Shift

Max Hattler’s new work Shift is on show at the Tenderpixel Gallery, London, until April 28. According to the artist, this abstract stop-motion animation work is ‘an attempt to visualise higher dimensions and unearthliness, taking into account these concepts’ heightened awareness when attempting to process or predict the end of the world’.

Watch the video of Max Hattler’s exhibition at Tenderpixel made by Mandeep Ahira:

Max Hattler: SHIFT at Tenderpixel from Max Hattler on Vimeo.

Pumzi is a Kenyan science fiction short film written and directed by Wanuri Kahiu, set in Africa in the future, 35 years after ‘The Water War’. As communities live in underground compounds, scientist Asha is led to investigage the possibility of growing seeds in the seemingly dead world outside. Pumzi was screened at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and we hope to be able to see it soon in the UK, the trailer really looks amazing! For more information go to the Pumzi website.

Watch the trailer:

I’ve just returned from the London Short Film Festival’s Music and Video shorts at the Roxy Bar and Screen, a smorgasbord of playful and elaborate musical and visual delights. Look out for the write-up next month but in the meantime you can check out one of the films in the programme below, Paul Cheshire’s very brief but brilliantly strange The Cursed Cassette. There is still one day of LSFF left, with some very exciting stuff going on, such as the Leftfield and Luscious programme, which we previewed here, and the Salon des Refusés and Rich Pickings events. For more information, check out the LSFF website.

Virginie Sélavy

Watch The Cursed Cassette:

Ladj Ly (Photo by JR)

Vice magazine has launched The Creators Project, a network dedicated to the celebration of creativity and culture across media and around the world. One of the creators is Ladj Ly, the 29-year-old filmmaker part of the Kourtrajmé collective who made the acclaimed 365 Days in Clichy Montfermeil, a documentary about the 2005 riots in the poor suburbs around Paris.

In the video below, he talks about how his own childhood experiences started him on the path to becoming a documentary filmmaker, talks about the films and directors that inspired him, and how he wants to help develop the tragically under-funded African cinema. For him, making documentaries, which involves following drug dealers in the ghettoised French suburbs, is important because it gives an insider’s point of view to juxtapose against the mainstream media’s often over-simplified portrayal.

Watch a selection of films from Art by Chance 2010:

ART BY CHANCE 2010 Screening Video from ART BY CHANCE on Vimeo.

With a running time of just 12 minutes (8 of which survive), Alice in Wonderland was the longest film produced in England at that time. Film archivists have been able to restore the film’s original colours for the first time in over 100 years.

Breathless

DVD of the month hands-down (and one of the most powerful films of the year) is Breathless (Ddongpari): In Yang Ik-joon’s stupefying film, gangsters are only marginally more violent than wife-beaters and equally as contemptible. There is nothing glamorous about the outlaws who inhabit the directorial debut of South Korean actor Yang, or about the astounding ultra-violence that punctuates the film. The main character, the psychotic Sang-hoon, and the boys under his command work in parasitic packs, intimidating and beating up unfortunate people because it is the only life they know. But Breathless is a lot more than a film about domestic violence in South Korea: it is no issue movie, but a profoundly singular, devastatingly powerful, intensely personal vision of both the explicit and hidden violence underlying social and familial relationships. Read more.

South Korean cinema has also produced Chaw, a new contender to most ludicrous Korean monster movie ever made, although it is nowhere near as deliciously bonkers as The Host. This time, a huge human-eating boar attacks a small mountain village, and a crew of assorted misfits goes on the hunt. There’s the seen-it-all detective, the authoritarian, unprincipled chief, the moronic country cops and a comically professional gadget-laden, Finland-trained hunter. It’s silly and not one bit scary but it’s fun while it lasts.

Other March DVD releases include Takeshis’, part of Takeshi Kitano’s ‘auto-destruct’ series of films, Xei Fei’s Black Snow, the politically inflected tale of a former prisoner’s isolation and despair in Beijing, Sinking of Japan, a competent if by-the-numbers big-budget disaster movie that emulates Hollywood’s apocalyptic blockbusters. New horror releases include heavy-handed, exploitative Australian revenge thriller The Horseman, Chris Smith’s derivative but engaging time travel horror movie Triangle, awful low-budget Brit horror Salvage. Michael Haneke’s masterful The White Ribbon and Franti ek Vlácil’s Valley of the Bees, enticingly described as ‘a visionary and haunting medieval epic from the director of Marketa Lazarová‘, are also released this month.

Watch the trailer for Breathless:

Buy from Amazon:
Breathless (2-disc Special Edition) [DVD] [2008]
Chaw [DVD] [2009]
Takeshis’ [DVD] [2005]
Black Snow [DVD] [1990]
Sinking Of Japan [DVD] [2006]
Triangle [DVD] [2009]
The White Ribbon [DVD] [2009]
Valley of the Bees [DVD] [1967]

ARTBYCHANCE09 Selection \ Dana Kasdorf \ Around the World from ART BY CHANCE Ultra Short Film F on Vimeo.

ARTBYCHANCE09 Selection \ Suleyman Yilmaz \ No More Overlap from ART BY CHANCE Ultra Short Film F on Vimeo.

ARTBYCHANCE09 Selection \ Sam Moorman Barnett \ Religious Experience from ART BY CHANCE Ultra Short Film F on Vimeo.

ART BY CHANCE is opened to movies of all kinds; fiction, animation, documentary and video art with the exception of training and advertising films. Enthusiastic and creative international filmmakers will be preparing 30-second long films on ‘Time’. Participants can also submit online from www.artbychance.org.

Following its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend, this is the first clip for Chris Morris’s jihad satire Four Lions, which follows four would-be terrorists and their farcical attempts to commit an atrocity in a British city.

UK release date to be confirmed.