Being true to its innovative endeavour in terms of themes and film language, the 2018 BIEFF International Competition invites the audience to introspection and debate regarding the present-day human condition in a world that keeps changing. Putting our sensitiveness face to face with the frailty of the nature and accessing the omnipresence of the technology in all the life aspects, we rediscover our double position, of
creation and
creator. The two
programs, The
Human Nature / Mother Nature and
Intimacy in the Digital Age, remind us that every day we find ourselves in an environment that we conquered and altered, but in which we write our own stories and they also ask us how, by our ceaseless search for human connections, we shape our interactions and identity, in front of, or with the help of the artificial intelligence.
In
Nature: All Rights Reserved (directed by Sebastian Mulder), nature is omnipresent: the waiting room from a dentist`s is a tropical beach (photo wallpaper), the balcony is all green with plastic grass and the conference room is a tropical forest (another photo wallpaper). Everything is a material
under
copyright law, of course, but who will investigate if the author and rightful owner, Nature itself, gave its permission?
After taking us through a spectral post-clubbing universe with
Fiesta Forever last year, Jorge Jácome returns to BIEFF with another kind of heterotopy. In
Flores, the entire population of Azores islands is forced to flee towards the continent. The camera follows two soldiers, the only people sent on a mission to the island, in shots that are luxuriously composed, on the background of the blue and violet flower invasion and reaches deep into their stories about the nostalgia of the past and the sadness of uprooting.
The peaceful life of a village is interrupted by a fire followed by an earthquake. The firemen can`t cope with the disaster, so the villagers decide to take refuge in the woods. Using the event as a starting point for a fascinating
mash-up, in
After the Volcano Léo Favier approaches very serious
themes, like the global warming, or the habitat invasions, in the playful form of a fantasy story, using archive footage of tens of years ago.
A beach at sunrise becomes the setting for a few surrealist encounters. Young people who try to prolong the remains of the night. Old people for whom a new day is just begining. For a few instants the ones and the others move in the same space, without apprehending the other ones` being there. The third presence is nature itself. With spectacular shots, Boris Poljak creates a feeling of the perishable human existence in the charming
They Just Come and Go.
The
Intimacy in the Digital Age program tries to see the way in which the acts of being, seeing and being seen changed in the context of the increasing importance of our digital self and asks the question if the dichotomy real/virtual makes any more snese or if the two of them combined in the same state of being.
In
Our Skin (directed by João Queiroga) the virtual spaces are kept in the private zone and thus, they become an exceptional space where connections can be formed, beyond prejudices. Late night phone conversations dissolve the boundaries of preconceptions and create intimacy where otherwise it would have been only ignorance or, even worse, contempt. Using
a real audio recording of a conversation between a trans-woman and a U.S. army veteran, the film goes beyond genre, only to reach the intimate essence of the emotion.
Taking this idea further,
Binary Love (directed by Ewan Golder) imagine the virtual space as the main place where we live in. In the harsh light of the neon lights of a virtual town existing within the limits of a motherboard. Eugene and Jessica finally meet, after having been declared a perfect match by an application which finds your half according to what you dream.
In
Information Skies (by Metahaven), one of the short films nominated at the 2017 European Film Academy Awards, the images exist before the Word which creates them. A young couple wearing VR glasses goes into the forest. A cryptic
voice-over combines fragments of thoughts and different realities. Visual elements that remind of the first years of the PC, oneiric sequences, abstract animations and avatars in anime-like animation provoke the archaic notion of reality as being rooted in substantiality. In the age of the experimental technology, the importance of the data affects the understanding of the world around us.
Details:
BIEFF
