myDylarama

The unwelcoming side of Britain: Beru Tessema on Lions

Brasserie du Court team, Elise Loiseau — 2023-03-20T13:18:00Z

Rosie, a Congolese teenager, who's recently arrived in London, discovers the unwelcoming side of life in Britain when a misunderstanding with two window cleaners escalates into conflict.

Lions is having quite the successful festival run. Well deserved, for this prescient and rousing short by London-based Beru. The short will be screened as part of a special programme of Clermont highlights in London at the Garden Cinema, in partnership with the festival team and Mydylarama!

The Brasserie team caught up with the Ethiopian-British filmmaker.

You'll be able to catch the film at the Garden Cinema in London as part of the Clermont-Ferrand in London event on 4-5 April!

Retour sur mon premier court : Laura Goncalves

Brasserie du Court team, Mydylarama team — 2023-03-09T13:39:03Z

A l'occasion de l'édition 2023 du Festival de Clermont-Ferrand, nous avons discuté avec la réalisatrice Laura Goncalves dont le court La Quadrature du Cercle avait fait partie de la sélection de 2015 pour en savoir un peu plus sur son parcours depuis et ce que lui a apporté cette présence au festival.

Parlez-nous de votre premier court-métrage sélectionné à Clermont-Ferrand. Quel était le sujet ?

Le court-métrage La Quadrature du Cercle a été sélectionné pour la 37ème édition du Festival du Court-Métrage de Clermont-Ferrand en 2015. Il était mon premier film à la suite de mes études. Il aborde les thématiques principales qui traversent toutes mes réalisations : l'ennui des villes et la circularité du temps. J'y mets en scène un personnage en proie aux répétitions de son quotidien et à la solitude dans une grande ville. Il va tenter de changer sa perception du temps avec la lumière hypnotique des écrans, ce qui participera à sa transformation.

J'élabore cette esquisse sur quotidien à partir d'une phrase « dans la vie on tourne en rond pour finir dans un rectangle ». Elle illustre bien un phénomène du temps à l'état boucle, où les formes rondes et carrées interrogent une condition humaine. Cette poésie géométrique continue d'habiter mes scénarios.

Quel a été votre parcours de réalisatrice ? Où en étiez-vous dans votre carrière ?

J'ai d'abord complété une formation en Cinéma à l'Université Paris 8 durant laquelle je me suis familiarisée avec plusieurs techniques de scénarisation et de réalisation dans une approche fictionnelle. Cela m'a conduit à explorer la matérialité de la vidéo dans un cursus en Arts visuels et médiatiques à l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Je construis, depuis lors, des narrations qui se déploient aussi dans la plasticité des images. Mon premier film, La Quadrature du Cercle, a reçu des distinctions dans des festivals tels que Dérapage 14 à Montréal, Best of des écritures et des formes émergentes de la SCAM à Paris, Vidéoformes à Clermont-Ferrand, Montreal Underground Film Festival et Fantasia à Montréal. Par la suite, j'ai réalisé plusieurs vidéos et installations vidéo, comme Les Paradis artificiels, qui s'articulent autour de mon intention centrale, refléter un temps à l'état de boucle. Je collabore également sur des créations scénographiques, documentaires et musicales. J'ai réalisé des vidéo-clips pour les groupes Suuns et Timber Timbre, ainsi que des projections vidéo pour la pièce de théâtre déambulatoire Les Laissés Pour Contes aux Ateliers Jean Brillant.

Quelle a été votre expérience du festival ?

Le festival du court métrage de Clermont-Ferrand est donc l'une de mes premières expériences en festival. J'ai reçu un accueil très chaleureux et vivifiant de la part des organisateurs et des intervenants. J'ai fait la découverte du travail de nombreux réalisateurs, car les films que j'ai pu voir m'ont été accessibles grâce au festival. C'est une richesse. Ce festival se fait gardien d'un écosystème artistique émergent et fait office de tremplin.

La présence du film au festival vous a-t-elle ouvert certaines portes ?

Grâce à cet évènement, j'ai rencontré de nombreuses personnes et, en filagramme, j'ai été approchée par une société de production, ce qui a renouvelé mes projets. Puis, cette visibilité a amené mon film à être programmé dans d'autres évènements, comme les Best of des écritures et formes émergentes par la SCAM à Paris.

Sur quoi avez-vous travaillé depuis ? Quels sont vos projets actuels ?

