Genres: short

  • Symbiosis

    Occasionally I’m able to spend time in a place where I can observe how the natural world takes shape outside the anxious time frame of our hurried species. In this world relationships seem to have evolved to perpetuate balance over long periods of time as opposed to short cycles of calm interspersed with brief periods of chaos. Overruns and schedules don’t appear to exist there as they do in our manufactured world. Symbiosis is defined as a close, prolonged association between two or more different biological species. This relationship can be symbiotic (mutualistic), where both parties involved benefit from the…

  • Goldjungen

    English Title: “Golden Boys” “If you speak in a low voice, no one hears you.” Two narrow alleys in Istanbul. A crowd of men, yelling. Screaming, shouting, chaotic gesticulation, ­grimacing faces, a deafening buzz of wild voices. The verbal noise dominates the scene. A communicative situation, incomprehensible at first to the alien bystander who doesn’t speak the language. ­Apparently they are traders, I find out. And they call it “the walking stock market”. But what does it really mean? “Today it’s a very quiet day. Everything is still at rest.”

  • Anything Can Happen

    Nighttime. Dogs are barking in the distance. We hear motor sounds and the headlights of a car clicking on and off, and see little sceneries along the road briefly illuminated. An unseen driver connects these momentary landscapes. The headlight beams remain the only light source and actual character throughout the approximately four minutes of rhythmic imagery, in an eerie audiovisual composition. Nothing is incidental, but at any moment “Anything Can Happen”.

  • Tabula Rasa

    “Tabula Rasa” is an exploration of space both on and off the screen. As a rhythmic composition of silent white surfaces, mumbling pine trees, humming motors, babbling crows and unsettling rain in the desert, it questions the current state of its own media, but at the same time portrays a location: Smith’s Ranch Drive-in Theater, Twentynine Palms, California.

  • Pirate Bay

    “Pirate Bay” is a musical film portrait of a beach-based fishing fleet in Hastings, in south-east England. A stroll on a stormy late winter’s day leads us along the dormant boats lying on the beach at low tide. Through the rhythmic montage and a jazz composition with its fragmented tones, the tourist seaside town becomes an abandoned battlefield studded by plundered ships, recalling constant quarrels on and about the sea. A sparse dystopia by Lisa Truttmann, with music by Guido Spannocchi on alto sax, featuring Gina Schwarz on double bass.

  • Characters

    Hú Zhǎng Zū writes ancient Chinese poems with water on the ground in Fuxing Park, Shanghai. After a few minutes, the characters dry out and disappear. She comes to the park almost everyday and practices her handwriting with her friends and colleagues. Together they have lively discussions about the strokes and shapes – both amongst each other and with the many spectators. Hú Zhǎng Zū is the only woman within the bustling crowd of men, and due to her calligraphy skills she is respected and highly admired. I come back to see her often, in order to learn from her…

  • OUT

    OUT, colour, QuickTime, Pro Res 422, stereo, 1 minute Two animated male figures are drawn together and pulled away until they fall into a pit of protesters. Then, a frightened look quickly disappears into the darkness. OUT is a one minute film that touches on the rising fear of being out during a global climate of growing hatred and pushback against LBGTQ rights and freedoms.

  • Landmarks of Memory

    A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s developed landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.

  • FIBERS

    This 15-minute hybrid non-fiction/experimental documentary essay blends Lida Mkrtchan’s voiceover testimony about her time in bomb shelters in Shushi (Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh) with a layered audiovisual landscape. The film moves between tactile close-ups of the narrator’s hands preparing zhengyalov bread and staged studio compositions in which objects, textures and performative gestures metaphorically reimagine the narrated events and inner states through dark video tableaux. The interplay of documentary and poetic imagery illustrates the resilience of the community under siege, the rhythm of daily life and the quiet actions that sustain hope. Moments of beauty, ritual and shared labour coexist alongside stark reflections on…

  • spring rebirth / renaissance printanière à la source du Pêcher

    Window on the fleeing memory.