KINO SATELLITE

 

Globe Art Point (G.A.P) is delighted to welcome Kino Satellite for a series of free screenings featuring international experimental and nonfiction short work, curated by Pamela Cohn.

Originally founded in 2010 in Berlin, Germany, Finland-based curator Pamela Cohn brings her Kino Satellite series to Helsinki, continuing its tradition of intimate screenings for viewing parties, post-screening discussion, and community building through the sharing of innovative and challenging moving image work as part of the lead-up to her curatorial residency at Helsinki International Artist Programme – HIAP, September 2024 – July 2025 on the island of Suomenlinna.

The screenings are set for 27 March, 3 April and 24 April 2024. Doors open at 17.15.

About the film curator Pamela Cohn: www.globeartpoint.fi/gap-artist-info/

STATION TO STATION – SHOW #1
27 March 2024

In this first grouping of films, we’ll explore works that play with ineffable or ghostly presences, featuring films from makers challenging themselves on how to storytell with image and sound about war, grief, and geographical movements from our limited physical plane of existence into imaginary worlds that feature states of interiority, works that grapple with the notions of the realities around us versus the realities we create inside our minds, and how those two realms of existence come to reside side by side in order to find emotional release and stasis.

17.30 – 17.45: Short introduction of program and featured works
17.45 – 19.15: Film program (Total RT: 84 minutes)
19.15 – 19.45: Post screening discussion + Mingle

FEATURED FILMS

Shadows directed by Vahid Goodarzpour, Iran/Finland 2023, 5’

Based on Plato’s allegory of the cave, a human attempts to escape from bondage and attain Truth. The human believes that he has reached the ultimate truth, but what he encounters after liberation from the imaginary is merely a shadow created by an unknown entity. A game of the mind’s eye, moving from one stage of reality to the next.

I Was a Ghost Myself directed by Müge Yildiz, Turkey/Finland 2022, 27’

Following a ghost’s footsteps, psycho-geographically moving through a city where the ancient intertwines with the modern, a haunting takes place as light in moving images. During two years of shooting, the filmmaker visits the town in which she grew up and the city in which she later lived. She then visits her childhood town to see her grandmother’s grave, her old family house and school. Filmed entirely with expired/old stock super 8mm film, handmade camera lenses and scratched film technique, the beams of light, dust and aged texture of the film compose the ghost in its emotional state. The soundscape, in turn, overlaps a collage of both recorded and found sounds with the ghost’s monologue at times observational, at times poetic, decomposing the ghost with geographic motion.

HANDBOOK directed by Pavel Mozhar, Germany/Belarus 2021, 26’

In the days following the presidential election in Belarus in August 2020, numerous protests erupt throughout the country. The special police, OMON, take particularly brutal action against demonstrators, that also spills over onto passers-by in the streets. In total, almost 7000 people are arrested throughout Belarus. Hundreds of victims recount their experiences in interviews. Their reports reveal a system of repression, which is reconstructed in detail in the director’s small flat in Neukölln, Berlin, in the form of a cinematic how-to guide.

Station to Station directed by Jimmy Hou, Taiwan 2023, 26’

“As a kid, time is remembered through moving from place to place; we were always in motion, and therefore it was ambiguous as to where I came from after all.” From living in the An-Kung Community of Taipei to embarking on a journey to China, with conflicting emotions and an engraved identity, the filmmaker is lost among the various meanings of home and hometown. After accumulating and assembling materials for about a decade, a home and self-identity was formed – by moving from image to image, station to station.

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THROUGH A SHIMMERING PRISM – SHOW #2
Wednesday, 3 April 2024

Doors open at 18.15h

In the three works presented, we dive into the length and breadth of family connections, those throughlines, stories, and legends that become part and parcel of our own emerging identities. With imagination and flair, the featured artists explore the unending beauty, devotion, and frustrations of trying to connect to loved ones on a deeper plane. Whether using fragile film stock that makes everything shimmer with refracted memory; or one’s own body to jump and dance and sway with its yearning to express both mourning and joy; or a medium and a glowing orb to bridge the communication gap between siblings: In moving ways, these works celebrate the clan, the tribe, the household, stunning topographical lineages in which human and physical geographies converge.

18.30 – 18.45: Short introduction of program and featured works
18.45 – 20.15: Film program (Total RT: 78 minutes)
20.15 – 20.45: Post screening discussion with special guest, Programme Coordinator at AV-Arkki, Tytti Rantanen + Mingle

FEATURED FILMS

The Truss Arch directed by Sonya Stefan, Québec, Canada 2021, 35’

In filmmaker and dance artist, Sonya Stefan’s hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, a truss arch bridge straddles the St. Marys River, linking Canada to the United States. Underneath the bridge, a kind of liminal space exists where the notion of borders becomes blurred. With a wild yet carefully controlled energy, Stefan transports the spectator to this curious site where, it seems, anything is possible. Landing somewhere between autobiography, a heartfelt tribute to an immigrant mother whose fate is out of her hands, and a dance film rich in poetry and symbolism, this ode to freedom bubbles with reflections and experimentations, all set against the gritty and imposing backdrop of factory chimneys.

