Films on Loop Programme

No Title (For the Sea) by Renata Poljak, 2024. 

Croatia

4 min 28 sec 

Courtoisie de l’artiste

No Title (For The Sea) is a film in progress exploring different fields of activity from philosophical to scientific, from utopia and mythology to music and its role in history and the present.  

The two main protagonists are the 12-year-old boy Vanja Cetinić - Koća and the widely known singer Amira Medunjanin. The newly written song is the core of the project and its content is based on speculation on mythology. If we rewrite the myths, we may change his energy, and no longer associate the Sea with death but with life. According to the legends, what we need now for the Sea to heal is a sort of a sea shaman who will help with his songs and prayers. Boy Vanja and Amira Medunjanin may not be shamans, but we can defintely speculate so. Belief system is a very fragile and manipulative category, as we know from our history.

The Image Remains the Same by Ali El-Darsa, 2023

Lebanon

18 min 27 sec

Courtoisie de l’artiste

A collage of personal and public accounts, The Image Remains the Same contemplates water as an allegory of journeys filled with desire, belonging, hope, and demise stretching from the shores of the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles to the Mediterranean Sea in Lebanon, specifically the El-Mina port, where Ali El-Darsa speaks to locals about emigrating from Tripoli’s shores to Europe.

The Image Remains the Same was developed at Villa Aurora Residency in Los Angeles in the fall of 2022. It picks up from the end of a former text-based work entitled The Color Remains the Same (2015).

The Seaman, by Bouchra Khalili, 2012

Morocco

10 min.

Courtesy of the artist and Mor Charpentier  

The Seaman was shot in the port of Hamburg, the second most important harbour in Europe, and one of the biggest of the world. It is also one of the first which has automated its terminal’s container storages area. Here, Bouchra Khalili has filmed a deserted port, emptied of human life and presence, providing a stage for the ghostly choreography of the cranes that carry thousands of containers, day and night. On the other side, a young Filipino seaman recounts off- screen and in three chapters his vision of globalized goods transportation industry, the isolation he suffers during months on cargos, and his relationship to his home, providing with an accurate description of workers’ conditions at sea.