e-flux Film Award presents: Special Screenings

e-flux Film Award is proud to present a special screening of shortlisted works from the 2nd e-flux Film Award, featuring work by Dhiaa Biya, Kara Ditte Hansen, Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Hey-Yeun Jang, Kyllachy, and the Moojin Brothers. Taking place at 3pm on Saturday, January 25, 2025, the program is curated and presented by the pre-selection committee members Lukas Brasiskis, Dmitry Frolov, and Steff Hui Ci Ling.

Read more about the e-flux Film Award here, and see details on the award ceremony of January 16, 2025 here.

Films

Dhiaa Biya, What else grows on the palm of your hands? (2023, 16 minutes)
In the midst of repetition and apparent numbness, Hayat lives a normal life. The gestures of her hand are constantly linked to the past, where her grandmother’s image resides. As she makes food or waits silently, her hands speak for her and connect past and present. The memories of her beloved grandmother come back time and time again. There is an ongoing dialogue between the two women, the two sets of hands, the two simply beautiful routines. ​In the film we see Hayat between the now and the then. As a child next to her grandmother and as an adult who floats over the memories. The hands of the women in the film are generous, compassionate and kind. They are characters in themselves: teaching and learning, playing and waiting. The preserved routine and the simplicity of daily acts reunites Hayat with her grandmother. They are together despite the passing of time.

Kara Ditte Hansen, Semi-Precious (2024, 15 minutes)
Semi-Precious is a portrait of the filmmaker’s mother, a retired holistic practitioner framed through her crystals, supplements, jewelry, healing instruments, and household adornments. Handwritten labels populate the exteriors of these objects to recall their emotional or spiritual use and are a vital remedy to her memory loss. Geologic and mortal time become enmeshed through: weathered landscapes, wrinkled hands, vibrating exercise machines, sound representations of planets, resonant quartz crystals in clock faces, and the profile of the oldest earth rock identified, the moon.
Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutman, Un Âne (2023, 12 minutes)
Un Âne – ‘a donkey’ in French – follows the route laid out by Chantal Akerman’s shooting in Al-Naqab desert in her last film No Home Movie (2015). The artists, following Akerman’s footsteps, decide to turn the camera where Akerman didn’t and pronounce the name of this particular desert in its Arabic name. By this simple gesture, Un Âne frames this location including its geopolitical history, and actuality, where evidence of colonial practices of segregation and deprivation of the Bedouin community is present and practiced. Efrat and Brutman’s film Vents Violents, shortlisted for the 2nd e-flux Film Award, puts together two films, originally Un Âne and [anan].
Hey-Yeun Jang, live/leave (2024, 14 minutes)
live/leave expresses personal inner discovery of an equilibrium between living and leaving, appearing and disappearing, being and becoming. Amid her domestic daily routine, a woman uses a mirror as a vehicle to reach beyond her space and time. Originally shot on celluloid film, selective frames were transferred to 35mm slide film, which after being mounted was transferred back to the moving image. This process explores the distinction between still image and moving image and what happens in the space and time between.

Kyllachy, Insignificant Specks of Dust in a Tapestry of Stars (2024, 8 minutes)
Astronauts venture to the moon in search of fresh resources. Illegal miners scavenge depleted gold deposits in Africa. The true cost of progress is complex.

Minki Hong, Paradise (2023, 30 minutes)
Jongno, an important commercial district and cultural hub in South Korea’s capital city Seoul, was also an important home for movie theaters, beginning with the establishment of Danseongsa Theater in 1907. However, the number of moviegoers visiting these theaters gradually diminished, and one by one, they closed their doors. However, several discount theaters survived, gradually becoming transformed into meeting places for gay men who sought to establish their own cultural spaces on the fringes of society. Alongside these “theaters patronized by homos,” gay bars also began opening in the back alleys of Jongno, with the area becoming a paradise for gay men in the 1980s.
Moojin Brothers, Three Worlds’ Dialogue (2024, 11 minutes)
Three Worlds’ Dialogue is an omnibus-style video project comprising three volumes: Between Trees, Bipedal Human’s Stride and Silent Transformation. The work explores the material foundation of technological media, humans, and nature discovered in the contemporary secular city. We have scrutinized an individual’s past trajectories and deviated from the technological civilization progressing in a singular direction. Moreover, we have also examined the human epoch, precariously founded on endless standards and judgements, as well as the scenes in nature where human life and death are constantly exchanged as commodity values. We hope that this exploration of the contemporary era, too material and secular, will provide an opportunity to contemplate human compulsions, restrictive pursuits of values, and ecological issues from a broader perspective.

For more information, contact [email protected].

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