Lo schermo dell’arte Film Festival 10th edition

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 14

Galleria delle Carrozze di Palazzo Medici Riccardi
6.00 pm
EXHIBITION OPENING
Directing the Real. Artists’ Film and Video in the 2010s
The exhibition brings together works by nineteen international artists to celebrate its engagement in promoting, producing and exhibiting the works from a new generation of visual artists.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15

Le Murate. Progetti Arte Contemporanea
11.00 am – 1.00 pm / 2.30 pm – 4.30 pm
VISIO Artists’ Presentation
The participating artists introduce the fundamental themes of their artistic practice in a 15-minute presentation at in Florence.

Galleria delle Carrozze di Palazzo Medici Riccardi
11.00 am – 6.00 pm
EXHIBITION
Directing the Real: Artists’ Film and Video in the 2010s

Cinema La Compagnia
7.00 pm
LIVE SET
Superstructure (2017) by Hassan Khan
After his performance at Guggenheim New York, Louvre Paris and Whitechapel London, Hassan Khan will present for the first time in Florence his famous project Superstructure 2017, a concert program with rotating selections from his repertoire- this time ranging from slow and suspenseful listening to subtle dancing. The pieces merge compositions and recordings done in the studio- from classical arabic music to programmed Gamelan with live work on a feedbacking mixer and an array of processors and filters.

9.30 pm
24 Frames by Abbas Kiarostami, France, Iran, 2016, 103′
Italian premiere in the presence of Ahmad Kiarostami
Produced over the course of three years, using digital instruments, 3D inserts and green screens, 24 Frames is Abbas Kiarostami’s last masterpiece. The director died in Paris, on July 4, 2016, at the age of 76. The film is a dialogue between his work as filmmaker and as a photographer, a combination of the two artistic languages to which he devoted his life. The film also answers a question: what happens before and after a photo is taken? Melancholic and joyful, serious and mischievous, the film is a meditation on the passage of time and the fragility of existence: issues that were always central in the great Iranian director’s films.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16

Galleria delle Carrozze di Palazzo Medici Riccardi
11.00 am – 6.00 pm
EXHIBITION
Directing the Real: Artists’ Film and Video in the 2010s

Cango Cantieri Goldonetta
ore 15.45
FESTIVAL TALK
Hassan Khan
In his lecture the artist will speak about his artistic practice in which sound, images and performance are closely linked.

Cinema La Compagnia
6. 00 pm
Koudelka Shooting Holy Land by Gilad Baram, Czech Republic, Israel, Germany, 2015, 71′
In the presence of the author
The director follows Josef Koudelka, the famous Czech Magnum photographer, on a journey through the Holy Land undertaken to understand this region which has been deeply shaken by conflict, and religious and racial tensions. The film is a dialogue between cinema and photography.

7.30 pm
FOCUS ON Hassan Khan
In the presence of the author
Films:
Jewel, 2010, 6’30”
Muslimgauze R.I.P., 2010, 8’07”
Blind Ambition, 2012, 45′

9.00 pm
Interregnum by Adrian Paci, 2017, Italy, 17 ’28”
In the presence of the author
In collaboration with Museo Novecento and Le Murate. Progetti Arte Contemporanea on the occasion of the exhibithion Adrian Paci. Di queste luci si servirà la notte
In his latest work, Paci assembles imagery, recovered from national archives and television programming from former Soviet Union countries and China, which shows the funerals of the dictators who governed them. Long lines of mourners wait to pay homage to a man and an ideal. The death of a leader releases individual pain which, says the Albanian artist, “was not contemplated in communist society.”

9.40 pm
Pre-Image (Blind as the MotherTongue) by Hiwa K, Greece, 2017, 17 ’40”
Italian premiere
Equipped with a strange object–a pole balanced on his nose, with mirrors attached–the Kurdish Iraqi artist retraces the journey he made from Turkey to Greece to Rome when he was forced to flee his country. The limited view of the ground from the device only allows him to proceed slowly and uncertainly. The film is the metaphor of the dangers that every migrant encounters along his escape route.

10.00 pm
Beuys by Andres Veiel, Germany, 2017, 107’
Italian premiere 
With previously unseen and unheard video, audio-tapes, including interviews, Andres Veiel’s film reconstructs Joseph Beuys’s life between art, teaching and politics, recreating the climate of debates, resistance and utopia in which the charismatic German artist worked. Sculptor, performer, shaman, theoretician, a revolutionary and provocative artist, even now thirty years after his death, his name is surrounded by a mythical aura.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17

Galleria delle Carrozze di Palazzo Medici Riccardi
11.00 am – 6.00 pm
EXHIBITION
Directing the Real. Artists’ Film and Video in the 2010

Altana di Palazzo Strozzi
ore 15.45
FESTIVAL TALK
Feature Expanded: Becoming a Feature
The round table BECOMING A FEATURE will investigate the reasons why, in the last decade, an increasing number of visual artists are venturing into feature-length narrative film productions introducing new exhibition and distribution models and at the same time often embracing the rules and structures of the film industry. With the artists Rä Di Martino, Kasia Fudakowski and Roee Rosen . In collaboration with In Between Art Film.

