A Very Long Gif

Shooting on 16mm film in Mozambique, director Ico Costa explores the textures of human behaviour as he follows young men who wonder what lies beyond their immediate surroundings. In the fragments of conversations captured in the Maputo market, a recording studio and on coconut trees, we find daily routines and tedium lead to chit-chat on desire, money and hope. In the interplay between performance and document, poetry emerges from fleeting everyday moments.

Different groups of people wander in a rainy, windy, dark world. They spend time together, trying to get away from their depressing jobs, meandering constantly towards a disturbing surreal queer fantasy.

No es (It isn’t) is a cumulative poem by Mariano Blatt, whose constant writing process extends over a lifetime. The text of the poem, to which verses are added over days, months and years, can cover anything: images, people, memories, landscapes, phrases, ideas, etc. Having that list of “what seems to be but isn’t” ringing in his head, Eduardo Williams’ film Parsi observes in a perpetual movement the spaces and people to create another poem that is caressed, crashes and spins next to No es.

Buenos Aires. Exe, 25 years old, has just lost his job and is not looking for another one. His neighbors and friends seem as odd to him as they always do. Online, he meets Alf, a boy from Mozambique who is also bored with his job and who is about to follow Archie, another boy who has run away into the jungle. Through the dense vegetation of the forest, Archie tracks ants back to their nest. One of them wanders off course and comes across Canh, a Filipino, sitting on top of a giant heap of earth and who is about to go back to his strange, beautiful home town, where he too has a miserable job.

The accident leads a group of young boys from the high roofs of their neighborhood, passing through its destruction, to the deepest of the earth.

Sometimes we find ourselves walking, talking or simply looking at things. That is what the protagonists of this film do. However, inside this mystery of life, we don’t know who they are or what they do. Teddy Williams builds yet again a dense and fantasmatic universe where breezes rhyme with vacancies and to the verb to be has its full double meaning. (M. V.)

Searching for a seed, a young man emerges from the underground where he hangs out with his friends. They all embark on a long digestive trip.

An elf falls asleep in the metro of Buenos Aires. What does he dream of? Maybe of being a young Bolivian man, a robot constructor, evolving in a city that seems to have been built by a child with a wild imagination. In his film, Eduardo Williams continues his project of connecting disjointed terrestrial. From Buenos Aires to La Paz, we move from cool to warm colors, from a fruit and vegetable shop to a dark cave where big metal figures are fabricated. Or maybe something else is being made there. Indeed, it is far away in the phantasmagoric woods of Fontainebleau that those metallic experimentations come to life as agile as voguing dancers. In a few minutes, we travel through three countries, two continents and through the bodies it captures, the voices and sounds it registers, it is the entire world manifesting at our senses.

For the 30th anniversaire of FIDMarseille about thirty directors have done us the honor of offering us some very beautiful short films.