Sille Storihle

Contemporary art has become an arena for political debate, and nowhere is this more evident than at the art academies. Norwegian artist Sille Storihle has designed a role-playing game to explore the issues. The rules of the game are clear: The students at the Film and Art School in Kabelvåg were given fictitious characters which they themselves developed further and act out in a group critique of each other’s work. But while the rules are clear, the game itself can easily spin out of control! And it does in ‘The Group Crit’, where the students (who are all in character) don’t hold back from criticising each other’s artworks – and each other in general – so we soon forget the performative framework of the heated debate. The collective experiment challenges not only the students’ self-perception, but also Storihle’s own authority as a director. An important, witty and wild work created with the active participation of the students.

Shot in Norway and Palestine, The Goodness Regime investigates the foundations of the ideology and the representation of a country adopting the most corporate gimmicks to brand itself as a peace-making nation. Deconstructing the arcanes of the Oslo Accords and unveiling the process of a national myth construction, the film looks at the political stages, the roles and the scenes through the very empirical spectrum of theatre, combining children's performances with archive sound recordings from diplomatic speeches.