Actuellement, je prépare un court-métrage d'animation hybride en mêlant de la rotoscopie de prises de vue réelles à des dessins animés. L'histoire se déroule dans une ville en deux dimensions, habitée par des rectangles de toutes tailles. Le protagoniste, Square, va percevoir la troisième dimension après l'apparition d'une sphère. Dans ce projet, je tente d'interpréter la peur de l'injonction sociale et la conformité à un paroxysme déshumanisant. La société qui est décrite court après le progrès technologique, obsédée par la rentabilité du temps, jusqu'à l'épuisement au travail. Donc, le récit a toujours lieu dans une ville. De plus, le temps à l'état de boucle est incarné ici dans le passage de la 2ème à la 3ème dimension, car des figures plates pour former un volume bouclent sur elle-même.

Coups de cœur récents au cinéma ? Votre court de cœur ?

Mon coup de cœur de l'année est un court-métrage, Bleat, du réalisateur grec Yorgos Lánthimos. C'est un très beau film en noir et blanc et muet. Il se déroule sur l'île grecque de Tenos dans les Cyclades. Il montre les fantasmes et le rêve d'une femme en deuil dans une maison reculée, tout en menant une réflexion sur les traditions. Il y a un regard et un traitement singuliers de l'expressivité des mains. J'aime aussi les films qui parlent du rêve, vital et pourtant si mystérieux. Le rêve échappe au contrôle car il n'appartient qu'au rêveur, ce qui est également un thème récurrent dans mes films. Aussi, j'aime beaucoup le thème de l'iléité. Il faut préciser aussi que mon courant cinématographique préféré est celui des expressionnistes allemands des années 20 pour leurs représentations symboliques.

D14 : gagnants : La quadrature du cercle : : Laura Gonçalves from Dérapage Festival on Vimeo.

Richard Misek on his short A History of the World According to Getty Images

Abla Kandalaft, Brasserie du Court team — 2023-02-09T14:22:58Z

A keen video essayist, Richard Misek's work involved endlessly googling archive images. In 2018, he noticed that the download function had been disabled on Google. He dug deeper and found out that Getty Images had threatened to sue Google. The more he looked, the more Richard noticed that Getty had their logo imprinted everywhere and the scope of their reach became clear to him. This very cleverly edited short film questions the proprietary ownership of images from our collective history and the process by which Getty restricts their use.

Isabella Margara on her short Nothing Holier than a Dolphin

Brasserie du Court team, Elise Loiseau — 2023-02-05T14:47:41Z

Two fishermen find a Dolphin accidentally caught in their nets. The Dolphin, on its turn, finds a fisherman drowning in the water and tries to save him.

More myths and legends as inspiration at this year's Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival! This time, they come to us from Greece and through the lens of Isabella Margara in an astoundingly original short that one member of the audience loudly claimed was "the best film he'd seen this year!"

Masterfully inspired by Afro-futurism: Amartei Amar on TsutsuƐ - ClermontFF2023

Brasserie du Court team, Elise Loiseau — 2023-02-05T14:41:11Z

Set in a small Ghanaian town at the edge of a large landfill site that spills into the ocean, the sons of a fisherman, Sowah and Okai, struggle to cope with loss of their eldest brother who drowned during a fishing expedition. Haunted by his demise, Okai believes their brother is still out there…

Speaking at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, filmmaker Amartei Amar explained his choice to draw on the aesthetics of such movements as Afro-futurism. He does so masterfully. This short represents some of the most beautiful facets of the genre with its intermeshing of innocent children's play, socio-political reality and supernatural elements grounded in millennia of myths and traditions. A stunning and ingenious piece of work.

What was the starting point of TsutsuƐ?

TsutsuƐ was born through three spiritually interwoven true stories. The first was from an experience our Producer had when a neighbourhood boy discovered a dead body in an open sewer. As he went to tell others, a storm broke and washed the body away. By the time he managed to get everyone to the spot, it wasn't there. No one believed him and was he labelled crazy. It wasn't until three days later, that the body was discovered in the ocean near where the sewer connects with the sea that the boy was believed. The second story comes from within my own family. Some years ago we lost the eldest brother of my father. He was survived by ten children, all grown except for the last born who also happens to be the only boy. His father passed and was even buried in the UK whilst he was still in boarding school here in Ghana. Because my cousin never got to see his father buried, he couldn't emotionally comprehend the loss when he was told. This manifested in him believing on numerous occasions that he saw his father in the streets and in the faces of other men. The spiritual connection with his late father and the mental toll it took on him during his formative years is something that has stuck with me since. The third true story came from a documentary we were doing on the fishing industry in Ghana. How 70% of what the fisherman take out of the ocean with their nets is just trash. Because of this, they must go deeper out into the ocean and into harsher, sometimes life-endangering, fishing conditions. It is a fearsome task for them, because in Ghanaian culture to drown at sea is to have a spirit condemned to wandering the earth without knowing where is home.

