Alberte Pagán

Documentary about the history of experimental cinema in Spain. FRAGMENTS is a historical survey of “the other” Spanish Cinema — films that brazenly explored their artistic, poetic and conceptual potential. Spanish experimental cinema can be glimpsed in a series of important yet isolated events that FRAGMENTS compiles through various firsthand accounts, film excerpts and documents. For the first time in Spain, a documentary brings together the most relevant of a cinema that is slowly losing its invisibility.

A film by Alberte Pagán commissioned by Philipp Schmickl & Hans Falb. Konfrontationen is one of the oldest festivals for free and improvised music in Europe. It takes place in Nickelsdorf, Austria, on the border with Hungary, where Syrian refugees are not allowed to continue on their trip through Europe. This is a film about the 2014 festival — twenty performances where sight and sound don’t always go hand in hand, where the image confronts the sound and the sound escapes the image. A musical in which workers and audiences are as important and necessary as musicians.

"Bs.As." is an experimental documentary film that reframes the history of immigration from Galicia (Spain) to Buenos Aires (Argentina). A Galician man's curiosity about his long-lost relatives who immigrated to Buenos Aires takes him on a surreal journey across times and space. Through travel, photographs, letters, and phone calls he explores the unpredictable ways in which immigration creates both bonds and distance between people and places. "Bs.As." received various awards including the Premio Foco Galicia (Tui, 2007).

τεμενος¹: Holy precinct. Like the Acropolis of Athens. Fence, border that surrounds it. Structural Boundary. τεμενος²: Place-event near the village of Lyssarea, in Arcadia, chosen by Gregory Markopoulos for the projection of his ultimate opus Eniaios. Robert Beavers organizes the event every four years. τεμενος³: Documentation of the pilgrimage to τεμενος², from Barbança to Lyssarea and back. The times and places get mixed up when they share the same precinct, i.e. the screen. The limits of the screen as a border, as a τεμενος¹, as structural boundary of a square space where mental work can take place. The time of Eniaios becomes space in this film, the emptiness of space, space as time inside the frontiers of the frame. Five seconds, on the way out —deferred editing. 125 frames, on the way back —contiguous editing. Sometimes the movement in space breaks free from this strict time boundary.

"Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." This is how Pagán describes this work in which the interplay between the image, its reverse, and the sound of the "Haunted House" erases and makes the boundaries between past and present, interior and exterior, collide.

Nature is cruel. Life is cruel. A stupid race to escape death, a more stupid flight to death. A jungle of feelings. In the jungle there is no perspective, there are no straight lines, there are no perpendiculars or horizontality: only a mass of organs and exuberance. Cruel life The sound of death. The music of death. Nothing is true.

Seventy-five 6x9cm portrait photographs bought at Hietalahti's Market in Helsinki presented at a rate of one every seven seconds and a half in a double "soft (filmed) + hard (scanned)" screen version.

Images taken with a mini iPad, following the 11km perimeter walk going clockwise and under a temperature which reached 107ºF.