Paul Tunge og Egil Håskjold Larsen.

Harstad Cinema

Director: Paul Tunge Egil Håskjold Larsen. Musikk: Kim Hiorthøy. Language: no dialogue. Running time: 66 min.

Sunday 21 OCT 4.30PM / LIVE STREAM / HARSTAD KINO SAL 2

I “Stream” av Alfred Benedict Marasigan, vil kunstneren gjøre en livestream fra et landskap i Harstad, som publikum kan velge om de vil se direkte i kinoen, på location sammen med kunstneren eller på nett. En hyllest til lys, sted og øyeblikket inspirert av livestreamingens utbredte bruk i alle media og de særegne norske sakte-TV sendingene.

Artist statement

My practice revolves around Canadian geographer Edward Relph’s “sense of place.” I’ve always made art in relation to where I am and I often investigate the questions “Why am I here?” and “Who am I where? How or in what form?” Introspection, phenomenology, and cultural geography are significant elements of my practice.

I am a Filipino gay millennial middle-class contemporary artist; these identifiers I use for myself carry individually charged associations that I struggle to escape, embrace, repurpose, and reevaluate every day. Landscape painting has often been my entry point, middle ground, and safe space for these inquiries, and it has helped me situate myself in a world where I keep questioning who I was, am, and should be.

Currently, I have been concerned with how these questions are recontextualized by my stay in Tromsø. I can feel my worldview changing drastically in a very peculiar place in the world, and I continuously attempt to negotiate my conflicted existence into historical and technological spaces through my new media works. Ultimately, the spatio-bigoraphical elements of my works consistently explore the complexities and ambiguities of belonging.

Alfred Marasigan (b. 1992) is born and raised in Batangas, Philippines. He graduated from Ateneo de Manila University and have taught visual art history, painting, and aesthetics in that institution. His background in landscape painting led to a spatio-biographical practice informed by cultural geography, local Romanticisms, and virtuality. He is currently taking up his MA in Contemporary Art at Kunstakademiet i Tromsø. At the moment, his works are concerned with his experiences in Northern Norway. His other artworks have also been included in various local and foreign exhibitions in and publications with Small Projects (Tromsø), c3 Contemporary Art Space (Melbourne), The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (Los Angeles), Galerie Métanoïa (Paris), Poh Chang Academy (Thailand), Cultural Center fo the Philippines (Pasay City), Toshima City Hall (Tokyo), Metropolitan Museum of Manila (Manila); and publications like Fordham University’s CURA Magazine, SFMoMA’s Tumblr, and Ateneo’s Heights, among others

RETROSPECTIVE BY ESTABLISHED ARTIST PROFILE

VENUES: HARSTAD CINEMA AND HARSTAD LIBRARY

The screenings will be introduced by curator Helga-Marie Nordby and followed by a conversation between artist and curator

SATURDAY OCT. 20. at 18.00// FILM ROGRAMME AND CONVERSATION WITH CURATOR// HARSTAD CINEMA SAL 2



CONTINOUS SCREENINGS 19 OCT KL.10.00-16.00 OG 20. OKT KL. 10.00-14.00// SWEDISH BOOK STORE (2007) AND DUETT /MED STYRKEN I VÅR TRO I EN SANG) (2010) // HARSTAD LIBRARY

Duett (Med styrken i vår tro i en sang, i en sang), 2010, video for monitor, 4 minutes (loop)

Swedish Book Store, 2007, video for monitor, 2 minutes 54 seconds (loop)

FILMP ROGRAMME LARS LAUMANN

SATURDAY OCTOBER 20 AT 18.00 IN HARSTAD CINEMA SAL 2

MORRISSEY FORETELLING THE DEATH OF DIANA 2006 (16 min), norwegian voice over

BERLINMUREN 2008 (24 min), engelsk

PRIMA, SECUNDA, Africa 2014 (22 min), norsk

SEASON OF MIGRATION TO THE NORTH 2016 (23 min), engelsk

SATURDAY OCT 20. AT 12.30 / CINEMA PROGRAMME / HARSTAD CINEMA SAL 2

SUNDAY OCT 21. AT 16.30 / LIVE STREAM / HARSTAD CINEMA SAL 2

On this second edition of AMIFF, we received many contributions, ranging from fiction, documentary and animation, to experimental video art and hybrid films, from artists and filmmakers around the world in the field of film and art. Open Call program director Helene Eggen, together with festival director Helene Hokland has made a selection of six films for the main program, and one special work “Stream” by Alfred Benedict Marasigan. The films cover a wide range of geography, age, form and expression, and maintain a high artistic level. All the films in the programme respond to this year's theme of "Peripheries", geographical as well as political and sociological. Several move beyond conventional film genres and artforms. In the gray area in-between the cinema and the gallery. Some of the filmmakers will participate in a Q&A after the screenings.

