CURE 8

Where I put films together

back to suffering

LO/ GR/ NT
2021 - 2024
Notebook
Lipstick

Through this curation, we aim to discuss the profound impact of the occupation in Palestine by highlighting the country’s beauty, rich traditions, and the everyday, intimate moments shared by its inhabitants. Our goal is to portray Palestine as a place where people lead dreams, futures, everyday lives—with families, homes, jobs, and hobbies—and to provide a perspective that reveals how these ordinary activities are continuously disrupted by the occupation.

We are centering this curation on intimacy and daily life to shift the perception of Palestine from that of a war zone—a view often emphasized in Western media. This portrayal alienates and distances us from the reality of Palestine as a country with rich significance, history, culture, and life, just like any other.”

put together for Anafi Film Festival 2024.

What was the color of your childhood room, and do you still imagine life through these lenses?
Walls hold a vast repository of memories encapsulated within domestic or social environments and simultaneously contribute to shaping history through their architectural presence. The class of their inhabitants is often dictated by the structures themselves, reflecting the social and economic hierarchies of different times and locales. The films in this curation listen to the stories of these walls, which carry a wealth of emotions and histories. The personal, intimate setting of a home is a space where memory is formed, but it also acts as a broader signifier of wealth, class, and position within history and society. Thus, the individual experience is woven into the larger narrative, shaping the collective memory.

put together for Anafi Film Festival 2024.

From the deepest corners of the animators’ minds to our tired eyes late at night, these films come to captivate our imagination. They span from sharp political commentaries on contemporary aspirations for luxury goods to intimate portrayals of domesticity and daily life. They imagine and construct experimental dance pieces and immerse us in horrific military experiments. These peculiar and uncanny works employ a varied mix of animated styles and technologies to narrate stories that will crawl inside your head and make you fear getting into bed.

put together for Anafi Film Festival 2024.

Eroticism and explicit sex have a long history of being censored. Yet, for as long as moving images have existed, sex has been one of their subjects. Whether erotic images are subtle or straightforward, audiences desire to see, and creators yearn to show. All the films in this session, both archival and contemporary, tackle this need through the prism of censorship. Some play with the rules so as to avoid it (Study of the Virgin in School Uniform Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, How I Like It), while others use film to recount censored stories (Lasting Marks, Nazarbazi, The Booth). A few were censored before reaching cult status (Dyketactics), and some were created to combat or to play with censorship itself (Reverse Censorship). Together, they take you on a titillating journey, where, ultimately, eroticism prevails.

put together for Leiden Shorts 2024.

curated by Maya Sfakianaki, Hedda Peters, Billy Guet- Frapard

In the time of invisible wires, our need to connect grows. We are searching for the sounds of each other's fluids, the fierce flow of longing when our bodies touch. Our constant hunt for sensual liquids to fill our evergrowing void sometimes succeeds - and we are united for that moment, we are complete and in euphoric currents we flow. Others, we wander again in pain, as if missing a part that never belonged to us.

A special programme presented as part of FOLD London's futur.shock series for 2024 that understands touch and physical contact as the ultimate avenue to establish a connection with the other but most importantly with the self.

put together for London Short Film Festival in collaboration with Fold London 2024.

In the time of invisible wires, our need to connect grows. We are searching for the sounds of each other's fluids, the fierce flow of longing when our bodies touch. Our constant hunt for sensual liquids to fill our evergrowing void sometimes succeeds - and we are united for that moment, we are complete and in euphoric currents we flow. Others, we wander again in pain, as if missing a part that never belonged to us.

A programme that understands touch and physical contact as the ultimate avenue to establish a connection with the other but most importantly with the self.

put together for Anafi Film Festival 2024.

Curatorial Takeover for Tape Collective , looking at the history of the nude and erotic representation on camera.

From the sculptures of ancient Greece to Expressionism and the Dada, the anthropomorphic nude has taken many shapes and forms to evoke a diversity of feelings and suggest various societal norms or changes. Since antiquity, the artistic subject of an idealised, symmetrical male figure was used as the exemplification of rigorousness and virtue, a stereotype to be continuously challenged in modern art of the late 19th and early 20th century which dismantled and reassembled the human figure aiming in a realism in feeling and emotion rather than figure.

The overwhelming strength and undeniable symmetry of the Greek warrior’s athletic figure, also reawakened in the Italian Renaissance and exemplified in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (14th century BC), was associated with triumph, glory and even more excellence. The female nude makes a late (and shy) appearance around the time when Praxiteles constructs naked Aphrodite (4th Century BC). Still symmetrical and idealised the female body emerges in sculptures and the visual arts - always censored in fear of awakening obscenity. For the ancient Greek, nudity as a form of power and liberty only applied to portrayals of male bodies while female nudity was considered a taboo and was extremely frowned upon.

