22.04. ‐ 27.04.2025

LICHTER ART AWARD

More information Lichter FilmfestLichter Filmfest

Die Welt ist an ihren Rändern blau / The world is blue at its edges

Iris Blauensteiner & Christine Moderbacher
2021 / 14:30 Min.


The world is blue at its edges is about an uncertain life’s future and in many ways everything that speaks against life. Current and historic world affairs are portrayed in a dystopian fashion. Using found footage via youtube and other TV and web channels it deals with the covid pandemic, lockdown life, past and present police states, the iron curtain, migration and all the emotions that all these realities provoke. And all this from the perspective of an insecure, almost frightened mother-to-be. The world is blue at its edges had its world premiere at This Human World – International Human Rights Film Festival in Vienna.

Soum

Alice Brygo
2021 / 30 Min.


On the outskirts of Paris, Inti, Jai and Pauline are looking for an empty place – a rift through which the “Trouble Generation” they embody could slip, between the laws of the old world and the uncertainty of the one to come. A portrait of our time that oscillates between documentary film, art performance and surrealism. While occupying a former bank and waiting for the expiry of the period from which they can legally assert their domicile, the three squatters furnish the place with their memories and performative games. From intimate documentaries to dreamlike fiction, their spiritual and identity journeys unfold as they search for their place in a fragile present burdened with legacies from the colonial past. Soum had its World Premiere at the 72nd Berlinale.

Unleash the Beast, Chapter 2. Hagenbecks Zoo

Catherina Cramer & Giulietta Ockenfuß
2021 / Installation / 27 Min.


The video work Unleash the Beast (a series in 3 chapters) mixes elements of television documentation and fictional film. The combination of both formats breaks down patriarchal narrative forms and questions how history is made. The first chapter of the series tells the story of a female aquatic monkey whose path through life imagines an evolutionary story shaped by feminism. Unleash the Beast, Chapter 2. Hagenbeck's Zoo deals with questions of identity and transformation, as well as continuities of colonialism. The setting of the series is Mexico. In Chapter 2, the fictional protagonist, a water monkey, founds a political movement. The prose text A Report to an Academy (1917) by Franz Kafka and historical facts on the wild animal trade are mixed with improvised dialogues along with a critical view upon the company history of the Hagenbeck entrepreneurial family.

The empty sphere

Stéphanie Roland
2021 / 19 Min.


The empty sphere is an experimental documentary portraying a space object and its fall into the darkness of a space cemetery. A woman scientist reveals her attachment to this object and the absence of images documenting this mysterious place. As a reverse sci-fi journey, this essay mixes reality and fiction to guide us, like a stalker, to the outskirts of an invisible place.

Acts of Improbable Genius

Melanie Jame Wolf
2022 / 18 Min.


Melanie James Wolf’s Acts of Improbable Genius explores the libidinal economy of comedy: who the complex machinery of desire permits to be funny, and who it does not. Shot in black and white, this two channel video is inhabited by two anachronistic archetypal comedian personas: Stand Up Ron and Pierrot the Clown. Both are played by the artist herself in a form which draws on Renate Lorenz’s notion of transtemporal drag. These two ghosts of humor-past perform the same stand-up-routine on an eternal loop. This glitching use of repetition produces a hauntological survey of what it is to be an entertainer whilst seeking to displace the myth of the Universal Everyman. The film celebrates the death of a certain kind of comedian: the mythologies he represents and the violence he redistributes. Whilst simultaneously paying deep respects to the complex labor of professional performers — usually rendered invisible as a part of the act.



Lichter Art Award

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