Showing

Not giddy yet aerial
World Premiere Watch trailerJenny Holt | United Kingdom | 25 mins
William Wordsworth’s first sighting of Grasmere vale in the English Lake District, his home for many years, was from Red Bank - an established viewpoint from where landscape could best be appreciated by the Lake District’s earliest visitors, tourists of the picturesque. Over 200 years later, the Lake District's familiarity as image, given rise to through picturesque ideals, has evolved into a brand. In a valley visitors are drawn to for its revered and familiar rural landscape, yet where 40% of its residential properties are second or holiday homes, Grasmere has a complicated relationship with tourism, and a difficult balance to sustain.
Taking the Red Bank viewpoint as a master image, this film aims to look beyond the scene to invoke landscape through interwoven lines of everyday narratives. Observed everyday activities, shot over the course of a year, evoke both residents’ and tourists’ perspectives – marking lambs before turning them onto the fell; a coach party in a gift shop; hill walking on Helvellyn; lessons in the local school. These narrative lines are interwoven by means of a loose symphonic structure approximating four themes, counterpointing the tensions provoked by a landscape created by farming and a present day economy sustained by tourism, and thinking about the landscape as a place of experiences, while remaining in dialogue with its views.
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White Elephant
Watch trailerKristof Bilsen | 34 mins
Somebody passed by one day:
‘Mama, does the Post really work?
If I leave this letter with you, will it ever arrive?’
I told him: 'of course it will'. He started laughing.
'I know for sure it will never reach its destination.'
'White Elephant' is a documentary about the Central Post-Office and its employees in Kinshasa, DR Congo. This grandiose relic of the colonial past has trapped its employees in a frozen timewarp
from which they are planning their escape. From past to present, through the cracks in the walls, and leaks in the ceilings, we glimpse present-day Congo.
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