Saint Petersburg, Russia

Program:

Curatorial text:

89 min

The concept on which this program revolves is “emptiness”, but you could argue even the very word might be a misconception for these purposes. Since its creation, cinema has been forced to adopt forms, narratives and readability upon itself, not so much as a result of a collective artistic search, but more of a necessity to have this new art enter the market, so it could be exploited in formulaic and replicable ways. As a consequence, for many decades and still to this day, it’s easier to label films that don’t want to deal with the obsessions of mass media consumption as “empty”, “slow” or “superficial”.

This program looks to understand this different way of (film)making, be it a slow change, a long anticipation, the absence of subject, even in the most literal sense, the rejection of traditional forms, the search for abstraction, and also the use of negative space in the cinema frame, not much different from the way a painter considers the sections of its canvas. Emptiness as a different kind of form.

Curator: Francisco Rojas