Frames of War

The last two years have marked a paradigm shift in war imagery, and in the way that we look at it: a stream of images mainly shot by civilians that are rendered all the more disturbing by their medium – usually interacted with amidst scattered, often radically different images, thrown in our direction by the algorithms of social media. As Harun Farocki warned in the late 1960s (whom we pay homage to through this edition's main theme), this flow of images that “hurt” us enables us to instantly “close our eyes” to images of the horrors happening in Palestine or Ukraine, which means that we will then “close our eyes to their memory, then to the facts, then to the context”. Frames of War is a gesture aimed at countering this reflex. We propose five films that, drawing on a wide range of techniques and materials (from personal archives to found footage, from structuralism to performative approaches), question both the content and the production of war images, as well as the violent processes of colonialism and imperialism. In parallel, the program proposes a reflection on a “primordial” form of the images that appear in our feeds, the VHS image, in the context and in the aftermath of the war that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia. (Flavia Dima)

Like a Sick Yellow

Norika Sefa | Duration 23’ 11”

An immersion into Nora's memory, where realities merge, the bad and beautiful intertwine until it’s all mingled and something else is formed. A tragedy foretold.

UNDR

Kamal Aljafari | Duration 15’

The camera's eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests.

Unwanted Kinship

Pavel Mozhar | Duration 30’

Using the streets of his Berlin neighborhood as a backdrop, a filmmaker born in Belarus investigates the systematic nature of Russian and Belarusian war crimes in Ukraine and explores his own responsibility for this war.

Man number 4

Miranda Pennell | Duration 9’ 52"

Gaza, December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker.

I Would Rather Be a Stone

Ana Hušman | Duration 23' 48“

Through the voice of Little Jela, the film tells the story of the events that marked a generation and shaped the future of the landscape of Lika, a neglected and sparsely populated region of Croatia. The living conditions impacted on the personal lives of the people who lived there, their solitude, relationships, opportunities, apprehensions and hopes.