Taking the Dog for a Walk

The world's strongest man is restless. Georges Christen has won 23 World Records for feats like towing planes with his teeth or bending iron bars. But his medals no longer bring him satisfaction.

Merging the traditions of art house and splatter, Mondo Veneziano: High Noon in the Sinking City pokes fun at the bloated importance of discursive theories in contemporary art. Cast in an abandoned Venice – a derelict film set in Luxembourg, as it turns out – this short fiction relates a meeting of a curator, a theorist, a painter and a “relational” artist who appear to engage in complex theoretical debates. Their verbal confrontation – a grotesque patchwork of quotes that mocks the art world’s infatuation with sampling and referencing – is punctuated by a string of dreamlike sequences in which the stereotypical characters are seen killing each other in the best tradition of mondo films.

Three Congolese producers are planning a reality TV show about the carnival in Belgium. Hawaly, their Burundian show-runner, is supposed to prepare the shooting in Belgium effectively, but her Belgian colleague is too busy with the supernatural.

Blue for a Moment is a documentary portrait of Swedish-born, Berlin-based musician Sven-Åke Johansson, a key figure in European improvised and experimental music. Active as a jazz drummer, composer, poet and visual artist, Johansson has spent decades challenging artistic conventions and genre boundaries. Born in 1943, he moved to Berlin in the late 1960s and became involved in the city’s experimental scene, including the Zodiak Free Arts Lab. During the 1970s and 1980s he played an important role in the West Berlin free jazz movement around the FMP/SÅJ label, collaborating with musicians such as Alexander von Schlippenbach and Rüdiger Carl. Influenced by Fluxus and modernist traditions, Johansson developed a distinctive approach based on noise, reduction and the use of everyday materials, anticipating the Echtzeitmusik scene that emerged in Berlin after 1990. The film explores his creative process, artistic philosophy and lasting impact on contemporary experimental music.