CINEMA PROGRAMME

FISK

Anton Benois & Beth Dillon, Island/Norge, 2015, 9.46 min

LEIRDUE

Trygve Luktvasslimo, Norway, 2018, 9 min

SILVIA IN THE WAVES

Giovana Olmos , Canada, 2017, 13 min

AFTER

Hanna Jalali, Ukrainia/Iran, 2016, 20 min

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Brandon Grötzinger & Wander Theunis, Netherlands, 2018, 8.51 min

SNOW WHITE COLOGNE

Amanda Eliasson, Sweden/England, 2018, 6.20 min

FISK

A short film produced in collaboration between Anton Benois (AUS, RUS, based in Trondheim, Norway) and Beth Dillon (AUS, based in Lausanne, Switzerland) during a 2-month winter residency at Listhus Artspace in Ólafsfjörður, north Iceland. The film follows the small-town wanderings of a literal fish out of water that appears at dawn on the harbour shore then proceeds to explore the streets and interiors of the remote town before returning to the ocean at nightfall. It is a ghostly presence, a mute observer who haunts the various sites of the village, including a cod-processing plant, a petrol station and a local home. Fisk provides a portrait of remote and exoticised localities from the perspective of the outsider, exploring feelings of disorientation and displacement within a winter landscape of long nights, twilight glows, sub-zero temperatures and heavy snows. It is also a meditation on the decline of the herring fishing industry in North Iceland, musing on themes of absence and nostalgia for past prosperity.

In a collaborative project ongoing for the past 4 years, artists Anton Benois (AUS, RUS, previously based in Tromsø, now based in Trondheim, Norway) and Beth Dillon (AUS, based in Geneva, Switzerland) present acts of landscape appreciation that incorporate elements of sculpture, video and performance. The work engages with shared narratives and images of the tourist and travelling artist, adopting a playful approach to behaviours of sightseeing and being seen, processes of repetition and exchange, and the aestheticisation of everyday rituals and actions.

LEIRDUE

Leirdue (Clay Pigeon) is a short film based on the story of young man Azaar who’s the sole survivor from a shipwreck and who then ends up in a TV interview. On this project Luktvasslimo has worked with Synne Bjørbæk whose daily engagement is as serving deputy mayor of Bodø. Leirdue is her debut on screen. The other lead is played by Benjamin Hov Golas, a 15-year old talent who’s just about to leave Lofoten for his musical studies. The film looks at how alienating the screen format might appear when you try to mould a life drama or two into it. The music for Leirdue is composed by Luktvasslimo himself and his two cats (!) and produced in collaboration with musician Alan Stones.

Trygve Luktvasslimo (1978) is a visual artist based on Valberg in Lofoten. Luktvasslimo’s work has been shown internationally in galleries, museums and festivals. He holds an MFA from Malmö Art Academy. Trygve Luktvasslimo’s recent films investigate how spiritual concepts like preaching and prophecy gets translated into entertainment and media through its idolized figures. Earlier work includes A Life with no Echo, a trilogy of films based on fictive pop star Thor and the characters and events surrounding Thor’s life. A Life with no Echo looks at the isolation and loneliness of megalomania and unwarranted artistic freedom. Thor is played by Trygve Luktvasslimo and the films include fantastic performances from renowned actors Joana Barrios, Filipe Vargas and Suzana Borges.

SILVIA IN THE WAVES

Noa struggles to honor the identity of his recently deceased parent while his mother tries to uphold the appearance of a conventional family. Grief and fantasy entwine to reveal the complex relationship between history and erasure, identity and memory.

Giovana Olmos was born in Mexico City in 1995. She is based in Montreal since 2006. Her work earned her an entrance bursary at Concordia University for outstanding portfolio in film production. During her undergraduate degree, she was awarded two production grants. Her magical realism short Mapou (2015) screened in many North American LGBT film festivals including Inside Out Toronto. Her second short, Silvia in the waves (2017) is still in the festival circuit with more than 15 international selections, a world premiere at the Festival International du Film Indépendant de Bordeaux and a merit awarded by the Chicago Int'l Film Festival’s CineYouth Film Fest. She is a longtime volunteer videographer in the LGBT organization African Rainbow, which she follows from Toronto to Brussels.