Tracing back into the ancient Greek nudes, and their basic contradictions, one soon realises how these early representations have influenced the ideals of beauty and shaped generations of unrealistic representations and expectations. The idealised self, with symmetrical proportions and fair hair and skin, almost deprived from its animalistic, sexual nature is throughout history associated with ideas of excellence and humbleness. An idea which disproves itself when representing the female figure, since considered (by the male artist) sexual by nature but portrayed with an overpowering voyeurism which steals its eroticism.

There came a time in Western art when creators turned around and pointed the finger to classicism and neoclassicism, and emerged themselves in deconstructing and reimagining the nude in movements such as Cubism, Expressionism, the Dada and artists such as Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picaso and Lucian Freud. Artists who emphasise in the nude, its raw, lustful, sick, angry, twisted and sexual nature - an interpretation which regardless of the extravagance in technique, is in essence far closer to reality.

Despite the emergence of cinema in a quite avant-garde time in history where the aforementioned artistic movements were flourishing in the visual arts, it did not bring with it the revolution the medium was (and is) capable of. There were female directors, such as the first ever director in history, Alice Guy Blanchet, who experimented with film and its narrative possibilities. Blanchet’s first film The Fairy Of The Cabbages (1986), which is arguably the first narrative film ever made, was actually concerned with the quite controversial subject of childbearing, drawing from an old French fairy tale which rumoured that babies were born out of cabbages and roses. From 1896 to 1906, Guy-Blaché was Gaumont's head of production and is generally considered to be the first filmmaker to systematically develop narrative filmmaking.

Besides the natural curious cinematic awakenings that emerged with the beginnings of silent cinema at the end of the 19th century, a notorious example is any signs of non-heteronormative sexuality on screen were prohibited quite quickly (in 1934) with the implementation of the Motion Picture Production Code in Hollywood that enforced a religious and conservative representation of romance on screen, that of “the love of a man for a woman permitted by the law of God and man”. Just three years prior, Mädchen in Uniform (1931), a German feature film exploring themes of adolescence and lesbian desire, was making an impact at Berlin’s lesbian clubs of the time. With the emergence of the Production Code in Hollywood, all experiments of the kind were silenced, and naked bodies got quickly covered up in favour of family friendly audiences. Due to the costliness and complexity of filmmaking, sexualities were forced to fit the heteronormative norm, to fit the brief. Of course, there have been avant-garde filmmakers in modern cinematic history, Carolee Schneemann as a fine example that kept denouncing big studios’ control of one’s body and of one’s art.

In contrast to the limiting realism of photography and live-action film, animation, developing from (and along with) the visual arts opened up new avenues to the artist since its independent nature allowed for greater possibilities in imagining the nude. In this curatorial month, I am featuring modern animators who have used the pliability of their medium to pose alternatives to a classical representation of sexuality and reimagine the aesthetics of the body. Freed from the constraints of the realist camera lens, they envision characters with suggestive shapes and forms, often flirting with the grotesque or the surreal, intending in the subversion of the classical ideal of beauty, in less danger of offending the masses.

An exemplar of provocative work, Hong Kong born and raised animator Wong Ping invents an animated world which consists of flashing, colourful imagery reminiscent of a pop-art aesthetic, yet far more disturbing and aggravating in content. With this extravagance of colours Wong Ping criticises repressed sexuality, personal sentiments and political limitations using a visual language that sways between shocking and amusing.

The artists mentioned, along with a plethora of others included in the references section of this piece, have portrayed the naked body and described sexuality, in shapes and forms unfrequently or never before imagined in a live action film. Either by flirting with the grotesque, or by adopting a more humorous, feminine or romantic approach, these filmmakers are interested in the body and are using the liberating power of animation to achieve sexual emancipation. By employing diverse animation techniques and experimenting with materials and visual styles, they introduce new narrative structures and challenge the status quo. The uncensored possibilities of animation as a genre are brilliantly employed to deconstruct and reshape the naked body and its expressions of sexuality.

MAINLY ALONEBUT SOMETIMES WITH OTHERS

HERE @ WILL BE @ THE @MUSIC I HAVEN’T @ YET PRODUCED @@@@

only fan of a broken heart *** only fan of a broken heart ***

only fan of a broken heart * only fan of a broken heart *