Comfort Behavior
Mudanza Contemporánea, by Timoteo Guillem. LA premiere!
Films Screening July 22-25, 2021
Live Q&A with Filmmakers and Programmers on Thursday July 22, 1pm PDT, 4 pm EDT
A sunburn across the bridge of your nose. A warm belly on a cold rock. Do you remember what it was like to run so fast that you can hear your heart beating in your head? An examination of texture, the internal, and the floating bits on the tops of your eyes. These films showcase the idea of play, pain, and the memory of an outside world materially experienced, not unlike dairy cows experiencing grass for the first time in a year.
Sunning is considered a comfort behavior in many animals. A tactile experience of facing the sun to warm oneself raises body temperature and reduces heart rate. After a prolonged period of languid gestures, we need to bask to remember. This program showcases films that warm up our bodies, hearts, and minds slowly re-acclimatizing to the world from outside. Using light, animation, and emotional memories, these filmmakers explore the tangible possibilities of a world best experienced through touch.
This program presents the work of filmmakers and artists Anouk De Clercq and Tom Callemin, Elena Duque, Anu-Laura Tuttelberg, Timoteo Guillem, Josh Cloud, and Nazlı Dinçel.
Programmed by Jordan Wong & Sam Gurry.
Ticketing for Comfort Behavior: Sliding Scale, requested $12 for general admission, $8 students/seniors, $0 for Filmforum members, at https://watch.eventive.org/comfortbehavior/play/60e77ed5a748f1008d8084cc
It, by Anouk De Clercq & Tom Callemin
It
By Anouk De Clercq & Tom Callemin
Belgium, Video, 2017, B/W, 16:9, Stereo & 5.1, English, 13 min.
A blind man reports on an eclipse, a light phenomenon that he perceives through senses that do not involve sight. He takes us by the hand and guides us through the dark, through this temporary event that transforms the world as we know it. In the midst of the darkness comes a presence, visible at the sudden fall of nighttime, til the sun inevitably rises again. True to tradition, the camera captures what temporarily passes us by. It is akin to trying to project the sun into our home in order to admire and capture the great cosmic movements. In this encounter between work by visual artists Anouk De Clercq and Tom Callemin, light and darkness also meet. Their respective worlds continually find themselves in the realm of the barely visible, in black-and-white, in the fascination with what light can reveal.
Anouk De Clercq explores the potential of audiovisual language to create possible worlds. Her recent work is based on the utopian idea of ‘radical empathy’. She has received several awards, including the Illy Prize at Art Brussels in 2005 and a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention in 2014. Her work has been shown in Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, MAXXI, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, BOZAR, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlinale, Ars Electronica, among others. Anouk De Clercq is affiliated to the School of Arts University College Ghent as a visiting professor. She is a founding member of Auguste Orts, On & For Production and Distribution and initiator of Monokino. Anouk De Clercq is the author of Where is Cinema, published by Archive Books.
Valdedios, by Elena Duque
Valdedios
By Elena Duque
Spain, 2019, Super 8 and HD video, 3’10”
In Valdediós Gualterius built a monastery in the 13th Century. In Valdediós there is a wall, there is a horse, there is a road, there is the whole universe.
Elena Duque is a Spanish-Venezuelan filmmaker, curator, writer and teacher. As a filmmaker, she has completed several animation and experimental short films, such as Cómo hacer un fanzine, exhibited in the art center CA2M in Madrid, De cara a la galeria, that premiered in Curta 8 (Curitiba, Brasil), La mar salada, programmed in the festivals Transient Visions (New York), Moving (Kioto) and Florida Experimental Film Festival, Pla y Cancela, selected in Verín and D'A in Barcelona, and in the exhibition Cibermujeres in the Neomudéjar Arts Center in Madrid and Valdediós (2019), part of the Official Section of Punto de Vista Festival in Pamplona, and selected in festivals such as London Animation Film Festival, Les Inattendus (Lyon), Milwaukee Underground Film Festival and Experiments in Cinema.
Winter in the Rainforest, by Anu-Laura Tuttelberg
Winter in the Rainforest
By Anu-Laura Tuttelberg
Estonia, Lithuania, Mexico, 2019, 16mm, 8’35”
Shot in real nature, in the tropical rainforests of Mexico and Peru, this film captures the eternal dance of life and death as experienced by magical creatures of porcelain - animals, birds, insects and flowers - fragile and resilient at the same time. Time passes here in a strange way, moving at an unexpected pace. The unique combination of natural light, fast flowing time and subtle stop motion animation creates a unique poetic reality that makes us aware of the magic and materiality of our own living in this world.