The scenes that take place in the dump are particularly striking visually. What gave you the idea of filming there?

Shooting there was paramount to me as I wanted to create a dramatic dichotomy between the power of the artificial reality versus the natural one, but also show how their global rivalry has an effect on the human condition and the intimate realities within it. The landfill and the ocean to me are brothers rather than enemies and it was important to create a spiritual correlation between the two showing how both are places of play and danger; peace and trauma.

Can you tell us a bit more about Elisha Kirtson-Acquah and Idrissu Tontie Jr., who play Okai and Sowa? Their performances are really powerful.

This was Elisha's first time acting and he's actually from the town we shot in so we're all very proud of him. He just has this energy about him. A fearlessness in his physicality, yet possessing a sort of quiet wisdom in how he sees the world. For me it was important that we were able to capture this side of him. I'm still in awe of him as he was just eight years old at the time of filming, but still continues to grow in the best of ways. With Tontie, I've worked with him before on the short film Vagabonds. It was also his first time acting as he was ten years old then and I could say the same about him as Elisha. He has a talent that I can't wait for the world to see. We are going to do a feature film with him as the lead so exciting times ahead. Both bring amazing amounts of dedication and intensity to their work and I can't wait to work with them again.

How did you shoot the scene that takes place at night, on the shore? How challenging was it, technically?

The logistics of this shoot were possibly the hardest I've ever faced. But we all knew this going in. The one thing I love about independent film, and even more specifically short independent film, is that in order to achieve a look or even just one shot, we have to go to these places and do it in the reality of the moment. With every environment, we have to, as filmmakers, endure what the characters go through. We are on the field, in the real spaces, so we have to find a way, through simple or complex human ingenuity. Honestly, everything you see, we just did in the simplest way you could think of, paying attention more to safety for cast and crew, while trying to achieve it.

What's your favourite short film?

My favourite short film is hard to say because there are so many that have meant so much to me. A one that still is a little treasure for me to watch every now and again is Nefta Football Club by Yves Piat.

What does the Festival mean to you?

This will be my first time for, Clermont-Ferrand, but its reputation to me as a filmmaker is that it is a champion of short film works by auteurs with unique voices both emerging and established. That, at its core, harbors a deep love for the craft of short film and the incredible role it plays in both the creation and evolution of a filmmaker.

Laura Gonçalves on her short "O Homem do Lixo"

Abla Kandalaft, Brasserie du Court team — 2023-02-05T14:26:28Z

On a hot August afternoon, the family gathers at the table. The memories of each are crossed to tell the story of uncle Botão. From the dictatorship to the emigration to France, where he worked as a garbage man, and when he arrived with the van filled with “garbage”he transformed into treasures.

What a man uncle Botão clearly was! Laura Gonçalves paints a tender and heart-warming portrait of a hard-working man who seems to have been as eccentric as he was likeable.

Café court / Short Talk - Laura Gonçalves from ClermontFd Short Film Festival on Vimeo.

Dwayne LeBlanc on Civic, at the Brasserie du Court

Abla Kandalaft, Brasserie du Court team — 2023-02-04T10:48:03Z

CIVIC is a short film that follows Booker on his first trip back home to South Central, L.A. after several years of self-imposed exile. Without any clear motive, or even a warning, Booker returns to the place that holds his origins and the people who shaped him.

An impressively mature and reflective debut short by Dwayne LeBlanc. There is a lot to unpack from Booker's journey through his past, but this gives the film richness and texture as opposed of weighty and opaque complexity. LeBlanc, through Booker, skilfully communicates often hard to articulate feelings of disconnect, familiarity and transience usually associated with migration, and, well, age.

"There is a radical desire for the unknown and of otherness": Soufiane Adel on One Day When I Was Lost

Abla Kandalaft, Brasserie du Court team — 2023-02-04T10:30:04Z

The Voyager probe is about to leave our solar system. At the same time, on Earth, Alain Diaw begins his first day of work in a prestigious automobile company. He has come a long way and is also aiming for the unknown.

Soufiane Adel's Le Jour où j'étais perdu (the title is taken from James Baldwin's book) is a beautiful and graphically ambitious meditation on social, physical and technological mobility, merging an individual's own desire to reach for the unknown and the ambitions of the global space race.

Talk to us about the bond that unites the Voyager and Alain's journey.

