Uninhabitable Earth: Spectres of Destruction and Renewal

With the planet facing existential threat on such an overwhelming scale, questions of how to represent it, and who speaks in its name, are as prescient as ever. These questions are discussed in a series of films concerned as much with renewal and reconnection as with collapse.

Mothers of the Land, an indigenous-made film by Álvaro & Diego Sarmiento, follows a group of women battling climate breakdown and the loss of biodiversity whilst farming land in the Andean highlands of Peru. We present the film alongside a workshop and Mass Seed Deposit in collaboration with Glasgow Seed Library, open to all.

Tamara Kotevska and Ljubo Stefanov’s Honeyland introduces us to one of the festival’s most magnetic screen presences, Hatidze Muratova, the last in a long line of Macedonian wild beekeepers whose story serves as a poignant microcosm of what we all stand to lose if we continue to ignore the fragile connection between humanity and natural world.

Themes of extinction, sanctuary and interspecies communication are profoundly explored in Carlos Casas’ sensual cine-poem, Cemetery, a film about the final journey of a dying elephant that stalks the outermost boundaries of nature documentary, adventure stories and experimental film.

And our artist-in-focus this year is Ana Vaz, whose mesmerising short films fuse ethnographic documentary and speculative fiction to form a singular critique of the relationship between myth and history, people and place – whilst probing the limits of cinematic representation.

Filter

Honeyland

Nestled in an isolated mountain region deep within the Balkans, Hatidze Muratova lives with her ailing mother in a village without roads, electricity or running water. She’s the last in a long line of wild beekeepers, eking out a living farming honey in small batches to be sold in the closest city – a mere four hours’ walk away. Hatidze’s peaceful existence is thrown into upheaval by the arrival of an itinerant family, with their roaring engines, seven rambunctious children and herd of cattle. Hatidze optimistically meets the promise of change with an open heart, it doesn’t take long however, before a conflict evolves that exposes the fundamental tension between nature and humanity, harmony and discord, exploitation and sustainability.

Followed by a conversation hosted by Femspectives.

—

Co-presented by Femspectives

Supported by Oxfam

Info

Posted: 3 October 2019

Tags:

More Info

Kime Ani (audio documentary)

Thursday 24 – Sunday 27 October
All Day
Unticketed

Kime Ani, in the Tahltan language, means ‘home coming’ or ‘let’s go home’. It is a seven-part electronic work, sampling audio from recordings of three generations of artist Edzi’u’s matriarchs and grandmothers’ stories, recorded as early as 2017 and as late as 30 years ago. Edzi’u’s songs are vessels of history, tradition, and adaptation; a record of Indigenous experience through a contemporary Indigenous lens.

Edzi’u is a mixed race Tahltan and inland Tlingit artist, songwriter and composer. Her songs are an incarnation of her family’s ancient tradition of storytelling, realized by designing sound through vintage and current audio recordings, electronic instruments and the voice.

Kime Ani will be free to listen to throughout the festival weekend at sound stations.

Info

Posted: 3 October 2019

Tags:

More Info

Mothers of the Land & Mass Seed Deposit with Glasgow Seed Library

Mothers of the Land is an indigenous made film accompanying five women from the Andean highlands of Peru in their daily struggle to maintain a traditional and organic way of working the land.

Peru is predicted to be among the three countries most affected by climate change. Farmers in the region use both traditional and modern agricultural techniques to maximize clean energy and combat extreme changes in weather.

Followed by a workshop with Glasgow Seed Library. Bring your saved seeds for a Mass Seed Deposit, hear from people passionate about seed saving and pick up some skills and techniques. We invite everyone interested in resilience and food sovereignty to get involved.

UK PREMIERE

This screening will be captioned for D/deaf and Hard of Hearing audiences.
Supported by Film Hub Scotland, part of the BFI’s Film Audience Network, and funded by Screen Scotland and Lottery funding from the BFI.

—

Glasgow Seed Library is a collaborative project, instigated by Glasgow Community Food Network (GCFN) and the Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow (CCA). It has been supported by the Gaia Foundation UK Seed Sovereignty Programme.

Info

Posted: 3 October 2019

Tags:

More Info

Cemetery

Carlos Casas’ deeply sensory film Cemetery follows an elephant, a mahout and the poachers in their pursuit as they move toward the mythical place known as the elephant graveyard. As the journey transitions from the jungle through stages of death, images begin to fall away, opening onto a rich sonic landscape.

Ten years in the making, Cemetery weaves together field recordings from around the globe. Finding a striking juncture between nature documentary, experimental film, road movie and soundscape, the film opens up questions about life cycles and memory, colonialism and extinction, conservation and the environment and interspecies relationships.

SCOTTISH PREMIERE

Info

Posted: 3 October 2019

Tags:

More Info

Ana Vaz: The Voyage Out

Our 2019 artist-in-focus is Ana Vaz, an artist and filmmaker whose films, installations and performances speculate upon the relationships between myth & history, self and other through a cosmology of references and perspectives. Assemblages of found and shot materials, her films combine ethnography and speculation – exploring the f(r)ictions imprinted upon ‘cultivated’ & ‘savage’ environments.

Ana joins us at the festival to present a special reading/screening around her upcoming debut feature film, The Voyage Out.

The Voyage Out takes the toxic disaster in Fukushima as a synecdoche of the impending ecological disaster and the possibility of renewal. It presents an ethnography of the future, an ethnography otherwise. Two years after the toxic disaster in Fukushima, a new island has emerged in the Ogasawara archipelago, in the far south of Japan. The Voyage Out stages, in a dreamlike and experimental form, the sensitive imaginary of these two places, and the way in which they compose a world crossed by the spectre of destruction and renewal.

Followed by a conversation between Ana and Charlotte Ashcroft (Film Hub Scotland) 

—

Arrows, Gazes, Points of Intensity: The Films Of Ana Vaz screens Saturday, 5:45pm

Info

Posted: 3 October 2019

Tags:

More Info

Arrows, Gazes, Points of Intensity: The Films of Ana Vaz

Our 2019 artist-in-focus is Ana Vaz, an artist and filmmaker whose films, installations and performances speculate upon the relationships between myth & history, self and other through a cosmology of references and perspectives. Assemblages of found and shot materials, her films combine ethnography and speculation – exploring the f(r)ictions imprinted upon ‘cultivated’ & ‘savage’ environments.

This collection of films proposes a critical reflection on the relationship between colonialism, modernity and the impending ecological disaster – exploring the colonial and post-colonial exchange between Europe and the Americas.

Interrogating the filmmaker’s gaze and relationship to the ‘other’, and through the development of a distinctively “embodied” cinema, Ana’s films explore complex relationships between environments, territories and hybrid histories, pushing the boundaries of our perception. Associations of images, sounds and texts, her works propose a corporeal and subjective experience of being in the world.

Followed by a conversation between Ana and artist Alexander Storey Gordon.

Curated by LUX Scotland

Part of our Artist in Focus: Ana Vaz series, which also includes a presentation by Ana around her upcoming feature film The Voyage Out, Sun 3:30pm

Info

Posted: 2 October 2019

Tags:

More Info

Films

Honeyland
Kime Ani (audio documentary)
Mothers of the Land & Mass Seed Deposit with Glasgow Seed Library
Cemetery
Ana Vaz: The Voyage Out
Arrows, Gazes, Points of Intensity: The Films of Ana Vaz