Artists' Film International: Solidarity #2

Note: These films are shown at KINOBOX, first floor, Prostneset Havneterminal, Tromsø.

Artists’ Film International is a partnership of 15 international organisations that celebrates moving-image. Every year, each organisation selects a film from an artist connected to their region, based on a collectively agreed theme.

Branching out from the theme of SOLIDARITY, the films selected reflect on the act of coming together; in friendship, community and resistance.

These three films exemplify the act of building new communities and friendships by reaching out in solidarity, through meeting, trying to understand, and helping others.

Inventory 2021

Pınar Öğrenci, 2021, 16 mins (Video-Forum, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Germany)

A remake of Yugoslavian director Želimir Žilnik’s Inventur – Metzstraße 11 (1975), Öğrenci updates it, moving its original focus from ‘guest workers’ in West Germany, to residents in Chemnitz, East Germany. A migrant himself, escaping the repressions of the current Turkish regime, Pınar Öğrenci depicts the anti racist struggles of people living in Chemnitz. The people in the film talk about their life histories, their connections to the region and their commitment against racism as well as the everyday experience of discrimination in its structural and its individual forms.

Dos personas

Lihuel González, 2018, 28 mins (Selected by Fundación PROA, Argentina)

Zhang Jing and Renaud have never met each other, they only know that their conversation partner does not share the same language and of their need to emigrate to a different country. The conversations that arise are spontaneous, they craft a catalogue of gestures, voice tones and linguistic similarities that help decode what the other person is saying and thus try to create a new code to make themselves understood. It reflects on the feeling of uprooting, the difficulties that come up when we try to understand another and what happens in the process of adapting to a new culture.

L’ESCALE / THE STOPOVER

Collectif Faire-Part, 2022, 14 mins (Selected by argos centre for audiovisual art, Belgium)

Filmmakers Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh travel from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Germany for the screening of their new film. During a layover in Angola, they're stopped at the airport because the airline doesn't trust their documents to be real. While Paul and Nizar think they are being led to a hotel until their flight back home, they are actually being taken to an illegal detention center. The filmmakers' testimony - which offers an eye-opening insight into the impossibility of safe and carefree travel for Congolese artists - stands in stark contrast with the seemingly peaceful images of cloud formations passing by an airplane window.

Artists’ Film International (AFI) is a partnership between: argos centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels, Belgium; Ballroom Marfa, Texas, USA; Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan in eXiLe e.V., (CCAA in EXiLe), Frankfurt, Germany; Cultural Center of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia; Forma, London, UK; Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (GAMeC), Bergamo, Italy; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, USA; MMAG Foundation, Amman, Jordan; Project 88, Mumbai, India; Sapieha Palace, branch of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, Lithuania; Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland; Tromsø Kunstforening/Romssa Dáiddasiida,Tromsø, Norway; Video-Forum of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k), Berlin, Germany.

KINOBOX is a micro-kino, which screens a broad range of works and artistic approaches, selected with consideration for their material, political and aesthetic sensibilities. Central to our curation is this belief in the importance of artists moving-image to question how we consume and are consumed by our media landscape.