The Voyager space mission was started by NASA in the 70s with the goal of exploring the solar system and of sending signals of our societies on Earth to potential alien civilizations. It was a message in a bottle thrown into an immense and mysterious ocean. This desire to surpass known limits reminded me of Alain's utopia, his vision of the future, it too hurtled toward the unknown. In both cases, there is a radical desire for the unknown and of otherness. Alain is working on a project of overhauling the automobile industry, based on an absolute approach of mobility. Having himself experienced this in his social and professional trajectory, he now wants to elevate it to the level of an industrial and human revolution. He is inspired by transhumanist thought, by his democratic current let's say. He believes this evolution necessary to attain social justice. But the frontier between vision and ideology is sometimes very thin…and Alain is resolved to move forward no matter the cost. With this drive, he could be overcome by the mechanism that he would like to surpass. Will his revolution be in line with his goal or will it reproduce a pattern of domination? Each viewer is free to answer.

Who or what inspired this character?

During my studies in industrial design, a former student was invited to speak to us about his career. He had become an executive in a large French company. On this occasion, he related an event that took place on his first day at work. He was going around the offices to visit his new workplace and when he went to shake hands with a future team-member, that person asked him to empty the waste bin, thinking he was a custodian or janitor, simply because he was black. This story never left me and it was upon this anecdote that the film was gradually constructed.

Could you explain the choice of title?

Le Jour où j'étais perdu borrows from the title of a story by James Baldwin, an American writer that never stopped preaching love and fraternal healing, surpassing differences of culture, background, and this in spite of wounds of the past. I also chose this title because it evokes a decisive moment for me that is scary and deep all at once. Often, when one is lost, it becomes impossible to turn, to change something within ourselves, for better or for worse.

Music plays an important role in your film. How did you create this soundtrack? 

The music in the film is composed of several moments that are rather varied in genre and include emotive tonalities. One of the principle pieces is at the beginning of the film, with the reinterpretation of the second aria of Queen of the Night of The Magic Flute by Mozart, created for the film by Othman Louati a rhythmic and imaginary process with a touch of sci-fi and an epilogue that evokes childhood while Alain looks at starlings. Othman is a composer who has a large knowledge of the classical repertoire, but also a taste for electronic and contemporary experimental music, as well as pop music. It was important for me to work with an eclectic composer because the film is about pushing boundaries, and the music needed to be approached in the same way. In Thomas' apartment for example, one of the “sci-fi” moments of the film, we used Arabic tonalities, a contribution of the composer Geoffroy Lindenmeyer, with whom I worked on previous films. The universe of science-fiction belongs to a very Western imaginary. I wanted to shake up this cultural imaginary at the moment of the film where Thomas loses himself, where he seriously questions himself.

Talk a bit about the film's cinematography and special effects.

My career in design was a source of inspiration for the film's esthetic, which unfolds in the field of industrial creation. It is a world of shapes, volumes, surfaces, material. The dialogue between these elements is always important in cinema, but was even more so in this case. The general idea was to film machines in a way that suggested their vitality, and conversely humans as machines, alienated by work, caught up in automatic reflexes. Regarding the special effects, the main challenge was to reproduce the Voyager space probe and the planets of the solar system in a realistic way, by trying to create a sense of identification and emotion rather than distance. Beside the shots in space, which are completely fabricated images, there were other, simpler, interventions that allowed us to include elements like the moon or the starlings in the shots. It was important to me to create points of contact between nature and the film's characters, Alain and Thomas, that their glances interrogate nature at some point, as if trying to pierce through its mystery.

What are your inspirations in cinema or otherwise?

The approach and the work of Stanley Kubrick. I'm thinking particularly of Napoléon, the film that he was not able to produce, but for which the entire process of documentation was edited: correspondence, costume studies, location scouting photos, versions of the screenplay, storyboard. Allemagne année zero et Rome ville ouverte by Roberto Rossellini as well.

What's your favorite short?

At Land by Maya Deren or La Jetée by Chris Marker.

What does the Festival mean to you?

It's that festival that showed my first short, Nuits closes, which was self-produced, in 2005. I really like this festival and the way it is able to fill up an entire city, mixing the professionals and audiences. I particularly wanted to come back to the festival with this film, after so many years.

Interview with Kamal Aljafari, director of Paradiso, XXXI, 108

Abla Kandalaft, Brasserie du Court team, Clotilde Couturier — 2023-02-01T21:14:54Z

“Nothing can be heard anymore; the roar of our plane absorbs every other sound. We are heading straight to the world's biggest display of soundproof fireworks, and soon we will drop our bombs.”

