This Is the Next Century

"You always live your life never thinking of the future", says Yes' famous Owner of a Lonely Heart, distorted in GREEN GREY BLACK BROWN into an abysmal chant coming from extractivist hells. Today, we're living a paradox—we're obsessively thinking about the future, but not about what is to come, selling, in fact, a sustainable future in the name of progress, without accounting for the past or an increasingly precarious present. The films in THIS IS THE NEXT CENTURY build bridges between the past and the future, constructing and deconstructing real and simulated worlds, brick by brick and pixel by pixel. In EVERY EPOCH DREAMS THE NEXT, the director uses digital technologies to confront the legacy of a film from the Albanian communist era with architectures of the present, while WHAT WE ASK OF A STATUE IS THAT IT DOESN'T MOVE interrogates the relationship between Athenians and their city by bringing the classical, the post-modern, and the revolutionary onto the same urban stage. At the other end, the digital, futuristic world of sports video games allows in WORLD AT STAKE for a commentary on the entertainment industry, individuality, and agency (or lack thereof), all inside a universe on the brink of collapse. THEIR EYES shifts the focus from the interface to the user, examining the invisible and meticulous labour of online workers who break down and index images to be used by autonomous cars from countries that are directly exploiting them. GREEN GREY BLACK BROWN continues a thread of labour, its collage of fuels, muds, and plastics reflecting not so much on the plasticity of matter as on the extractivist sludge that spreads over today's economic and environmental realities. If the future is now, does any other future still exist? (Dora Leu)

Every Epoch Dreams the Next

Johannes Gierlinger | Duration 18'

Starting with an excerpt from an Albanian feature film from the communist era in which a boy dreams of the construction of a modern city, EVERY EPOCH DREAMS THE NEXT reflects on how a cityscape changes as power structures shift and how these power structures can override the common good and the general public.

World at Stake

Total Refusal (Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein) | Duration 20'

A golfer fails to strike, a soccer team plays against itself and a rally co-driver faces an identity crisis. They are surrounded by an audience unable to act. Shot inside of sports video games, A WORLD AT STAKE turns the ordering principles of victory and defeat upside down and negotiates social roles between individual sovereignty and collective passivity.

What we ask of a statue is that it doesn’t move

Daphné Hérétakis | Duration 31'

Nothing seems to be moving in Athens and the people are as still as statues. But elsewhere in the city, a caryatid escapes the museum and a small groupuscule demands the destruction of all antiquities. Perhaps filming is the only way to avoid turning into stone.

Green Grey Black Brown

Yuyan Wang | Duration 12'

A synthetic realm unfolds, meticulously engineered by global startups. Everything is bound together by a dark slime—an oily, recurrent presence that merges Jurassic-era flora with plastic plant decorations destined for shopping malls. Petroleum, in both refined and unrefined forms, opens up a portal to the gory logics of petro-capitalism and global extraction practices.

Their Eyes

Nicolas Gourault | Duration 23'

How does a machine learn to read the world? Testimonies and screen recordings introduce the experience of online micro-workers from the Global South: their job is to teach the AI of self-driving cars to navigate the streets of the Global North.