INT 7: Time Being
The INT 7: Time Being programme begins with a bang with Marwan Khneisser's Zakira Kassira (Short Memory) (2010), composed of a single unbroken shot which follows two young Lebanese children weaving around the floors of a tenement building, unobtrusively observing the inhabitants' nightly rituals. The apparent sense of everyday mundanity is however shot through with an unspoken but tangible feeling of foreboding, culminating in the film's shocking, polemical denouement.
Image: Zakira Kassira
Following this is Lars Kornhoff's Kinderspiel (Child's Play) (2010), in which a teenager silently breaks into a house and removes the young child sleeping inside. From this initial act of intrusion and transgression, what slowly develops is a tender, protective bond between the child and the boy, though while his motives for his actions become more evident, as the story progresses the nature of their relationship counter-intuitively becomes more ambiguous and mysterious.
Image: Kinderspiel
Winner in the short film category at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Maryna Vroda's extraordinary Cross-Country (2011) progresses in the fashion of a relay race, the metaphorical 'baton' appearing to be the very act of motion itself. A train journey makes way for a group of joggers, before the camera alights more permanently on a boy, who is then in turn forced to run himself. An elliptical enigma, with a haunted quality, seeming to speak of an awakening to the alienation and hidden dangers of adult life. More explicitly oneiric is Tobias Gundorff Boesen's Ghost (2011), a ethereal tailing of a child's perilous 'return' to their parents, unfolding within a highly subjective, nightmarish dream-logic.
Image: Cross-Country
In Ulrike Vahl's Unter Null (Below Zero) 2011, set in the wintry, picturesque snow-bound landscape near Wittenberg, road marker Axel struggles to cope with an all-encompassing melancholia, a condition which leads to his hospitalization and deep soul-searching on his family's part. Steering clear of sensationalism, the film feels rooted in genuine experience, and with an eye for capturing the quiet despair at the apparent meaninglessness of existence and the sometimes agonizingly-slow passage of time.
Image: Unter Null
Also screening is Daniel Seideneder and Daniel Pfeiffer's Hurdy Gurdy (2010), in which tilt-shift photography and a percussive score beguilingly combine to transform the rhythms of ordinary life into something akin to an intricate clockwork toy.