Cinema La Compagnia
6.00 pm
Tashlikh by Yael Bartana, Israel, Netherlands, 2017, sound, 11′
Italian premiere
A gloomy sound accompanies objects of various shapes falling in slow motion: life-jackets, travel bags, passports, keys, toys, weapons, photographs, clothes, and bullets. The Israeli artist, protagonist of the Polish Pavilion at the 2011 Biennale, stages a type of ritual that consists in deliberately throwing objects related to traumatic memory as an example of psychological liberation.

followed by
The World by Mika Taanila, Finland, 2017, sound, 7′
Italian premiere
Inspired by The Man Who Fell to Earth, Nicola Roeg’s film starring David Bowie, the Finnish artist’s short film represents a literally reversed version: the pictures are actually overturned. In an apocalyptic atmosphere, animals, plants and objects seem to await a final disaster.

6.25 pm
Fall into Ruin by William E. Jones, USA, 2017, 30
Italian premiere
Alexander Iolas was a noted Greek merchant and collector who lived between Paris, New York and Athens. The film recounts the author’s visit to his Athenian villa, a site that has been declared a part of the country’s cultural heritage. The building, often vandalized, is in a state of complete abandonment. In the period of its utmost splendor, in the early 80’s it was wonderfully furnished with works of contemporary art and antiques.

7.10 pm
Act & Punishment by Evgenij Mitta, Russia, 2015, 90′
The Pussy Riot, a group of Russian punk-rock women, show their dissent through performances that are a mixture of actionism, art and politics. On August 17, 2012, three of them were arrested during a performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. They were accused of “vandalism motivated by religious hatred.” The movie begins with imagery from their trial. They were sentenced to two years in jail, and became a world-wide symbol of the struggle for freedom of expression.

21.00 pm
Vivian’s Garden by Rosalind Nashashibi, UK, 2017, 30′
Italian premiere in the presence of the author
Vivian Suter and her mother Elisabeth are Swiss-Austrian artists living in Panajachel, Guatemala, on an estate purchased in the 1980s, surrounded by a lush tropical garden. The artist’s 16mm camera enters into symbiosis with the daily lives of the women through close, intimate, sometimes almost furtive shots

21.50 pm
Urth by Ben Rivers, UK, 2017, 19′
Italian premiere
An anonymous scientist recounts his last days in the Biosphere 2 Science Center, in Arizona. The British artist’s film is an intimate reflection on issues such as isolation, artificial environments, visions of the future, and the relationship between man and nature.

22.30 pm
Live Art: Adrian Villar Rojas in Istanbul by Heinz Peter Schwerfel, France, 2016, 26’
Live Art: Philippe Parreno, le temps de l’espace by Heinz Peter Schwerfel, France, 2015, 25’
World premiere in the presence of the author
The ARTE TV Channel’s Live Art series by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Heinz Peter Schwerfel includes eight films about artists who have renewed the language of contemporary art. The series will be broadcast in early of 2018. Villar Rojas produces sculptures from organic and inorganic materials. The flow of time is a central obsession in his work, which seeks to give tangible form to the processes of change, decay and rebirth to which every life-form is destined.The film was shot at the 2015 Istanbul Biennale, for which the Argentine artist made a series of fantastic animals, installed on the edge of the Sea of Marmara. The film about Philippe Parreno, shot in New York in June 2015 at his show at Armory Drill Hill, follows the French artist’s installation, which changed daily; with narration by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Parreno, and the piano player Mikhail Rudy.

SATURDAY NOVEMBER, 18

Galleria delle Carrozze di Palazzo Medici Riccardi
11.00 am – 6.00 pm
EXHIBITION
Directing the Real. Artists’ Film and Video in the 2010s

Cinema La Compagnia
4.45 pm
In Art We Trust by Benoît Rossel, Switzerland, France, 2017, 85′
Italian premiere
A collection of testimonials by contemporary artists, including Lawrence Weiner, John Armleder, and Liam Gillick, who share their thoughts about the role of art and creation. The film recounts their ambitions and doubts as they try to describe the creative process, as well as the practice and the method needed to produce art. The director conjures a portrait of a mysterious craft, seen as sacred by some, despised and considered pretentious by others.