Anu-Laura Tuttelberg graduated with a MA degree in animation at Estonian Academy of Arts in 2013. She made her first animation, Fly Mill (Kärbeste veski, 2012), a puppet film, as her graduation film. Fly Mill has screened at about hundred festivals around the world and won more than 20 prizes including 6 Grand Prix. Her first film after graduation, a short animated film, On the Other Side of the Woods (Teisel pool metsa), premiered in June 2014 at Annecy International Animation Festival. She has made set designs for several short stop motion animations and given workshops of stop motion animation. Her new puppet film Winter in the Rainforest, which is a co-production with Estonia, Mexico and Lithuania, has screened at the Annecy and Zagreb International Animation Festivals.
Mudanza Contemporánea, by Timoteo Guillem
Mudanza Contemporánea
By Timoteo Guillem
Spain, 2018, Digital, 19’40”
*Los Angeles Premiere
It’s hot in a ramshackle attic, full-blown fans stir the atmosphere generated by the “exercises” of a weird tenant who manipulates objects. He twists cardboard, builds object castles, admires them, talks to them, breaks them, dresses and dances with them. The ceremonies are repeated and mutated, the environments change and the objects multiply creating a kind of dissonant choreography built with remnants of amateur video. The plot gets more complicated when between those objects his memories appear and force him to fight in a duel of dances with his past.
Teo Guillem is a director that has been working for more than ten years in films, commercials, music videos and opening titles for feature films since 2007 when he established Dvein, a production company and directors collective that with a background in fine art and design, that
is well-known for their style that merges the physical with the digital world to craft a distinctive aesthetic with an experimental, design-driven culture at its core. Teo’s directorial work with Dvein had a wide success in commercials and films and been featured in multiple festival and exhibitions around the world such as Saatchi & Saatchi’s New Director Showcase (France), OFFF Festival (Spain & France), F5 (United States), or ArtFutura (Argentina). His short film Magma (2013), was awarded in AICP Awards, the Australian Animation Festival among others and is part of the permanent collection of MoMa in New York. Aside other awards and recognitions he has also been awarded with the City of Barcelona Award on Film (2012) and the Fine Arts Medal of San Carlos University in Valencia (2013).
Hybtap, by Josh Cloud
Hybtap
By Josh Cloud
USA, 2019, Digital, 4’21”
*Los Angeles Premiere
Written, Fabricated, and Performed through Josh Cloud, Hybtap ( Have You Been To A Place ) is a visual poem depicting the ongoing search for self and an exploration into the intersection of sculpture, print, and animation.
Josh Cloud is a multimedia visual and video artist located in Los Angeles CA. His practice has recently expanded from illustration and animation to now include a wide variety of 3D processes, including ceramics, weaving, woodwork, and printmaking. His sculptural works have an aged aesthetic quality, somewhere between art object and artifact, existing somewhen between times. These works hope to resurface and reanalyze the past––questioning which histories are inflated and which are compressed, who holds the power to make such decisions, and how that power can be claimed by an individual in the present through object making.
Instructions on How to Make a Film, by Nazlı Dinçel
Instructions on How to Make a Film
By Nazlı Dinçel
Canada/USA, 2018, Sound, B&W, 24fps, 16mm, 13 min.
Shot at the Film Farm in Mt. Forest, this comedy is a quest about performance, educational voiceover, analogue filmmaking, ASCII, language, ethics of ethnography and narrative storytelling under a metaphor of instructions to farm land. Text by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Wikihow/shoot-film.
Nazlı Dinçel’s hand-made work reflects on experiences of disruption. She records the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation and desire with the film object: its texture, color and the tractable emulsion of the 16mm material. Her use of text as image, language and sound imitates the failure of memory and her own displacement within a western society. Born in Ankara, Turkey, Dinçel immigrated to the United Sates at age 17. Dinçel resides in Milwaukee, WI where she is currently building an artist run film laboratory. She obtained her MFA in filmmaking from UW-Milwaukee. Her works have been exhibited globally including the Museum of Modern art in New York, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Vienna Modern art Museum, Buenos Aires International Film Festival, Walker Art Center and Hong Kong International Film Festival. She was recently a 2019/2020 Radcliffe Institute fellow for advanced study at Harvard University, and a 2019 Emerging Artist recipient of the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship. In addition to exhibiting with institutions, Dinçel avidly self-distributes and tours with her work in micro-cinemas, artist run laboratories and alternative screening spaces in order to support and circulate handmade filmmaking to communities outside of institutions.