Palestinian filmmaker and artist Kamal Aljafari has built a solid reputation for his cutting-edge experimental filmmaking over the years, with work shown at the Berlinale, Locarno, Venice.... and here in Clermont-Ferrand! Aljafari's new film certainly doesn't disappoint. Its title is taken from a short story by Borges. The images are footage from an Israeli army propaganda video showing it conducting "tests" in the desert. Aljafari repurposes these to depict what seems to be a staged fight, or playacting, it's never quite clear, and intentionally so. It's an ambitious, uncanny film, very rich in symbolism, which manages to say so much about our own relation to on-screen violence.

Where and when does Paradiso, XXXI, 108 take place?

Paradiso, XXXI, 108 is taking place in Al-Naqab desert, in the south of Palestine.

From which material did you get the military pictures? Did you do editing?

The material is coming from films commissioned by the Israeli Army. They were didactic, educational propaganda films, where basically being in the army meant to look very entertaining and full of learning. The whole concept of the film is in the editing, which allowed me to subvert the material by changing the order of scenes and actions, by exasperating the iteration of mechanical activities through which these war games are questioned and seem senseless. But in some scenes the editing was kept as it is because it served the idea of the film. Also the narration in Hebrew was taken from the original material and, despite the fact that it is fictitious, it is a document that testifies to a certain state of mind.

What did you have in mind when making the soundtrack of the film?

First I was interested in the mechanical aspect of human beings, and, more specifically, of an apparatus of destruction, the army. The sound gives you the feeling of that and builds up the tension. Like the “Danse Macabre”, which is a music that already talks and reflects on human nature, as its title reveals. In a way this is what we see. While I used Haendel's “Sarabande” for delivering a kind of melancholy for all that is going wrong with humanity, which always pays the price for being at war and creating systems that are enforcing destruction. Surely this film is showing a specific place and a specific case, but I think it is a reflection on humanity itself and on its failure. Then there are some parts in the film where we are using Suleiman Gamil's music (“Pharaoh Funeral Process”, “Isis Looks for Osiris”) that in a certain way is the sound of this landscape. The sound of the flute is coming again and again, like the wind, it is almost what this landscape is telling: you cannot defeat me. This area of Palestine has been very affected both by using a large part of it as army bases for exercises and by creating settlements and, by doing so, changing the nature of the place. Where there is desert, in many places in the world, it has been used to exercise, to test bombs and finally destroy the landscape itself. In the material we never see the people: the enemy is always supposedly hiding behind the hills, or between ruins, but we never see it. Nevertheless the soldiers continue bombing and maneuvering and attacking again and again with their power forces. This whole thing that the enemy is not to be seen is also quite symbolic: it's the way the Palestinians, are perceived in many aspects of their life, as non-existing and temporary. Yet the “state” is set to look for them, in a way the material testify for this ideology, they are there and not there. They are not being recognized as human beings and the army attempts at the same time to fight them, which is in itself very contradictory and prone to failure.

Is there a sequel to Paradiso, XXXI, 108? Do you have further projects dealing with this issue?

The film was born out of another project we are still editing called A Fidai Film, and in that sense what we see in Paradiso, XXXI, 108 is just one aspect of a work of sabotage that I do to archival materials. A Fidai Film deals with the looting of archives, of a culture, of an entire country, and which is still going on. The film is a visual treatment of all of this. Working with archives allows me to study images and find patterns. In A Fidai Film there are a couple of sequences where we see exercises of the army from different times, and where they attack ruins, empty of humans. There is something very strange about using old and ancient structures to exercise an occupation. Making it in some ways symbolic for the whole story of Palestine, and not only in modern times.

What's your favourite short?

I would say Homage by Assassination by Elia Suleiman (1992). To me it is one of the best short films of all time. It is his first movie he made in New York.

What does the Festival mean to you?

I have always heard about this festival and I am very happy that my film was selected in your program. What I really love about the Clermont-Ferrand short film festival is the idea of having a place that focuses on and supports short films, which to me manage to deliver the most experimental ideas in cinema. This is both because of their length, which most of the time makes them the most difficult to produce and support, but also gives them the freedom to be independent.

Salar Pashtoonyar on Bad Omen at the Brasserie

Abla Kandalaft, Brasserie du Court team — 2023-02-01T21:02:00Z

Set in Kabul, Afghanistan. Pari, an in-house tailor, must find the means to purchase her prescription glasses to save her job.

I did a double take when Salar came on to this video interview. I'll be honest and say that I expected him to be a woman. Salar has a real knack for writing female characters. Bad Omen is an intelligent, well-crafted story and I look forward to seeing more of Salar's work.

He joined us at the Brasserie du Court for this quick interview: