curated by Chiara Ghidelli and Chiara Granata | reviews by Chiara Ghidelli
For its 2024 edition, Concorto Film Festival has decided to carry on the project started last year with the Mnemosyne focus. Dedicated to the reuse of archive materials, the focus takes the title of Warburg’s well-known work, which has demonstrated how much our visual culture has been crossed by pictures bound to come back. What Mnemosyne wanted to transmit is, then, the cultural value and linguistic versatility of these “pictures which come back”, the so-called found footage. These materials are actually experiencing a new beginning nowadays, throughout some great success that range from authorship to mainstream, from niche to trend.
In addition to confirming the power of archives that have emerged by now from purely popular and documentary stories, the second edition of Mnemosyne aims at going down an even more defined path through those narratives that are able to describe different worlds. It is a research throughout a new way of conceiving fiction and towards new narrative formulas, able to start from the document and make it the basis for new inventions.
The selected shorts
curated by Chiara Ghidelli and Chiara Granata
A missed call, Francesco Manzato, 2024, Italy, 10’
The Veiled City, Cubides-Brady Natalie, 2023, UK England, 12’
Teen Girl Fantasy, Marisa Hoika, 2023, Canada, 10’
La noche del minotauro (The night of the Minotaur), Julana Zuluaga Montoya, 2023, 10’
The Same The Other, Bohau Liu, 2023, Switzerland, 8’
Quantum Dot – Fast Forward, Joe Pickett, 2019, Luxembourg, 3’
A missed call, Francesco Manzato, 2024, Italy, 10’
Starting from his home footage and putting together the landscapes on his grandfather’s Super 8 film, Francesco Manzato traces back the memories he has always deserved. A missed call is structured along the lines of a message left in an impossible voicemail and sets the stage for a linguistic and narrative short circuit. The time of the archive reaches and completes the time – present? future? – of a team on a journey to a galaxy that could be ours too, creating a celestial yet possible paradise to believe in. The amateur film-maker uses camera movements to communicate with the plastic stillness of the video game without violence. Deep science fiction in the archives.
The Veiled City, Cubides-Brady Natalie, 2023, UK England, 12’
The Great Smog of London was an event that happened in 1952. Starting from this, Nathalie Cubides-Brady hypothesizes and declares the existence of a new historical timeline. Based on archive footage documenting the impact of an event that has never been quite defined as catastrophic, The Veiled City distances itself from the images and blazes a new trail that goes beyond the document. The imaginary trail in a fictional, unreal London, stage of a post-apocalyptic dark tale of which there is nothing left, and the trail of the document that hints to the great History, the one of 1952 and the one we live nowadays, interpreted by a narrator’s voice, survivor of a disaster that the History itself caused. Juggling document and fiction, The Veiled City embodies the exposure of every human and environmental emergency where victims and executioners are on the same level.
Teen Girl Fantasy, Marisa Hoika, 2023, Canada, 10’
A poster, a march, the song of a parade. A woman’s voice, one and a thousand more, that beats the rhythm of the archive images, tells the story about a world that holds a youthful lightness and a grim reality. An imagination in the style of Sofia Coppola, made up of teenage girls, cheerleaders, fireworks, Sundays at the river, donuts and school desks, transgression, dreams and many expectations. Daydreaming, genuinely fantasizing. The tale of a coming-of-age feminist accompanied by a voice that is never too loud and that cries out against the normalization of a male gaze. A pure look at an impure system.
La noche del minotauro (The night of the Minotaur), Julana Zuluaga Montoya, 2023, 10’
Rediscovering home footage and investigating into the grandmother’s past life, La noche del minotauro re-tells a family story through the filter of the myth: the one of Luz Emilia Garcia, forerunner of the porn film industry in Colombia. Her granddaughter, Julana Zuluaga, celebrates her as a woman, pioneer and celestial creature, drawing a poetical and mythological picture of her. The archive tells the story about her childhood and adulthood, surrounding her with a magical and metaphysical narration, and indulges in a magical realism that relocates us in a fable dimension far from ours. A past story that holds a pressing and present need, a celebration of nature, of the woman and of spaces of freedom.
The Same The Other, Bohau Liu, 2023, Switzerland, 8’
What happens if we train a software to recognize people through images coming from different periods and places? Using the title of a collection of poems written by Jorge Luis Borges, The Same The Other represents an audiovisual specimen about images and how artificial intelligence interprets them. Through a mixture of cinema and video art, Bohau Liu offers a collage of found footage, using it as an instrument for a meditation that explores the field of aesthetics and ethics. A problematization through images of the role, the risks and the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence, of the trust reposed in it and its consequences.
Quantum Dot – Fast Forward, Joe Pickett, 2019, Luxembourg, 3’
Realized for the track Fast Forward of the group Quantum Dot, the music video was made by Joe Pickett and assembles images of found footage that show the moment of childbirth. Cinema, television and private videos – heterogenous archives arranged by the author, founder of the Found Footage Fest in North America, to get an emotional climax that tells the potential and the versatility of archive languages.
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