2023 – Page 2 – Kaleidoskop

VAI E VEM

June 12, 2023/in 2023 /by jdtgf_kaleidoskop

Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa had been planning a collaboration on the political and collective agency of cinema since longer. In 2020, the two filmmakers tackle their longings for exchange in the form of audiovisual essays between São Paulo and Los Angeles: an experimental feminist film practice emerges in a video letter dialogue staged on the basis of collaborative and open authorship. In three-week cycles, a cinematic correspondence rooted in intimacy and friendship unfolds, which is set in relation to works by 16 other inspiring experimental women* filmmakers. A game with forms and formats, with excerpts of the authors’ concerns and the essential things that need to be shared with each other in life. VAI E VEM is a snapshot of Brazil and the USA in politically turbulent times, a sensual approach to communication in constant change, and a formal expression of the physical closeness of two friends that transcends the distance between the Northern and Southern Americas.

EDELWEISS

June 12, 2023/in 2023 /by jdtgf_kaleidoskop

A critical love letter to a country that needs to become a better place for those who have been making it a better place for years. The performative documentary interweaves dauntless positions and perspectives of People of Colour in Austria, asking: what is a viable stance towards a country riddled with structural racism and everyday discrimination? In speaking together, spaces and opportunities arise that enable one to take a position, to be empowered, to simply exist as a matter of course. Anna Gaberscik combines performances and interviews into a multifaceted portrait of tedious struggles, urgent articulations, and delightful subversions of identity ascriptions. A film about the complicated love affair of all those who live here and therefore are from here. By rendering complex interconnections, affiliations, and relationships visible, EDELWEISS holds up a mirror to Austria’s dominant yet fragile, and painfully white identity construction.

MAPUTO NAKUZANDZA

June 9, 2023/in 2023 /by jdtgf_kaleidoskop

The first light of day in Maputo – Radio Maputo Nakudzandza reports the disappearance of a bride. People saunter home from nightclubs, do morning sports, a tourist roams the streets, meanwhile others are getting up and heading off to work. For 24 hours, Ariadine Zampaulo lures us through the simultaneity of happenings in Mozambique’s capital. In her kaleidoscopic portrait, multiple realities and fictions mingle and collide in dense stories. Moments of connectedness, planned and unexpected encounters spin a narrative web across Maputo. Dance choreographies on rooftops, poetry in the streets, the throbbing soundscapes of a city riddled with tokens of a colonial past. In sublime gestures, this film captures the vivid yet subtle nuances of an urban polyphony in the present.

ALBAHR ‘AMAMAKUM

June 8, 2023/in 2023 /by jdtgf_kaleidoskop

Unexpectedly, Jana is back in Beirut. In Paris, she has abandoned her art studies and countless odd jobs. What motivated Jana’s abrupt return remains uncertain. Back with her parents, it is difficult to readjust and attend to her former life, family, and friends. Only Adam seems to grasp Jana’s plight – together they embark on an atmospheric trip through the city at night. While the newly built city quarters pass by contemplatively like ghost towns, and the camera tries to catch glimpses of the sea amidst new urban architecture, breath-taking shots of Beirut with multilayered visual and acoustic atmospheres frame the protagonists’ existential emptiness. In this compelling debut feature, Ely Dagher entwines the becoming of a crisis-ridden Beirut with young Jana’s pursuit of meaning and identity.

KOKOMO CITY

June 11, 2023/in US 2023 /by jdtgf_kaleidoskop

Morning routines and conversations in bed, gossip and real talk. In encounters and interviews, D. Smith portrays four Black trans* sex workers in New York and Georgia. The protagonists discuss their lives with relish but without any sugar-coating. The conversations that unfold are deep, passionate reflections on social and political realities as well as incisive analyses of belonging and identity within their own communities. A flow of self-empowered dramatisations, performative interventions, and associative collages coalesces in haunting black-and-white images accompanied by an equally so gripping soundtrack. Between stereotyping and care, violence and fetishization, desire and affection, relationships to lovers, to friends and families, communities and contexts are lived out in all their complexity and ambiguity. KOKOMO CITY is a barrage of resistant narratives and heartening struggles that refuse being played off against each other by dominant societies.