www.bim18.ch

Premieres followed by conversations with the artists at Cinéma Spoutnik. Films presented by the students of the HEAD – Genève’s cinema department

18.00
Tobias Madison, O Vermelho do Meio-Dia
(Brazil/Switzerland · 2018 · 45 min · Portuguese and English, English subtitles)
Reservation
O Vermelho do Meio-Dia occupies the space between documentary and improvisation, enabling an investigation of the idea of the Other as well as its various constructed perspectives and depictions. The film interweaves two stories which fundamentally diverge despite overlapping. On the one hand, there is a party, its premises, guests, music, class, gender, which build a big “coming together.” On the other hand, a conversation between transgender members of an art collective moves between scripted interactions and improvisation. Revolving around a Bataillean sadomasochistic tale about the falling outs in a community on the brink of war, the films hinges on a perspectivist interplay between scripted and “real” conflict.

19.00
Irene Dionisio, Il mio unico crimine è vedere chiaro nella notte
(Italy/Switzerland · 2018 · 16 min · Italian, English subtitles)
Reservation
Il mio unico crimine è vedere chiaro nella notte addresses the issues of censorship in Italian cinema and psychological removal in art. The work’s title—my only crime is seeing clearly in the night—incisively highlights the conflict at the basis of creation and censorship. The film, with its re-imagining of film fragments, cut out and eliminated with bureaucratic scrupulousness, doggedly retraces the cuts inflicted on the productions of past masters and thinks them through once again as the signs of a cinema yearning to be completed. The cut, which aims to interrupt the relationship between the gaze and the possible, instead becomes a place to be repopulated with… ghosts.

19.30
James N. Kienitz Wilkins, This Action Lies
(USA/Switzerland · 2018 · 32 min · English, French subtitles)
Reservation
This Action Lies is a movie about the limits of observation, about staring very hard at something while listening to something else. It is a paranoid polyphonic apology of a simple act: offering three perspectives of an object that may not exist in a room that cannot exist, while at the mercy of a mistrustful monologue. In other words, a defense of cinema. This project expands ideas introduced in one of Kienitz Wilkins’ previous films, Indefinite Pitch (2016), and is similarly voice-driven, using an extended monologue to analyze a common and underappreciated commercial product, elevating it to the status of an almost Platonic form.

20.15
Bahar Noorizadeh, After​ ​Scarcity
( Switzerland · 2018 · 35 min · Russian, English subtitles)
Reservation
After Scarcity is a sci-fi-essay film that tracks Soviet cyberneticians (1950s-1980s) in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy, an attempt that finds traction today as a way of defying financialization. If the problem of socialism was time loss—too much bureaucracy, too much conversation, too many meetings—a socialism-on-speed, counting electricity plus statistics, could move past this limit. The film recounts the history of a moment in time when, against all odds, it seemed feasible to plan for the whole system at once—collective ownership of global resources with the programmed and networked efficiency of Wal-Mart.