Birdsong

A blind man reports on an eclipse, a light phenomenon that he perceives through senses that do not involve sight. He takes us by the hand and guides us through the dark, through this temporary event that transforms the world as we know it.

Simultaneously boundless and intimate, collective and personal, an ode to and an example of a cinematic experience that is becoming increasingly rare, the darkness of a movie theatre in the course of the projection of a 35mm film print.

In the Summer of 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in her country, Helga Davis wrote a text that voices her pain, her despair and also her hopes for the future. ‘OK’ scrutinises the relations between Black and White while searching for the essence of collaboration and caring about the other.

Exploring the surface of a single frame from a black and white 16mm film through an electron microscope, Anouk De Clercq ponders over ways of seeing and the nature of cinema. Spatiality being one of the key concepts in the work of Anouk De Clercq, in Atlas she wants to go as deep into space as possible, at the tiniest scale, and see what insights we get from this other perspective on things. This atlas is a guide in a macroscopic tale of the world.

Swan Song is a metaphorical phrase for a final gesture, effort, or performance just before death of retirement. The phrase refers to an ancient belief that the swan is completely silent during its lifetime until the moment just before death, when it sings one beautiful song. What song does a pixel sing before it fades away?

A 21st century protest song and an invitation to drink to the vibrancy of life – at all levels.

The film is inspired by the terella—a small magnetized model ball representing the Earth, used by scientists since the late sixteenth century. Three centuries later, in the year of the birth of cinema, Norwegian physicist Kristian Birkeland used the terella to study the aurora borealis, while in the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht wrote in exile: “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.” Resembling a terella, the dark planet depicted on the screen is surrounded by pulsating light, invoking both hope and despair.