After the themes Face-to-Face (about Portraiture) and Becoming-Landscape (about Space), the third edition of SMAFF focuses on the notion of Time. In fact, the common understanding of TIME is associated with History, which is perceived as a linear succession of one thing after another.
But Time is an overlapping of multiple events and experiences that occur simultaneously. (read more)
There are always multiple sides to events and occurrences. However, the dominant historical perspective often cancels the multiplicity in favour of a linear understanding of events. What remains is always set by the main narrative, which has the ability to shape and control how history is remembered, what is neglected and silenced, and crucially, what history is passed to future generations.
In order to approach minor or forgotten histories, perhaps it would be helpful to think of alternative temporalities in terms of ‘meanwhile’. When we read the dominant history, we have to think about what else was happening ‘meanwhile’.
With the theme Meanwhile Histories comes the opportunity to challenge the dominant narratives and perspectives that have shaped our understanding of history. By acknowledging the existence of parallel histories and alternative temporalities, we can uncover the stories and experiences that have been overlooked or silenced.
Screenings, talks and panel sessions are organised around the theme of conflicting temporalities: history, memory, iteration, obsolescence, ownership, transmission, and material decay.
Topics included the problematics of original and copy in the case of iterative works; the time-based or event-like nature of the unique versus the replicated object in that context; the definition of memory as a concept or value given technologies of replication; models of collaborative recording and paperwork—how contracts, working drawings, certificates, and the like serve as representations of objects and ideas.
Exploring Meanwhile Histories allows us to consider personal accounts, marginalized archives and neglected memories, providing a more comprehensive and accurate account of reality. It invites us to question who has been given the power to shape history and whose voices have been suppressed.
Furthermore, alternative histories not only offer us a deeper understanding of the past, but they also have the potential to shape our future. By recognizing and amplifying the experiences of marginalized groups such as black communities, women, L.G.B.T. individuals, and the environment, we can challenge the inequalities and injustices that persist in our society today.
In essence, Meanwhile Histories encourages us to engage with a multiplicity of perspectives and imagine a more inclusive and equitable future. They allow us to navigate beyond the limitations of linear historical narratives and embrace the complexity and diversity of human experiences. By striving to discover “what else was happening meanwhile,” we can gain a more complete understanding of our shared reality and actively contribute to reshaping our collective memory.
The Jury changes every year, is composed of international members and according to the annual topic. The Jury for the 2024 edition is composed of: Luciano Rigolini, Natalia Sielewicz and Chomwan Weeraworawit.
Day 1 – September 12th
Morning
11:00 | Flavio Paolucci. From Guelmim to Biasca, Villi Hermann
2024 · color · CH · FR, DE, ITA / EN · 65’
A German museum had scheduled an exhibition of Flavio Paolucci’s work for 2022 but the pandemic prevented the artist from travelling to Germany. So, he created the work in his studio in Biasca, Switzerland, and then destroyed it. This creation will only exist in this film and only film viewers will see the work.
12:00 | Taking Venice, Amei Wallach
2023 · color · USA · EN · 98’ · In competition · Swiss premiere
The film uncovers the true story behind rumours that the U.S. government and a team of high-placed insiders rigged the 1964 Venice Biennale – the Olympics of art – so their chosen artist, Robert Rauschenberg, could win the Grand Prize.
Afternoon
15:00 | Arte Povera, Notes for History, Andrea Bettinetti
2023 · color · IT · ITA / EN · 88’ · In competition · Swiss premiere
Through the words of its protagonists, the documentary sheds light on how Arte Povera has profoundly influenced the development of contemporary art and how it is relevant to modern society for its poetics and values.
16:30 | Conversation Ewa Hess + Michele Bongiorno
17:00 | Dieter Roth, Edith Jud
2003 · color & b/w · CH · DE / EN · 120’
The artist Dieter Roth combined art and life in a unique way. Conceived as an inward and outward journey, the film explores the link between art and life. Roth’s works are the starting point, including videos and films in which the artist himself appears.
Evening
21:00 | Asterión, Francesco Montagner
2022 · color · CZ · 15’ · In competition
This silent visual poem is the story of a double fate, the one of the taxidermist and the one of the bull, both doomed to succumb to their own restless natures. The man is inwardly transformed and finds in the animal’s skin a way to cope with his own mortality.
21:15 | Pet Shop Days, Olmo Schnabel
2023 · color · UK · EN · 110’ · In competition · Swiss premiere
Impulsive black sheep Alejandro and pet store employee Jack, enter a whirlwind romance that sends them down the rabbit hole of depravity in Manhattan’s underworld.
23:00 | hold on to her, Robin Vanbesien
2024 · color · BE · KU, FR, EN, NL / EN · 80’ · In competition · Swiss premiere
In the refusal of the shortage of truth, the film produces a counter-evidence of a deadly event, and practices justice as a sensuous social space for collective mourning and healing.
Day 2 – September 13th
Morning
11:00 | E for Eileen, Gerard & Kelly
2023 · color · FR · FR, EN / EN · 24’ · In competition · World premiere
Eileen Gray spends her last day in the house she designed and built. Her solitude is interrupted by the arrival of old friends who threaten to drown her in the past. This speculative fiction, shot entirely in Gray’s modernist villa E-1027, is the third in a series of films by Gerard & Kelly set in iconic French architecture.
11:30 | Moi Aussi, Je Regarde, Ingel Vaikla
2024 · color · BE · FR / EN · 22’ · In competition · Swiss premiere
An experimental documentary portrays the unité d’habitation in Marseille by Le Corbusier through the stories of its female inhabitants in an attempt to give the building a view beyond the masculine world of modernity.
12:00 | The Sense of Tuning, Beka & Lemoine
2023 · color · FR · IN, EN / EN · 98’ · In competition
The documentary explores Bijoy Jain’s sensibility in the course of a day-long encounter: twelve hours of intense wandering that immerses the audience in the streets of Mumbai, a city the architect’s work is closely tied to.
Afternoon
14:30 | May ‘68 in ‘78, Michel Auder
2024 · color · USA · 67’ · In competition
In 1968, Michel Auder documented the revolts in Paris, but lost the footage. Exactly ten years after the events, Auder restored these cinematic memories by interviewing Parisians about their personal memories of May 1968.
15:40 | Imperfect three image films, Jonas Mekas
1995 · USA · No dialogue · 6’
Mekas chooses the haiku in that this Japanese poetic genre represents the ultimate expression of a contact with the here and now: he reaches the essence of the haiku without translating the literary genre into an audiovisual surrogate.
15:45 | Juste le temps, Robert Cahen
1983 · FR · No dialogue · 13’
Cahen formulates an implied fiction within a dreamlike journey of a woman on a train moving through the French countryside: by manipulating images he reconceives time to intimate passages of vision and temporality.
16:00 | Conversation Ewa Hess + Robert Cahen
16:30 | L’Automne, Marcel Hanoun
1972 · FR · FR/EN · 72’
A technical film, motionless, deceptively motionless, on editing. A director and his assistant will edit a film before us in an endless dialectic of looking, watching, movie filming, movie filmed.
17:45 | Conversation Róisín Tapponi + Stefano Rabolli Pansera
18:30 | Welcome Reception
Evening
21:00 | Time as perspective, Rosa Barba
2012 · color · DE, USA · EN · 12’
Shot in the Texan desert and showing huge oil pumps constantly repeating the same mechanical movement, the film evokes a temporal horizon which is hard to fixate – it could be a futuristic vision or a historical document. The drilling pumpjacks keep moving but never change, a monotonous labor that becomes monumental.
21:15 | The Wonder Way, Emmanuelle Antille
2023 · color · CH · EN, FR / EN · 94’ · In competition
An exploration in search of extraordinary territories, terrestrial or celestial paradises, intriguing and uncharted. A journey out of time, seeking encounters with those who imagine other worlds within this world.
23:00 | Preemptive Listening, Aura Satz
2024 · color · UK · EN · 89’ · In competition
In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, ‘Preemptive Listening’ is an ode to the sirens of a changing world. Will we hear them in advance? Does an alarm have to be alarming?
Day 3 – September 14th
Morning
11:00 | Parsi, Eduardo Williams
2018 · BUI, AR, CH · ES/EN · 23’ · In competition
The immersive work, shot with 360-degree cameras, explores the rhythmic, discursive language of Mariano Blatt’s poem “No es” against the perpetually moving people of Guinea-Bissau.
11:25 | Pude ver un Puma, Eduardo Williams
2011 · AR · ES/en · 18’
An accident sends a group of young boys on a journey from the high roofs of their neighbourhood, passing through its destruction, to the deepest part of the Earth.
11:45 | The Heart of Heritage, Nina Degraeve
2023 · color · BE · NL, FR / EN · 48’ · In competition
At the heart of Belgium’s Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, a team of researchers is preserving Belgian heritage. Through the conservation and restoration of altered paintings and sculptures, fragile objects and religious buildings ravaged by recent floods, a rare and precious time is revealed.
12:40 | Different Danny, Amshu Chukki
2023 · IN · EN/EN · 16’ · In competition
Different Danny and Other Stories foregrounds the skills, devices and conditions to conjure an atmosphere: props, stands, temporary sets and stretchable bodies delve into cinematic time: non-linear, ductile and sometimes suspended: time is unraveled against its very source – the city.
Afternoon
14:00 | Lecture by Chiara Vecchiarelli
15:00 | Exergo, Jorge Moneo Quintana
2024 · color · ES · EU · ES / EN · 20’ · In competition
By focusing on the peripheral or hidden details of some paintings in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, this woman’s voice relates several stories linked to the social, economic and psychological conditions of the artists, both past and present.
