In Focus Programme: Hometactics
Once again, the non-competitive selection of the Interaction Festival In Focus presents short documentaries from different parts of the world gathered around one problem question. Programme selector Nadica Denić, a film researcher and curator based in Amsterdam, finds her inspiration in Mariana Ortega’s term home tactics (In-Between, 2016) from which she develops the concept further: “Hometactics is a curated programme of short films that explores first-person filmmaking as a negotiation of belonging. How can first-person filmmaking be understood as a cinematic practice that can negotiate a sense of belonging in a world that feels threatening? The films in this programme turn to the camera in the exploration of the filmmakers’ belonging, prompting them to traverse cities, countries, and even continents.“
Three intimately intoned films from the selection – Longing For Light (Alba Cros Pellisé, 2023), I Don’t Feel at Home Anywhere Anymore (Viv Li, 2020) and Mother Earth’s Inner Organs (Ana Bravo Pérez, 2022) – reflect on home as a category which eternally remains enveloped in tension against the geographical space.
In a nine-day-long visit to her family in Bejing, the director of the accomplishment I Don’t Feel at Home Annywhere Anymore depicts some heavy, and some humorous vignettes of holiday life. The superimposed text onto static shots – scenes with parents, friends, former partners – sums up conversations, at the same time creating a mental and, at times, ironic distance from the situation. Through the places, habits and relationships that were dear to her when she moved to Belgium ten years ago, Viv Li evokes her past experiences, along with visually freezing them: it seems as though the distance is impossible to overcome. In Longing For Light, Alba Cros Pellisé unravels the film strip with warm-coloured scenes, filled with tender sentiments. The displacement here is primarily in the path of discovering Eden, a return to the ground which the author feels she belongs to, while the voice over underlines the vitalistic fascination with the sun in Barcelona – the sun under which it seems as though each picture gains a specific fullness. Mother Earth’s Inner Organs is a journey from Amsterdam to the north of Colombia, which documents coal exploitation, sometimes in a dream-like manner, and sometimes to a scientific precision. And while the people there view Mma – Mother Earth in a mythical sense, almost beyond reason, but at the same time in a familiar sense, for the Western world she is simply another resource in man’s service. In such vein, the experimental, disorienting shots of Mother Earth being worked on, opening up, splitting in two, stand in contrast to scenes that almost depict field recordings of digging. In what way and to what degree we belong to the culture, family, city and earth, are some of the questions that these directors explore – alone, in first person.
The third edition of the Interaction Festival, dedicated to short creative documentaries, will be held from the 20th until the 26th of August in the Summer Garden of the City Cultural Center in Užice, that is, from the 21st until the 25th of August in the SKC Požega Cinema and the Cultural Center of Čačak.
Author of the text: Ana Filipović, critic of the Filmoskopija portal.