IK1 - hezurbeltzak & song´s d´une femme de menage

beyond the shadow of a doubt, the quality of the "IK1" block of short films just screened was very high. starting out with "1977" by PEQUE VARELA fired off a series of animated works, showing that some of the most vibrant film work lingers in that genre - quite evident by the sheer amount of animated films in this festival´s program. continued with "DON`T ASK" by current NYC-residing TOVA BECK-FRIEDMAN, has a level of attitude that surprised, and elated, me. the films use of archival footage from 1940´s NEW YORK CITY, cross-cut with new interview material about female JEWISH identity, creates a piece of film which in its short time frame (3minutes) takes you on a voyage of time, constantly re-adressing the issue of where we are headed for the future.

"HEZURBELTZAK, A COMMON GRAVE" by Basque-filmmaker IZIBENE ONEDERRA is one of my personal favouries so far. also an animated piece, it is highly evocative as it illustrates a degenerate world where its content is quite jarring. reminiscent of H.R. GEIGER´s dark, twisted sub-world where the dark is the normative and the fetischism is key, it illustrates animation and its possibilies in all its gore and glory. but beyond content and form, its essence manages to reach into, and under, one´s own thoughts and fears. see it here:



another one of my (stylistic) favourites so far, is the 3 minute short "LE DERNIER CRI" ("THE LATEST FASHION"). it´s director ERWIN OLAF is nothing short of a complete re-working of human self-illusions and the importance of style and fashion in its most perverted form. if only it had been longer!

next, "SONGS D´UNE FEMME DE MENAGE" ("CLEANING LADY´s DREAMS"), with its great use of colour and mood, offers a stylish cinematography. the human and lonely story of the the Turkish woman GÜL and her everyday-work of cleaning, has an almost ROY ANDERSSON-esque tone it its striving to bring to attention the little details of life. even though it is evident that much attention and hard work has gone into the production, the director BANU AKSEKI manages to do that which I appreciate more than anything else: doing a film where the motto "less is more" seems to have been a mantra. a quite intriguing and moving piece of film, where the human essence is at center.

"HARVEST TIME" by Finnish SAMI KORJUS is a humorous, and dark, tale of a day at a farm in the middle of FINLAND, reaching absurd levels of inter-action between human beings. the film "THREE LOVE STORIES" manages to combine archival footage with the director SVETLANA FILIPPOVA's own animated drawings, bridging the gap between reality and fiction. while doing she, she manages to almost make the animated sections seem to be more alive than the historical footage, since the style of the black and white drawings contains an urgency to it which is a stark contrast to the low-vibe feel of what seems to be a distant and strange world in the authentic archival material.

finally, the hilarious (and the most mainstream film I´ve seen here so far) "I AM BOB", with the actual SIR BOB GELDOF totally pissing on himself and his image of an international rock star slash anti-poverty icon, is a nice breather to the more heavier pieces of films in the block. rounding the block of with huge laughs and applauds, DONALD RICE´s film is a nice piece of entertainment fiction.