EMAF: Perfect Timing

Perfect Timing is the Title of this Year‘S Emaf Tourprogram presenting a selection of the Award-Winners of the Festival 2008. Form, style and content is as diversified and manifold like never before. Found footage, digital animation, art tableau, documental view and satiric exaggeration distinguish the prizewinning films this year.

The EMAF Tour 2008 presents as Best Of Compilation the prizewinning films of this years festival.

FALSCHE FREUNDE Sylvia Schedelbauer, D, 2007, 5:00

SECRET LIFE Reynold Reynolds, USA, 2008, 10:30

DUNKELLAND Ilka Lauchstädt, D, 2007, 13:00

PLOT POINT Nicolas Provost, B, 2007, 13:30

RAUSCHEN & BRAUSEN I Daniel Burkhardt, D, 2007, 5:00

KEMPINSKI Neil Beloufa, F/Mali, 2007, 14:00

TAKE INTO THE AIR MY QUIET BREATH Julia Meltzer & David Thorne, USA, 2007, 17:00

The program starts with the film FALSCHE FREUNDE by Sylvia Schedelbauer, who received the Experimentalfilm-Prize for this work. The Jury of German Filmcritics stated: "With the simple means of old black-and-white archive material and rather familiar, albeit slightly alienated horror soundtrack, the director manages to draw the viewer into the nightmarish atmosphere of the images by the unsettling rhythm of the cuts."

The international Jury split the EMAF-Award ex aequo and gave it to two works. SECRET LIFE is specially made Single-version for the Tour of EMAF of the two-channel-installation by Reynold Reynolds, who notes: "One thing that I enjoy about dreams is the way that narrative collapses. Emotion and context replace the question of plot. The subconscious meaning of things becomes prevalent."

It follows DUNKELLAND by Ilka Lauchstaedt, who juggles in her Video from 2007 with cinematographic and lyrical text-passages which appear like intertitles in silent movies and construct the subtle fl oating dramatic scaffolding which bind the dreamlike sequences. Vanishing points are in focus, lines which seem to disappear in the endless perspectives of the landscape. All these places emanate abandonment, startled out of a long-lasting sleep. They are rarely visited. Lauchstädt˙s character figures arrive there in a trance. They are on the trail of their own memory and stop at nothing.

The second prize-winner of the EMAF-Award is Nicolas Provost. In PLOT POINT via the soundtrack he condenses everyday streetlife into a crime-story. The Jury states: "The crowded streets of New York City turn into fi ctive, cinematographic scenery. Provost is playing with our collective memory, its cinematic codes and narrative languages questioning the boundaries between a staged, suggested reality and authentic fiction."

At this years EMAF the Digital Sparks Award was given to RAUSCHEN & BRAUSEN I the videopart of a multilayered installation by Daniel Burkhardt. "The image of a skyscraper facade, tristesse and urbanity. A zoom releases us from the representation and sets us in motion. The composition of image and sound evolves a maelstrom into the unforeseen and into a bottomless abyss" Burkhardt manages to create a challenging artwork from the daily traffi c in front of an apartment building. As starting point serves a 16 minute static recording of the building. At times the view is interrupted by a car passing quickly. Through the movement the image is changing. The effect is as simple as subtle.

The Dialog-Award of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs initiated to foster the intercultural exchange was split ex aequo as well this year. The Jury expresses: "KEMPINSKI by Neil Beloufa, who lives in Paris, gets the Dialogue Prize because this work questions our expectations and projections of Africa in a very clever way and on a extremely high visual level. The story is set in a small village in Africa. It is night time with little artificial light. The villagers are talking directly into the camera, telling present-time stories of a futuristic, magical world which seems to connect to African culture."

To complete the program we present the second Dialog-Award winners Julia Meltzer and David Thorne who made a 45minutes work about the private and societal Life in Syria. TAKE INTO THE AIR MY QUIET BREATH is the first part of this political and yet poetic documentary in fi ve parts, each stylistically autonomous and concise, which delivers a kaleidoscopic and subtle portrait of Syria, opening up possible futures. In a very elaborate but simple visual language the work offers a different perspective on a place where people live between the competing forces of a repressive regime, a growing conservative Islamic movement, and intense pressure of the United States.

Curated by/ Text: Ralf Sausmikat
European Media Art Festival