Short film program “Resistance”

In Praise of Slowness

Tangier is located on the Strait of Gibraltar in Morocco, a very remote spot on the map. But it has also been overtaken by the ever-accelerating lifestyle and global economic and technological processes that have pushed many professions into the margins. Like the bleach salesman who walks the streets of a fast-growing city earning 100 Moroccan dirhams daily. This film is like a capsule, an attempt to preserve and capture what is unique but almost lost.

Hicham Gardaf

Hicham Gardag is a Moroccan visual artist born in Tangier and lives and works in London. Gardaf works across photography and film. Much of Gardaf’s practice delves into transformations of contemporary landscape to time, space, and politics of place. Recent screenings and exhibitions include the 74th Berlinale in Berlin, Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Homing

When Europeans settled in the Americas, they brought with them two invasive bird species, the European sparrow and the European starling, which took Purple Martins from their natural nesting sites. Historically nesting in pumpkin cavities carved out by natives, the purple martins have become dependent on humans and the birdhouses they build. Without saying a word, the film follows the purple martins’ migratory paths from the Amazon rainforest to the Great Lakes of North America. The focus is entirely on the bird, and the viewer is implicitly invited to reflect on human domination of the ecosystem and its impact on life, for good or for bad.

Tamer Hassan

Tamer Hassan has screened his films internationally including at Viennale, Art of the Real, Mar Del Plata, Punto de Vista, and Sheffield DocFest. He has been a fellow at the Flaherty Film Seminar and participated in the Berlinale Talents program. He currently teaches at Parsons School of Design.

Green Cemetery

Lavina, in her sixties, will finally be able to relax and grow her own garden. As a token of remembrance, she plans to plant a tree for all the deceased relatives who visit her in her dreams. For Lavina, the backyard is like a green archive where death and life are always side by side. The frames and the narrator’s quiet whispers, arranged in a collage of cut-outs, are like a hypnotic prayer unfolding in the middle of the Brazilian savanna.

Awards

E-flux – Film award, 2023

Curitiba International Film Festival “Olhar de Cinema” – Special prize in the National programme

Maurício Chades

Maurício Chades is an artist and filmmaker from Brazil. His works, in film, installation, sculpture, and performance, speculate about anticolonial symbiotic futures and queer ecologies. Envisioning syntropic environments and multispecies alliances, his art practice combines storytelling with restorative agriculture, composting, and fungiculture.