Film Farm. Degrowing rites: Framing film ecologies

In the first film program Degrowing Rites: Framing Film Ecologies, we present three experimental films that explore the porous borders between an ecological totality, film’s chemical toxicity, and the possibilities of co-existence. Between poetic precision and microscopic events, through sound art and photochemical mastery, the program gathers us around co-creation with other life—trees, plants, fungi, animals—as well as the inanimate instruments of cinema. While the works of Karel Doing, Els van Riel, and Phil Hoffman land in Vilnius from culturally different communities of experimental film, their works retain an honest engagement with extended observation. Best approached as lyrical, non-narrative meditation, Degrowing Rites uses sound, silence, and voice to bring us deeper into the matter and spirit of photochemical images.

A Patriot of These Woods

A Patriot of These Woods is a film that is inspired by the novel The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. Calvino’s book tells the adventures of a boy who climbs up a tree to spend the rest of his life inhabiting an arboreal kingdom. The filmmaker dives into the vegetal world, undertaking his own journey into the trees around him using his body as a metaphorical soldier who defends the trees and plants that grow around him. An otherwise concealed world opens up, revealing the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants. A hybrid creature emerges, partially plant, partially human, their bodies merged, their thought processes entangled. These woods respect no borders.

Elliptic

Elliptic is a filmwork that considers an image as reflecting light. It looks at how brightly a beam of light is deflected as it hits an edge and transforms the image as it enters a lens. A delicately slow focus shift carries this movement along the cone of the visual field into a certain depth, and back again. Surprises appear slowly, and disappear to make place for a next one. An important remark is that this film needs to be seen from beginning to end, most likely not on a computer screen.

Vulture

`vulture’ sets its sight on farm animals and their surrounding flora. Static shots and slow moving zooms follow the grazing animals in their minute inter-species exchanges. When left to roam together the sensibilities of these “beasts” are allowed to surface.