WL shorts: Present, Tense

For this tense present: a programme in which physical and representational pasts are set alight via speculative and personal expressions of making art. Through compositional and contextual frames — including that of film history — emerge signs of resistance, but also an inviting and infectious persistence of vision from an array of exciting filmmakers.

Nicolás Pereda’s playful and moving Dear Chantal narrates letters to legendary Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman about a short-term apartment rental in Mexico City, as we see the modern abode tidied and organized — tranquil signs of life. Wedding a personal voiceover with fragmentary imagery — both sourced and original — Vika Kirchenbauer’s The Capacity for Adequate Anger is a raw and pensive reflection on family, class, and alienation within the institutional art world. A trio of interconnected shorts, Laida Lertxundi’s beguiling Inner Outer Space responds to the landscape of Spain’s Basque region and the dynamic between still and moving images by way of performance and dioramas. Minjung Kim’s “The red filter is withdrawn.” expands upon the focus and artistry of her miniatures in a pointed excavation of the colonial ghosts that haunt South Korea’s Jeju Island. Informed by an underlying sense of anxiety and anguish, Michael Robinson’s Polycephaly in D nestles fragments of narrative within a collage of sound, image, and text that oscillates between the elegant and the discordant — and that reconfigures an archive of popular media imagery into a personal one. Shot in the Chilean Andes and propelled by an evocative score by sound artist Jason Sharp, Daïchi Saïto’s hypnotic earthearthearth transforms sublime landscapes into colourful conflagrations of Rothko-esque abstraction. Finally, an ecstatic work of superimposition by a master of materialism, Peter Tscherkassky’s Train Again — the third instalment in the filmmaker’s Rushes Series — conjures the thrill and spectacle of early cinema, while paying tribute to his late contemporary Kurt Kren.

ANDRÉA PICARD

Content advisory: strobe effects