Paradocs Shorts

Programme

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  Mast-del

  The ominous howl of the wind whipping against the windows. The sharp-edged sound of a match being struck. A hand lights a cigarette, abstracted into negative, in shades of blue. In her short video essay, award-winning Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory creates an intimate inner world that moves between the concrete and the abstract. Two young women lie in bed; one describes how she once met a man in an online chat group for film lovers. The man worked in a shop that sold banned movies under the counter. Their meeting in the park didn’t go as they had hoped.
  
  The story unfolds in short captions superimposed on a collage of self-filmed material and found footage from old Iranian films. Layer by layer, a moving reflection emerges on a reality that is extremely complex for Iranian women. It’s a reality in which personal freedom and desires no longer exist in public space, but only behind closed doors and in the imagination.

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  Nocturne for a Forest

  The Carmelite monastery and the surrounding Buçaco Forest in Portugal were strictly out of bounds for women: “Those who enter will go to hell and burn for all eternity,” decreed Pope Gregory XV in 1622. Shortly thereafter, however, the monks had the opportunity to admire “Sagrada Família,” a painting of the infant Jesus and Mary, with milk flowing from her naked breast. Although women were physically excluded, in the imagination of filmmaker Catarina Vasconcelos their spirits refused to be chased away. Invisible and inaudible, they still hide within these leafy woods, and engage in animated discussion.
  
  In this magical and poetic short film with a feel for irony, their presence is betrayed by a brightening of the leaves, while the onscreen text reveals the content of their conversation. This exploration of experiences and dreams of the past soon takes a radically contemporary turn. Even Josefa de Óbidos, the creator of “Sagrada Família,” is called to account, in this creative fusion of fiction and documentary, political discourse and experimentation. A bounteous fountain of meaningful associations.

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  We Don’t Talk Like We Used To

  In recent years, artist Joshua Gen Solondz has divided his time between the US, Hong Kong and Japan, always with his camera at the ready. The result is a compilation of images in which medical face masks alternate with rubber SM masks, tourists take photos that you know will never be looked at again, the sun sparkles into the camera lens, a corny joke is followed by an abstract image, and casually written texts seem to address the viewer directly with mysterious messages.
  
  The jerky rhythm of the editing is like a visual version of a hip-hop DJ’s scratching. The images are spread out into impressionistic strips or cut into a flickering bombardment of light. In his experimental film, Solondz explores the no-man’s-land between an impressionistic travelogue, a psychological hall of mirrors and a cinematic noise rock show. Packaged in this overwhelming form, the maker addresses topics such as ageing, rootlessness, lust, love and the need to make art.