The dark theatre and the big screen. Sit back in wonder. Our love for cinema has often been articulated throughout the history of film and has become an equally popular and global topos: From a basement cinema in Berlin to a Senegalese place of longing, from nostalgic reverberations in Iran to natural screen shadow plays in Lithuania, we embark on what is essentially a passion journey — in eager anticipation of the moment the movie theatre is allowed to go dark again, and the screen — bright.
Curated by Daniel Ebner (Vienna Shorts)
MICHAEL S., RE-COLLECTED
Steven Swirko
Austria / 2019, 3 min
Michael Schneider is a passionate cinéaste. No love in his life has been as enduring as his love for the movies. Ever since he was a teenager he has been collecting Super 8mm versions of films of all sorts: features, commercial, old newsreels - he’s got it all. While his private life fell victim to his passion, his collection is growing bigger and bigger every day. Now, for the first time, Michael has to ask himself, if the choices he made will keep him happy.
DARKROOM
Billy Roisz
Austria / 2013, 13 min
Glimpses of the lit interiors of a cinema, rural construction and a residential building flash in a black space, and create a desolate world of borders where the inner and the outer meet.
CINEMA CRISTAL
Mariles Pöschl, Farnaz Jurabchian
Austria, Iran / 2013, 14 min
Laleh Zar — a street located in the city centre of Tehran, formerly home to many cinemas, and often seen as a symbol for the modernisation of Iran — is today characterised by a multitude of luminous elements, which are offered for sale alongside the street. The flow of images through light — cinema — seems to have broken apart into a variety of different light sources after the changes that the Iranian revolution has brought about.
WE WAITED UNTIL NIGHTFALL
Wendy V. Muñiz, Guillermo Zouain
Dominican Republic / 2019, 18 min
We waited until nightfall revisits repurposed cinemas through hunting images and sounds that trace the practices of belonging still embodied in the theaters’ remains.
SAMEDI CINEMA
Mamadou Dia
Senegal / 2016, 12 min
In a small town in the north of Senegal two young avid cinephiles, Baba and Sembene, are desperate to see a movie on the big screen of their local cinema before it closes its door forever.
A PROPOSAL TO PROJECT IN SCOPE
Viktoria Schmid
Austria, Lithuania / 2020, 8 min
A self-built screen amid an expansive green landscape. On it dance silhouettes of the surrounding trees and bushes. A natural cinema – without a darkened cinema hall, without artificial light and without film. From various camera positions, Viktoria Schmid portrays her screen, installed in the sculpture park of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, as a moving image within a moving image.