For the fourth time, the experimental film festival «Process» / Article will take place

From 18 to 22 August, the experimental film festival “Process” will take place in Riga for the fourth time, offering a diverse avant-garde film program with film screenings, audiovisual performances, talks and educational events, the festival organizers informed.

The festival “Process” is dedicated to analog experimental cinema – the works in it belong to different streams of alternative, personal and avant-garde cinema and are created using and often experimenting with analog film. Shortly before the main events of the festival, 14-15. In August, it will be introduced by a creative workshop led by the Berlin artists’ duo Ojoboca, where everyone will have the opportunity to try out different methods of analogue image and sound creation and learn the secrets of making extended cinema. The results of the workshop will be shown on the opening night of the festival on August 18, when the participants of the workshop and percussionist Elvijs Endelis will perform with a joint performance.

The theme of this year’s festival is “The End of the World”, trying to reflect on both the loss and the possibility of something new. This theme will be addressed in various ways in a selection of short films made in the last four years: the latest Baltic analog / experimental film program curated by Ieva Balode, as well as Lāsma Bertule and festival curator Erwin van ‘t Hart (IFF Rotterdam) and Tomazo Isabella Tommaso Isabella, Filmmaker IFF). In the retrospective section of the festival, there will be a rare opportunity to see films of Austrian avant-garde classics in their original format, which have been selected and will be told about by film director Jānis Putniņš. The avant-garde program of Latvian amateurs of the 1980s, on the other hand, will feature treasures from the history of Latvian cinema, which will also be shown in their original 16mm format. The festival will end with a full-length phantasmagoria “Autumn Sleeps” by Michael Higgins, a member of the Irish filmmaking group Experimental Film Society, but before that everyone will be invited to visit the festival’s organizers, the Baltic Analog Lab. discuss the final, beginning and change issues in the context of cinema with the participants of the festival.

As in previous years, one of the main events of the festival is the live performance program “Process Expanded” (August 21 at the Nurme Brewery), where the audiovisual works will be performed by the already mentioned filmmakers’ association “Ojoboca” (Anja Dornieden, Juan David González Monroy), a trio of Czech artists František Týmal, David Šmitmajer, Jiří Rouš and Lichun Tseng, a Taiwanese artist living in the Netherlands, together with musician Robert Kroos. Using a variety of custom 16mm film and slide projectors, the projection of film – or even just light – from these normally mechanical and imperceptible activities into these performances becomes an essential part of the work, with artists manually influencing and expanding the usual ways in which moving images appear.

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