Eco-grief (Klimaatrouw)
Grief due to the disappearance of nature or to the extinction of yet another species: ecological mourning is unfortunately no longer a new phenomenon. On the flip side of warm, cosy autumn days, there are floods, forest fires, and other natural disasters. As part of the Ontroerd Kortfilmavonden, Kortfilm.be presents a programme that gives room to emotions of confusion, loss, and activist discontent. However, we move beyond doom and seek a collective space where imagination is a resistance strategy.
The ecological crisis also inspires filmmakers to produce activist pamphlets or poetic reflections. In this short film programme, our suffering climate is given audiovisual support by experimenting with pellicule or imagining dystopian worlds using archival footage or sci-fi interpretations. The silver screen becomes a place where lost ecosystems, traditions, or land are reclaimed, either as a temporary memory or an immortalised cry for help.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with One Field Fallow, a queer-run venue in Brussels for artistic research, neighborhood and community work.
This programme lasts about 60 minutes and was curated by lau persijn and Niels Putman. All films are either silent or subtitled in English.
This event is a collaboration between KASKcinema and Kortfilm.be, with the support of Sereni.
Programme
Programma
It is said that when the first European ship, led by Christopher Columbus, arrived on the coast of what is now the Dominican Republic, it was received by a rain of arrows launched by the Caribbean Taíno. In the same location today, a salt lake is witness to profound changes in the ecosystem that lead to the migration of animal species and to an expanding desert. In Amérika: Bay of Arrows, the camera is an arrow, looking for contemporary ways to awaken such a fending off gesture.
In 1952, London was engulfed by the Great Smog: a thin fog due to industrialisation. Archival footage from this period looks like letters from a desolate future. Speculative urban symphony The Veiled City combines reality with fiction and invites us to understand the smog in the context of today’s climate crisis.
The jay, the train, the moss, the trembling soil. How to listen to a space considered empty? underneath it flickers suggests different perspectives on La friche Josaphat, a verdant fallow land in Brussels threatened by real estate development. By questioning our ways of looking and listening, the film seeks to connect with the land as a single body inhabited by many creatures.
Filmed inside Biosphere 2 in Arizona, Urth forms a cinematic meditation on ambitious experiments and constructed environments. The film considers what an endeavor such as Biosphere 2 might mean today and in the near future in terms of humankind’s relationship with the natural world.
35mm negative film stock was buried under leaves near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. The abstract flurry of activity on the surface of the filmstrip translates the energies of the radioactive site. Disordered marks and traces, representing the imprint of time between sunset and sunrise on the night of June 24th, 2014, blend into the green and blue tones of the light-exposed emulsion.