgy. The island as a location has a special relation to time. In the film it exists as a time-space, a temporalization between expectations of the end of the present age and narrative flashbacks on the level of dialogue.
Paula Saraste (b.1981) is a Helsinki based visual artist who works with film, photography and performance. The themes of her works are often related to the relationship between the past and the present as well as fear and identity, and they talk about broader questions beyond their psychological level. Saraste has an MfA degree from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (2016). Her works have been exhibited in solo, joint and group exhibitions, such as Photography Gallery Hippolyte, gallery Myyma?la?2 and Forum Box in Helsinki, Galerie Heike Arndt and HilbertRaum in Berlin and Aomori Contemporary Art Centre, Japan. In addition, she has participated in numerous group exhibitions and screenings in Finland and abroad.


Renu Savant
The Orchard and the Pardes
Experimental doc. | hdv | color | 119:42 | India | 2024
In 2021, during the second summer of the pandemic, I lived and video recorded in the small coastal town of Ratnagiri, India. Shot in the mango orchards of this region the film, "The Orchard and the Pardes", chronicles the last two months of their work with 4 immigrant (Nepalese) labourers during the mango harvesting season. In doing so it reveals not only their conditions of work but also a certain politics of intimacy across conflicting power relations between the labourers, their employer and myself as the filmmaker. It is a personal documentation film in a series of films, I have been making in this region. The film looks at once into small inter-personal spaces and at the same time critically examines the day to day working of a deeply fraught phenomenon of our global times - migrant labour. While looking critically at the processes of ethnographic filmmaking itself, "The Orchard and the Pardes", is a self-reflexive and personal work as much as it documents working conditions of immigrant labour in this western coastal region of India. It casts questions of identity, language and interpersonal politics and importantly the role of deceit in communication across class and gender. Mango growing, a booming agro-industry in this region, relies almost solely on seasonal migrant labour. The film reveals the vulnerability faced by the migrant labourers and how power dynamics works at the micro, day to day level. It explores the relationship between the woman filmmaker and the masculine world of agro-business playing out through various currents of interpersonal dialogue and becomes a deliberation on the complex insidiousness of power systems and their unfolding at a micro level.
Renu Savant is a filmmaker based in Mumbai. She is a Film and Television Institute of India graduate and has worked as a journalist and researcher. She is also a lover of literature and has completed her MA in English Literature. In 2012 she received the Special Jury Award in the 59th National Film Awards held in New Delhi for her short film “Airawat”; and the “Swarna Kamal” for Best Direction in the 62nd National Film Awards in 2015 for her short film “Aaranyak”, amongst other awards.

Sandra Schäfer
Into the Magnetic Fields
Experimental doc. | 4K | color | 14:10 | Germany | 2024
What waves and signals run through the hybrid landscapes between agricultural use and fallow land? Who passes through them? Working, traversing, and intervening in the landscape and space meet the atmosphere, the wind, the earth. Posthuman modes of production encounter magnetism and visions of Afrofuturism. The settings of the film include a field in the Lower Rhine region, outer space, a forest in Bad Marienberg, and a research site for migratory birds. Generated voices quoting texts by feminist science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin, theorist Mark Fisher, artist Lygia Clark, and interviews with foresters and bird researchers form the soundtrack together with music by Dominik Eulberg, Manuela Schininà, Maya Shenfeld, and Tim Tetzner.
Sandra Schäfer’s artistic practice deals with the production of urban, rural and geopolitical space, history, and visual politics. Often her works are based on researches, in which she is concerned with the margins, gaps and discontinuities of our perception of history, political struggles, urban, rural and geopolitical spaces. Her works were exhibited at 66th and 67th Berlinale (Forum Expanded), Berlin; at Camera Austria, Graz; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; mumok, Vienna; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Depo, Istanbul; La Virreina, Barcelona; Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe. In 2018, she completed her doctorate focusing on militant visual and spatial politics at HFBK University of Fine Arts Hamburg. Schäfer also is professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and an associated member of the feminist film distributor Cinenova in London. Schäfer’s practice involves curating film and lecture programmes. In 2003, for example, she curated the film festival Kabul/ Tehran 1979ff: Film Landscapes, Cities under Stress and Migration at the Volksbühne Berlin and the Filmkunsthaus Babylon together with Jochen Becker and Madeleine Bernstorff.