6.25 pm
Donald Judd and I by Sasha Pirker, Austria, USA, 2016, 3′ 30”
Italian premiere
The Los Angeles house where Donald Judd first discovered and fell in love with the furniture of Austrian architect Rudolph Schindler is re-imagined by the director, who brings together Schindler’s angular furniture with some paintings by the American minimalist artist.

followed by
The Dust Channel by Roee Rosen, Israel, 2016, 23′
Italian premiere in the presence of the author
Screened at Documenta14, Rosen’s short film is a surreal lyrical operetta that takes place in the home of a bourgeois Israeli family whose fear of dirt and any other strange presence turns into a perverse devotion to household cleaning appliances. The sung text details a ménage à trois between a young couple and their Dyson DC07 vacuum cleaner.

7.15 pm
Controfigura by Rä Di Martino, Italy, Switzerland, France, Morocco, 2017, 68′
In the presence of the author and Corrado Sassi
In this first topical feature by the Roman artist, a film crew explores Marrakech to find locations suitable for filming a remake of Frank Perry’s 1968 film, The Swimmer, in which a man crosses a whole region, from one swimming pool to another, to reach his home. During the production process, Corrado, the twin used to test the shots, hopes that that main role will be his. Filippo Timi interprets Burt Lancaster’s role.

9.00 pm
Feature Expanded > Award

9.15 pm
Looking for Oum Kulthum by Shirin Neshat, Germania, Austria, Italy, Libano, Qatar, 2017, 90′
In the presence of the author
In collaboration with In Between Art Film
Shirin Neshat returns, after her acclaimed film Women Without Men, to the subject of the female condition and Iran from a female perspective. This second feature by the artist, presented in the Orizzonti section of the latest Venice Film Festival, is the story of Mitra, an Iranian director in exile, at work on her dream project: a film about the life of legendary singer and Egyptian diva Oum Kulthum (1900-1975). The difficulties encountered by the filmmaker in filming intertwine with what Oum experienced in her day as a female artist in a male-dominated society.

SUNDAY NOVEMBER, 19

Galleria delle Carrozze di Palazzo Medici Riccardi
11.00 am – 6.00 pm
EXHIBITION
Directing the Real. Artists’ Film and Video in the 2010s

Cinema La Compagnia
4.45 pm
Big Time by Kaspar Astrup Schroder, Denmark, 2017, 93′
A portrait of award-winning Danish architect Bjarke Ingels who, by age forty, had already signed several well-known recent buildings, such as the W57 VIA 57 West skyscraper in New York, the Danish National Maritme Museum in Helsingor, and the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London. Shot over seven years, the film follows his professional and personal life with great discretion: from the opening of his new studio in New York, to on-site construction work, and through a surgical operation that followed a severe brain contusion suffered during a game of baseball.

6.30 pm
Il giardino delle erbacce by Virgilio Sieni, Italy, 2017, sound, 20’
World premiere in the presence of the author
It’s dawn. A person is sitting in a fallow field. Looks like she’s waiting for something. Suddenly she’s attracted by a glow. She closes her eyes, her hand falls from her knee. She moves her leg to get up, presses the ground with her heel. The journey begins. Forty meters separate her from the goal. An atlas of gestures and faces mark the journey, revealing a humanity that reflects on nature.

7.10 pm
Bom Bom’s Dream by Jeremy Deller and Cecilia Bengolea, UK, 2016, 12′ 30″
Italian premiere
The social and traditional aspects of the popular music world have often been the focus of Turner Prize-winner Jeremy Deller’s work. Here, a Japanese dancer known as Bom Bom participates in a Jamaican dance contest. The film unfolds between absurd dance sequences and strange special effects, in a surreal atmosphere, with an absolutely pop aesthetic.

7.25 pm
Whipping Zombie by Yuri Ancarani, Italy, 27′
Italian premiere
Zombie kale, or “zombie whipping”, is a unique ritual filmed the first time in history by Ancarani. To the rhythm of hypnotic, repetitive trance-inducing music performed with percussion and traditional wind instruments, zombie men whip and fight each other until they “die and are reborn” in an infinite cycle.

9.00 pm
VISIO > Young Talent Acquisition Prize

9.15 pm
Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco by James Crump, USA, 2017, 90’
Italian premiere in the presence of the author
An extraordinary soundtrack by Donna Summer, Marvin Gaye and Isaac Hayes accompanies the story of Antonio Lopez, the most influential fashion designer of the 1970s, whose designs were inspired by ethnicities and street life in New York and Paris. The film follows the disinhibited life and turbulent relationships of the group of friends and collaborators who surrounded him: Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, his creative partner Juan Ramos and his muses: Cathee Dahmen, Grace Jones, Pat Cleveland, Tina Chow, Jessica Lange and Jerry Hall.