15:20 | Future Tense: Conversations at Manchester Museum, Ero Sevan
2023 · color · UK · EN · 22’ · In competition · Swiss Premiere
Using Manchester Museum as a local case study, Future Tense traces how colonial violence is at the heart of many museum collections across the United Kingdom.
15:45 | She MAD, S1:E4, Martine Syms
2020 · Color · USA · EN · 11’
Drawing from early cinema, television, the internet, social media, and ambient footage produced by phones and surveillance, Syms addresses the ways in which representations of black identity and gender have been shaped throughout the history of moving image.
16:00 | Dancing in the Streets, Mark Bradford
2019 · color · USA · En · 5’
Artist Mark Bradford’s video, centered on the titular song by Martha and the Vandellas, weaves together the past and present of charged landscapes into one cohesive moment.
16:15 | Green in the Grooves, Tamara Henderson
2023 · color · AUS, UK · Folly and music · 27’ · In competition · Swiss premiere
The visual poem registers patterns in objects and atmospheric phenomena and logs their appearance in dreams to expand conventional registers of consciousness. This process of tapping into dreams connects to Surrealist traditions.
17:00 | Outside the Gates, Naeem Mohaiemen
110’ · In competition
While a crisis generated by disciplining dominated headlines, Columbia University School of Arts students continued to make their work in quiet and persistent timbres. Films by Krista Gay, Rama Ghanem, Sharon Lee, Sasha Fishman, Erica Enriquez, Elisheva Gavra, Fadl Fakhouri, and Benjamin Salesse are compiled here by their faculty Naeem Mohaiemen and curated by Adam Szymczyk.
18:50 | Conversation Naeem Mohaiemen + Adam Szymczyk
Evening
21:00 | The Watchman, Ali Cherri
2024 · color · IT, FR · TUR, EN · 26’ · In competition
A soldier spends his nights in a watchtower waiting for an enemy that doesn’t arrive, until suddenly strange lights appear on the horizon. Ali Cherri creates a universe in which a suspended and void time opens the door to ghostly presences from a past made of war.
21:30 | Conversation Ali Cherri + Leonardo Bigazzi
22:30 | Prize Giving Ceremony
Day 4 – September 15th
Morning
11:00 | A State in a State, Tekla Aslanishvili
2022 · color · GE · RU/EN · 47’ · In competition
An experimental documentary film that follows the processes of construction, disruption, and fragmentation of railroads in the South Caucasus region and examines railways as the materialization of the fragile political borders that have reemerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
11:45 | Tsam, Chimed Tudev, Darima Tumur
2024 · color · MO · MO/EN · 47’
Tsam dance, which was born during the 8th century in Mongolia, is one of the most important ritual of Tibetan Buddhism. The documentary focuses on the persistence of the cyclical temporality of ritual even under the communist regime.
13:00 | Conversation Ewa Hess + Darima Tumur
Afternoon
15:00 | A Childless Village, Reza Jamali
2022 · color · IR · AZ / EN · 81’ · In competition · Swiss premiere
Twenty years ago, in a remote village, an old filmmaker made a film on the sterility of the women villagers, but in order to protect their dignity, the women stole the footages and burnt them. After decades, the villagers find out that the men are barren and there is nothing wrong with the women.
16:30 | Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday, Young-jun Tak
2024 · color · DE · EN · 20’ · In competition · Swiss premiere
The film challenges binary presentation of genders through queer male bodies and movements. It juxtaposes the hypermasculinity, staged by Spanish Legion soldiers’ ritual, and the hyperfemininity, worshiped by male dancers, lifting up and carrying the female protagonist in Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet “Manon”.
17:00 | In Praise of Darkness, Adrián Balseca
2024 · color · EC · No dialogue · 17’ · In competition
Through the production of an obsidian prosthetic eye, body and territory are mirrored as traces of an inverse time, which uncover syndromes of our present.
17:30 | Equifinality, Hans Baumann
2024 · color · USA ·EN · 10’ · In competition
Shot around Hawai’s, the documentary probes the haunting metaphysics of scientific fieldwork and features archival footage from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, researchers from the Smithsonian Center for Earth and Planetary Studies.
Evening
21:00 | HEDEIHEID, Paul McCarthy
2024 · color · USA · EN · 62’ · In competition · World premiere
A provocative exploration of familial and surreal themes set in a Swiss field. This film contrasts serene landscapes with intense, unsettling imagery. Through the interactions of a grandfather, father, and others, McCarthy delves into complex dynamics, blurring the line between reality and fantasy to create a deeply immersive and challenging narrative.
22:00 | A&E: Adolf & Eva / Adam & Eve, The Counter 2, 28:32, Paul McCarthy
2024 · color · USA · EN · 28’ · In competition · Swiss premiere
As part of the continued evolution of Paul McCarthy’s ongoing A&E project, begun in 2019, the film takes his satirically uncompromising body of work to yet another level with the integration of AI argumentation.