Wolf Whispers / Murmures du loup directed by Chloé Belloc, France 2020, 25’

A quirky portrait of two siblings. He makes lists. But he doesn’t want to talk about his lists – certainly not on camera. Actually, not at all. Director Chloé Belloc tries to connect with her autistic brother Baptiste, but it’s clear that talking isn’t going to work. In this sensitive film, Belloc makes a probing attempt to bridge the gap, not with words, but by listening and giving space to her brother’s silences. Using a uniquely beautiful and layered cinematic language all her own, she leads spectators into the mythical world that exists beyond our own limited abilities to really “see” someone. In the process, she ends up perfectly matching the love and beauty that she sees in her brother by gifting him with an equally beautiful and magical portrait of his singular interior world.

Through a Shimmering Prism, We Made a Way directed by Rhea Storr, UK 2021, 18’

In London, three sisters move through public/political spaces – a square, a bridge, a garden and hill – in an exploration of Black diasporic movement. Taking as its starting point empty carnival and parade routes both in London and Nassau, Bahamas, Storr reflects on progress, the architectural histories of colonialism, and the female body in public space. Originally shot on Super 8mm film, the textures and surfaces of glass, mirror and stone are used as a strategic way of moving through these spaces. There are many sources unspoken but visibly or audibly present: the green parakeets of London; Windrush Square, the site of the Black Cultural Archives; the 12th century French Cloisters now located in the Bahamas; and the Parliament buildings, the judging site of Junkanoo, an annual Bahamian celebration. A gorgeous portrait of siblings exploring together the privileges and difficulties of living in diaspora.

Post-screening discussion with Pamela Cohn in conversation with curator and archivist, Tytti Rantanen of AV-Arkki, Helsinki.

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TWO SIDES OF THE TORTOISE – SHOW #3
Wednesday, 24 April 2024

Globe Art Point is delighted to welcome Kino Satellite for the last in a series of free screenings featuring international experimental and nonfiction short work, curated by Pamela Cohn.

Most of our planet is covered with water. But in the coming years, that number will expand or contract exponentially due to climate change and environmental havoc wreaked by humans. Our species, too, is made up of about the same amount of water as the Earth. We hold oceans, seas, rivers and other nutrients of essential life in the ever more fragile global ecosystem in which we all live. Our very survival, along with all other non-human species of all stripes, is dependent on how we continue to shepherd our globe’s aquatic bodies. In four beautiful short film works, we’ll travel from the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan to Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands to a dried-up seabed in Uzbekistan, finally arriving in the gentle wilds of rural Albania. There are all kinds of tales and stories embedded in the deep.

Doors open at 18.15h; films play at 18.45.

18.30 – 18.45: Short introduction of program and featured works
18.45 – 20.00: Film program (Total RT: 70 minutes)
Light snacks and refreshments will be served.

FEATURED FILMS

I Still Talk to You directed by Turkan Huseyn, Azerbaijan 2024, 15’

In a melancholy dialogue with her boyfriend and various people she meets by chance, the filmmaker attempts to fathom the secrets of love in a wistful, poetic journey to the Caspian Sea.

Two Sides of the Tortoise directed by Oscar X. Illingworth, Ecuador 2024, 12’

An explorer arrives in the Galapagos Islands for the first time to have a tactile encounter with rocks and tortoises. In the darkness of the volcanic tunnels, the giant beasts transfigure freely, holding mysteries of the universe in the scars on their backs. To their misfortune, they are also a coveted food source for hungry sailors who aimlessly prowl the Pacific Ocean.

Aralkum directed by Mila Zhluktenko & Daniel Asadi Faezi, Germany/Uzbekistan 2022, 13’

A desert landscape as if from another planet. A few lonely, rusty shipwrecks. Low desert scrub grows in a way that holds the sand together during merciless storms. Aralkum, the Aral Desert, is the bare seabed. Weaving together different cinematic textures, the dried-up body of water is re-imagined, allowing an old fisherman to set sail one last time.

Luma directed by Eleanor Mortimer & Liridon Mustafaj, Albania, UK 2022, 30’

For countless generations, the Valbona River in Albania has carved its way through the country’s Alps, leaving its mark on the lives of the people that inhabit its shores. At once gentle, powerful, and playful, the river moves through the valley carrying song, memory, and ancient legends. But something stirs, and the freedom of the river, as well as the people who depend on her, is threatened.