AFTER

This is about the mess that we leave behind after leaving the life, and people who have to solve it or merely accept and tolerate. Bohdan’s father was died and Vera also lost her husband. They meet on this common ground of loss. At the funeral, they find out new hidden facts about dead Georgy.

Hanna Jalali was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Studied at the Institute of journalism of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University (B. A.). In 2015 she was graduated from Kyiv National I.K. Karpenko-Kary Theater, Cinema and Television University. M. A. in Documentary Directing and Film Production. "After" - her first short feature after graduating.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

On the last day of the year, a dispirited work-at-home phone interpreter has her moribund life turned upside down when she answers an unexpected emergency call.

Dutch natives Brandon Grötzinger (1991) and Wander Theunis (1989) graduated as a sound designer and a screenwriter respectively from Amsterdam's Netherlands Film Academy in 2015. They have, since then, worked — each in his own field — on several shorts and feature film projects, before making their debut as co-writer-directors in 2018 with their tragicomical short film KALÍ CHRONIÁ (HAPPY NEW YEAR).

SNOW WHITE COLOGNE

Snow White Cologne is a visual poem, post-rationalising the struggle and recovery of my younger sister's drug addiction. There's love and loss, good and bad.

Amanda Eliasson (b.1990) is a Swedish animation director who recently graduated with an MA in animation from the Royal College of Art, London. Now she’s working as a freelance animation director in the UK.

STREAM

Stream is my homage to light, place, and the moment. Inspired by the widespread use of livestreaming across all online media and the peculiar popularity of Norwegian slow TV, the project responds to the seemingly minute, banal, and insignificant narratives being told every day.

Artist statement

My practice revolves around Canadian geographer Edward Relph’s “sense of place.” I’ve always made art in relation to where I am and I often investigate the questions “Why am I here?” and “Who am I where? How or in what form?” Introspection, phenomenology, and cultural geography are significant elements of my practice.

I am a Filipino gay millennial middle-class contemporary artist; these identifiers I use for myself carry individually charged associations that I struggle to escape, embrace, repurpose, and reevaluate every day. Landscape painting has often been my entry point, middle ground, and safe space for these inquiries, and it has helped me situate myself in a world where I keep questioning who I was, am, and should be.

Currently, I have been concerned with how these questions are recontextualized by my stay in Tromsø. I can feel my worldview changing drastically in a very peculiar place in the world, and I continuously attempt to negotiate my conflicted existence into historical and technological spaces through my new media works. Ultimately, the spatio-bigoraphical elements of my works consistently explore the complexities and ambiguities of belonging.

Alfred Marasigan (b. 1992) is born and raised in Batangas, Philippines. He graduated from Ateneo de Manila University and have taught visual art history, painting, and aesthetics in that institution. His background in landscape painting led to a spatio-biographical practice informed by cultural geography, local Romanticisms, and virtuality. He is currently taking up his MA in Contemporary Art at Kunstakademiet i Tromsø. At the moment, his works are concerned with his experiences in Northern Norway. His other artworks have also been included in various local and foreign exhibitions in and publications with Small Projects (Tromsø), c3 Contemporary Art Space (Melbourne), The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (Los Angeles), Galerie Métanoïa (Paris), Poh Chang Academy (Thailand), Cultural Center fo the Philippines (Pasay City), Toshima City Hall (Tokyo), Metropolitan Museum of Manila (Manila); and publications like Fordham University’s CURA Magazine, SFMoMA’s Tumblr, and Ateneo’s Heights, among others.

RETROSPECTIVE BY ESTABLISHED ARTIST PROFILE

VENUES: HARSTAD CINEMA AND HARSTAD LIBRARY

FRIDAY OCT 19 at 21.30 // SHUT UP CHILD, THIS AIN`T BINGO//HARSTAD CINEMA SAL 2

SATURDAY OCT. 20 at 18.00// FILMP ROGRAMME AND CONVERSATION WITH CURATOR// HARSTAD CINEMA SAL 2

CONTINOUS SCREENINGS 19 OCT KL.10.00-16.00 OG 20. OKT KL. 10.00-14.00// BOOK STORE SCENE (2007) AND DUETT (2010) // HARSTAD LIBRARY

The screenings will be introduced by curator Helga-Marie Nordby and followed by a conversation between artist and curator.

FILM PROGRAMME LARS LAUMANN

FRIDAY 19. OCT AT 21.30 I HARSTAD CINEMA SAL 2

SHUT UP CHILD, THIS AIN`T BINGO, Lars Laumann and Kjersti Andvig, 2009, (59 min), english subtitles

Meeting point Harstad harbour - Expressboat terminal 16:30 / Departure 17:00/ Free of charge, but sign up is necessary.

TIDAL PULSE

A site-responsive sound piece and visual voyage by Enrique Ramirez

Curated by Vanina Saracino

During one single journey lasting three hours, the local speedboat Stjernøy becomes Tidal Pulse, a temporary world emerging from the aftermath of the sociopolitical and environmental crisis, interweaving the abyss and the cosmos into a new history of the future. The engine of the boat, its heart and lung, will guide us with its rhythmical voice through the nightfall and along the waters. Our pulse will be soon synchronized with the tides and the undertows. Other beings will share space with us intermittently, leaving us to reach smaller islands called by the names of uncharted planets. We will see daylight merging into darkness, geographies blurring. Strange critters will emerge from the depth of the oceans. We will slowly drift into another dimension.

* Please turn your mobile phones to flight mode to avoid sound interferences.

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For this new work, Chilean artist and filmmaker Enrique Ramírez recorded the sounds of the boat - the vibrations created by the engine inside and outside the moving vehicle and in the operations room - and composes, in real time, a sound piece that becomes the pulse of this fuel-powered heart drifting along our increasingly threatened oceans.

The boat’s pulse intertwines with the voices of local activists, politicians, scientists and workers in the oil industry business, reflecting on issues regarding the future of post fossil-fuel societies, the future of Norway and, by extension, the future of the Earth.

We, the passengers and the audience, can hear these sounds through wireless headphones, having the opportunity to circulate on the boat, to immerse completely in the sounds and images, or even to choose silence. The length of the journey, lasting three hours, invites us to take the time to sense the surroundings and to embrace a slower pace, and it explicitly aims at countering the increasing acceleration of Western societies, which demand us to be faster, more productive and more efficient in the name of a destructive conception of progress.

The wonderful landscape of the islands surrounding Harstad will accompany us during the first hour of our journey. But gradually the natural light’s intensity will decrease and the projected light will emerge from the twilight and the increasing darkness. With this modality of presenting moving images in a public space, and especially on a moving object, we aim at reflecting on the different meanings of motion and the temporalities within this medium, as well as exploring other potential configurations of the movie theatre as a privileged immersive space for the reception of video works.

The voices and statements that will accompany us along the journey belong to Silje Ask Lundberg (environmental activist, Naturvernforbundet / Friends of the Earth Norway), Barbro Hætta (Sami person and local politician, practicing as a doctor), Kjell Giaever (director of Petro Arctic), Dr. Jack Kohler (glaciologist, Norwegian Polar Institute, Tromsø), Anne Henriette Reinås Nilut (member of the Sami parliament and cultural producer). We thank them for their crucial contribution to the project. We also thank Helene Hokland (director, AMIFF) and Helene Eggen (producer, AMIFF) for the invitation and their deep commitment to the project, the captain and the crew of Stjernøy for their invaluable support, Mat av Vahl for the soup and Therese Jensen for the local seaweed buns served onboard and all the guests for taking the time to accompany us along the journey.

Tidal Pulse has been commissioned by AMIFF - Arctic Moving Image and Film Festival, 2018. The images were partly realized during the artist’s research for INcoming (2017), commissioned by Screen City Biennial (Stavanger).

Vanina Saracino (*1984, Italy) is an independent curator and film programmer currently based in Berlin. She is the co-founder of OLHO, an international curatorial project about contemporary art and cinema initiated in 2015 in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, also shown at Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi (Venice, 2017) and Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2018). From 2013 to 2017 she curated monthly selections of artists' films on the experimental channel ikonoTV, being also in charge of collaborations and projects with museums and institutions worldwide. With ikonoTV, in 2015, she initiated Art Speaks Out, a yearly exhibition project on the environment and climate change, also shown at the Istanbul Modern Museum (2015) and within the UN Climate Change Conference (Marrakech, 2016). Other projects include 'Fragmented Vision' (The New Gallery Musrara, Jerusalem, 2018); 'Earthly Mutations: Films From the Near Future' (Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, 2018); 'The Crisis of the Horizon' (Small Projects, Tromsø, 2018); 'Lost Dimension' (AMIFF, Harstad, Norway, 2017); 'The Impossibility of an Island' (within TBA21's 'Open Ocean Space x COP23', Bonn and Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk, 2017); ‘Adrian Paci: A State of Temporary Permanence’, for Lovely Days at Kino Mediteran, Bol, Croatia (2016); ‘Vertical World – approaching gravity’, (General Public, Berlin, 2012); ‘Un Lugar Habitable es un Evento’ (Centro Cultural Facultad de Artes, Medellín, Colombia, 2012). Graduated in Communication Sciences with a thesis in semiotics of the arts, she holds a masters degree in Arts Management (GIOCA, Università di Bologna) and an MA in Philosophy and Art Theory (UAB, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona).

Enrique Ramírez was born in 1979 in Santiago de Chile. Since 2010, he lives and works between Paris (France) and Santiago (Chile). He studied popular music and cinema in Chile before joining the postgraduate master in contemporary art and new media of Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains (Tourcoing, France). In 2014 he won the discovery price of Les Amis du Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. He has since exposed in some major places as Le Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton or le 104), France (le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire) and in Central and South America (Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico ; Museo de la memoria, Santiago ; Centro Cultural MATTA, Embajada de Chile en Argentina, Buenos Aires). In 2017, he is invited to the 57th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia curated by Christine Macel. Enrique Ramírez´s work combines video, photography, installations and poetic narratives. Ramírez appreciates stories within stories, fictions straddling countries and epochs, the mirages between dream and reality. This Chilean artist, who lives and works between Chile and France, often uses image and sound to construct a profusion of intrigues and to occupy the equilibrium between the poetic and the political. His imaginary worlds are attached to one obsessional element—his thinking starts with the sea, a space for memory in perpetual movement, a space for narrative projections where the fate of Chile intersects with grand narratives of voyage, conquest and migratory flows. His liquid images speak of the sparkle of a truth in permanent flight, the backwash of history, always repeating and never the same.

Harstad Cinema Sal 2

Nordland College of Art and Film and Tromsø Art Academy, in collaboration with AMIFF, presents a programme of film and video works in the space between film and visual art. The moving image programme at Nordland College of Art and Film, include film and visual arts in the same programme to expand and challenge both fields. At the same time, the study emphasizes exploring methods for collective thinking and practice within a field that is in rapid development, both technologically and in terms of content. The Art Academy's contemporary art program is part of a multidisciplinary faculty of visual arts, consisting of creative writing, music, drama and theater, and specialization in art and culture, which allows for cooperation and exchange between the disciplines. Therefore NKFS and the Academy of Fine Arts in Tromsø are particularly interesting for AMIFF and a collaboration we seek to continue. There will be conversations with the artists and filmmakers about their individual practice after the program.

The curatorial collective Hærk, based at Nordland College of Art and Film, worked with curator in residence Erik Martinson to select the eight works presented here. In this programme, desires and frustrations are explored in various ways. This happens through a dissonance in both form and the relations within the works. Throughout the programme we delve into contradicting narratives, voyeuristic power structures and territorial negotiations. This selection of student works encapsulates diverse ways of engaging with moving images, with a variety of formal and conceptual concerns represented.

Programme

Apokryfos

Stian Bekkvik Norway 2018 06:41

A synthesis of different voices, intentions and language. Not about the movement within the image (an illusion), but between them, and between an INT. and an EXT., a camera and a body, a light and a shadow. A mainly aesthetic experiment with free spaces for ideas, for impossible spaces, within the joints.

Swim with Dolphins

Malin Lin Nordström Sweden/Taiwan 2017 03:40

For a generation of dreamers, lifestyle inspiration and bucket lists are readily available online. On large anonymous internet forums, such as Flashback and Familjeliv, ordinary Swedish people reveal to each other how they really spend their evening and weekends.

We’re Going to Meet

Hamid Waheed Norway 2017 04:40

An exploration of the relationship between the voyeur and a self-directing

image.

The Other

Marianne Lauritsen Norway 2018 13:00

An approach to something that may be sexuality. But then again, maybe not.

Hilda and Maude

Øystein Qviller Norway 2018 03:26

Hilda and Maud stumbles over something that changes their lives forever.

No Man’s Land

Magnus Holmen Norway 2018 10:20

To think that our mind is connected with other people’s minds is an idea of neighborhood, a community in and with our surroundings. In No Man’s Land this idea is challenged. Should the majority conform to the interests of the community which holds different views of life? Or is it more important to hide inside your own cave?

Cryo

Henrik Lande Norway 2018 02:14

What do we call the big glowing things that are attached to buildings? Logo signs? Why are they so prominent in the cityscape? How do they influence us?

Søster

Franciska Eliassen Norway 2018 11:21

In Søster we’re invited into a filmmaker’s process. A voice guides us through collages, music and sound, forming a possible film about two sisters. The film plays with memories, reality and fantasy. Through this, an associative universe of larvae, ocean and mythical creatures is born.

Johann Lurf

Venue: Harstad Cinema

Filmmaker present!

Johann Lurf will attend AMIFF to screen and talk about his highly unique, sensational and ambitious experimental film ★, consisting solely of found-footage material of starry skies through cinematic history, collected from non the less then impressive 550 films! (That is, so far. Johann will continue the project by providing a new, longer version each year.)

 "A film with no answers but as many questions as there are stars in the universe, Austrian structuralist Johann Lurf has chosen an audacious and ever-expanding subject for his feature film debut: the stars of cinema. Not the movie stars, but the stars in the night´s sky, pinpricks of light against the darkness excerpted from films beginning at cinema´s dawn and continuing to this present day in a project that is planned to be expanded yearly. These stellar instances, riven from context with sound intact—ambient hums, grand orchestral scores, pedantic explanations, dreamy speculation—are magical fields of darkness sprinkled with possibilities. Lurf´s jazzy editing, balancing tranquil concentration and jumpy jitters based on his methodology of retaining each clip´s length, image and sound, sends the audience on a journey across the tones of promise and threat that emanate from the cosmos. A subject difficult if not impossible to accurately photograph on film, we are therefore greeted again and again by the varied interpretations of the starry night by matte artists and special effects wizards, gazing now in stillness, now in careening motion across or into space at incandescent nebulae, distant twinkling dots, and the black void in-between. Surveying a history of cinema´s fixation with, and escape to, outer space, we find both what audiences in their own times saw up there, as well as mirrors of our own wonderment: Awe, terror, hope, arrogant confidence, melancholic yearning and blank, awesome silence. These are the rare moments when the movie audience, backs to the projector, in fact faces light projected at them: Our eyes are the screens for the cinema of the stars." (Daniel Kasman)

"Stargazers watch out! Johann Lurf went to the tremendous effort of collecting starry skies from no fewer than 553 movies and mounting them in chronological order, from 1905 all the Milky Way to 2017. The amazing result is an unadulterated, searched footage documentary with a stunning soundtrack, a vast catalogue of mostly imagined firmaments from throughout film history." (Diagonale 2018, mz)

"A film that defies easy explanation, ★ is filmmaker Johann Lurf’s inventive examination of how outer space has been portrayed in movies. 
You don’t have to be a scientist to find space fascinating. Few things in the universe have enthralled, perplexed, and inspired such a diverse group of people, from astronomers and philosophers to artists and ordinary people walking at night. Artists were so inspired by the heavens that they created artwork of celestial objects — even when you see a “photo” of other planets and stars, it is often an artist’s rendering.
Lurf playfully shows how cinema turned the stars into endless metaphors, dreams, and warm blankets. There is no story or characters — only movie scenes worked together outside of their contexts. We put our own thoughts into the stunning scenes while each clip’s sound design presents us with ambience, brief dialogue, or loud music. The editing enthralls us as space is not depicted the same in every clip. If you have a love affair with movies and the sky, ★ is the ultimate romantic art film."
(Sundance Film Festival in January 2018)

"This film’s ambition is both precise and lofty: an exploration of cinematic history consisting solely of scenes of starry skies. No landscapes, not even trees or roofs. A cloud or a satellite perhaps. No subtitles either. The excerpts retain their original – often kitsch or bombastic – soundtracks and are in chronological order. Initially, the iconography is pretty naive, but later viewers are presented with a galaxy of stylistic approaches and technical solutions. The more recent, the more realistic. Besides a trip through film history, ★ is also a conceptual work that elicits questions concerning our relationship with time and space. Moreover Lurf forces us to reflect on human aspirations. Yet his own ambitions are also exceptionally high: he wants to make an unending director’s cut, providing a new, longer version each year."
(Rotterdam International Film Festival in January 2018)!

Director, consept and realisation: Johann Lurf Sound: Nils Kirchhoff Year: Austria 2017 Language: No dialogue, Running time: 99 min