Images and Views of Alternative Cinema

The Festival Images and Views of Alternative Cinema, under the initiative of the Ministry of Education and Theatro Ena, and in collaboration with Brave New Culture, having emerged 10 years ago, returns this year - in its ceremonial edition - with an endeavour to promote the inherent multiformity of the cinematographic language. At the same time, beyond the scope of screening of unique and rare films from the international vanguard, the festival will aim for the formation of a discussion forum through running lectures, parallel events with visual installations and setting an ideal environment to bring closer professionals, critics and cinema theorists as well as visual artists and filmgoers.

The Festival will take place from the 15th until the 22nd of June, at its established space, the 'Other Space' of Theatro Ena in the old city of Nicosia.

Just like in previous years, the festival's program is best characterized by its multifarious synthesis: the way viewers are introduced to works by creators of the Seventh Art, artistic movements and cinematographic styles that share the common elements of exploring the aesthetic and formalistic possibilities of cinematic art, experimentalism, social and existential problematization and the overturning of any academic cinematographic writing.

This year's festival is composed of the following programs:

Bill Viola: Time. Light, Being
Bill Viola is a prominent personality in the world of video art. His world-renowned works reflect the amalgamation of the allegoric with the skilful use of technology. Viola navigates through both temporal and visual systems of video art in order to examine metaphorically our modes of perception and learning, with an ultimate documentation of a symbolic introspection of his inner self. The ceremonial character of his explorations, through visual and acoustic phenomena, oscillating between illusion and reality, poetically dissolve into illusionary transcendence. The most significant museums and galleries of contemporary art in the world have screened and presented his works.

Nico Papatakis, or Cinema considered as the Most Subversive Art
The festival will be presenting four films by one of the greatest "unknown" directors of the Greek, but also international, cinema. He remained unfamiliar to the greater audience mainly due to his distantiation from the marketing system and his audacious reluctance to conform to any national, political and social conventions or artistic norms that he encountered. The world of Nikos Papatakis is completely personal and peculiar. Through the screening of these films, the Cypriot audience will get a chance to go through the journey of this solitary man from the Greek diaspora, and emerge into a world of subversive liveliness, both cinematographic and social. Among the many celebrities of his time that he had worked with, some of his collaborators in his works were Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Genet with whom he worked on the adaptation of Les Equilibristes. His wife was the famous actress Anouk Aimee. The film critic and Papatakis' close friend, Federico Rossi, will be present at the festival.

The Bene-Factor: Honouring the Cinema of Carmelo Bene
The audience will have the opportunity to encounter the radical filmic universe of the leading cinematographer Carmelo Bene. Any screenings of films by the famously subversive Italian iconoclast amounts in global terms a true rarity. Bene comprises an emblematic and provocative figure of the Italian experimental theatre, as well as of the cinematic avant-garde. Pasolini, with whom he worked on Oedipus Rex (1967), praised his work as being "autonomous and authentic, the sole noteworthy work in an overall vapid experimental theatrical scene". In the Seventh Art, through the basic means of interpretations that approximated a baroque style and the non-naturalistic use of sound and music, Bene conquered the highest expression of freedom. He described his films as, "music for the eyes" with "surgical, undisciplined montage".

David Lynch: Then & Now
Considered as one of the leaders of avant-garde cinema, David Lynch is known for his obsessions and the particularity that describe his shooting style. He became famous through his films' distinctive narrativity and for his surreal takes which, equipped with myriads of symbols, succeed at equating dreams with nightmares. Characteristic of his works: the author's refusal to explicate them, as his artistic ambition relies in the viewer's interpretation. At the Festival his short films will be screened, designating the first Lynchean steps in cinema, ranging from his years in college studying visual arts in Philadelphia to the period in which his longer films gained recognition. In addition, the program will include a screening of a series of contemporary short films by Lynch, shot on digital camera, and whose distribution was restricted to online users of a space created by Lynch for his subscribers. The audience will have the opportunity to watch the not so popular Then and Now by the famous director.

George Melies: The Magical Origins of Film
The festival presents a short tribute to the great French cinematographer, George Melies, who introduced a series of technical innovations in cinema. He is considerer as one of the first directors in the history of cinema whose contribution has been formative to its development from technique to a new form of art.

IN/FLUX: Media Trips from the African World
Experimental films and video make up this part of the program. Violence and pleasures, contradictions, fears and desires of a planet that is being shaped by the post-colonial conditions, the present and the future of humanitarianism in a contemporary globalized system constantly mutating through radical changes... These themes are the focus of IN/FLUX, whose creators, coming from Africa and its diasporic communities, refuse submitting to convenient approaches and answers when contemplating these social conundrums.

Like every year, short lectures/introductions from connoisseurs in every topic will introduce the screenings. Furthermore, visual artists have been invited to alter the venue with their artworks.

Free Entrance for all screenings.

Further information concerning the schedule can be addressed at 77772552.

Download Screenings Programme