Saint Petersburg School of New Cinema
Kinora Film Foundation
Saint Petersburg, Russia
  1. Rushnan Jaleel, in thin air (2025)
  2. Francisco Rojas, Shapeless Variations (2025)
  3. Viktoria Schmid, Rojo Žalia Blau (2025)
  4. Nicole Remy, A Certain Light (2024)
  5. Ryan Marino, The Visible Material (2024)
  6. Victor Van Rossem, Toward a Fundamental Theory of Physics (2025)
Program:
Curatorial Statement:
69 min
As a curator, I have long wanted to assemble a program dedicated to pure light and its texture — a kind of tribute to Stan Brakhage’s The Text of Light. In that film, Brakhage used only an ashtray, through which he scattered everything visible into barely perceptible flickers. In this program I tried to focus on the technical aspect, bringing together films that employ different shooting techniques. The selection begins with a simple handycam and ends with a striking construction made of 293 lenses — inviting the viewer on a journey through the many facets of cinema’s fundamental element. Everything is light.
Curator: Mark Petrovitsky
LIGHT
2025
The Visible Material
Through means of rephotography and refracted projection, the movements and luminescent surfaces of Berlin’s Alexanderplaz are transformed into vibrant fields of moving color.
2024
Ryan Marino
A Certain Light
A journey through different processes of capturing light using pinhole cameras (pinhole camera in Super 8 format), accompanied by a cassette recorder during the director residency at Nanolab (Daylesford, Australia). It represents a step between the interior and the exterior, between moving forward and going back. It is about the space the director inhabit, the one she walk through and capture over and over again.
2024
Nicole Remy
Rojo Žalia Blau
Viktoria Schmid expands her reconstructions of analog color systems with an homage to glorious Technicolor. She shoots with 16mm color negative film, running it three times through a Bolex camera and exposing it each time through different filters – red, green, and blue. The three layers of color – and time – are recorded one on top of the other and precisely synchronized. Three locations, filmed over an extended period of time: Spain, a Baltic Sea resort in Lithuania, and a forest in Lower Austria.
2025
Viktoria Schmid
Shapeless Variations
A condensation of a handful of sunsets with various visual moods. Red and blue as opposites that still find a way to cohere. Concrete silhouettes over an ever-changing, expanding canvas. Every movement is collective, molecular. Over an invisible horizon, a chance presents itself to meditate on the “speed” of water (and the sea) and also for a more fluid kind of editing.
Francisco Rojas
in thin air
‘In thin air’ attempts to touch the invisible plane of pure image wedged between camera and subject, to move the world within the frame rather than turning the frame towards the world. Ruptures within the image allow visible subjects to be woven and sifted through the weave of the edit like strands of hair through fingers.
2025
Rushnan Jaleel
Toward a Fundamental Theory of Physics
Shot on 16mm film using a handcrafted Time-Slice camera with 293 lenses—a modern reinterpretation of the original device built by Tim Macmillan in the early 1980s—this experimental (3D) short offers a unique, tactile exploration of time and light as the raw materials and fundamental paradoxes of cinema.
2025
Victor Van Rossem
Saint Petersburg School of New Cinema
Kinora Film Foundation
19 April / 16:00
11 April / 16:00
Made on
Tilda