Program 4: There Are Other Worlds They Have Not Told You Of

Please note: This program’s limited rental window at NYFF58 has ended. Explore the latest new releases and restorations in our Virtual Cinema.

Labor of Love
Sylvia Schedelbauer, 2020, Germany, 11m
Stroboscopic color fields and partial images—crashing waves, cascading blood cells, firing neurons—accompany a lulling voiceover, which guides the viewer on a journey of haptic sensation. Spiraling through infinite portals within portals, a hallucinatory descent through mutating forms and exploding energies, Labor of Love offers a unique, multidimensional experience, a vertiginous sensation of proprioception that bends our coordinates of time and space.

Look Then Below
Ben Rivers, 2019, UK, 22m
Third in a suite of collaborations with science fiction author Mark von Schlegell that includes Slow Action (NYFF49) and Urth (2016), Ben Rivers’ Look Then Below blends 16mm cinematography and computer-generated imagery to transform the areas in and around Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset, UK, into a new anthropocenic landscape, forever transformed and transforming. Vermillion skies, iridescent oceans, irradiated vegetation, and ruined ancient palaces lead the way to a subterranean space of glowing mystery.

Figure Minus Fact
Mary Helena Clark, 2020, USA, 13m
Marbled end pages, spectral bouquets filmed in day-for-night blue and hunting camera night vision, stingrays in an aquarium touch pool. Mary Helena Clark’s disjunctive montage encodes a diffuse succession of physical and emotional sensations—intimacy, loss, euphoria—in a subjectless portrait of mourning. Here, an affective space opens up in which visceral vulnerabilities are felt across various forms: bodies and objects, animate and inanimate alike.

While Cursed by Specters
Burak Çevik, 2020, Turkey, 10m
Burak Çevik’s film reworks the stark black-and-white compositions of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s 1984 film Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations) in which German locations stand in for the imagined country of Kafka’s unfinished novel, Amerika. Here, however, depopulated interiors and desolate outdoor spaces carry the phantasmic traces of humanity—voices, shadows, photographs, cars—but never let them appear, suggesting a world in which all connections to the social have come untethered.

In the Air Tonight
Andrew Norman Wilson, 2020, USA, 11m
A ghost story, a simulation, a message unspooling from a fax machine: In the Air Tonight recreates the apocryphal narrative of the origins of Phil Collins’ anthemic ’80s mega-hit, via the voiceover of an “artist friend” nicknamed Slipperman, who narrates a lurid backstory against exquisitely montaged footage evoking shimmering cocaine-fueled LA nightlife, slo-mo moonlit waves, and the glossy black hood of a Ferrari.

Watch the Q&A below.