A man is held by a large doll with wide eyes. The room they inhabit is blue and modern.

From Oberhausen to Ottawa

August 26, 2021

8 PM EDT

OPEN AIR CINEMA

In collaboration with Goethe-Institut Ottawa and Digital Arts Resource Center

Award Winners from International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2020

76 min. / Original versions with English subtitles

This selection of winners of the 2020 festival also includes works that have even received several awards. Sohrab Hura’s Bittersweet is a reflection on family relationships and domestic spaces, exploring the bond between the filmmaker and his mother and that between his mother and her beloved dog. Hura uses his grainy flash shots to sensitively capture intimate and banal moments in the life of his mother, who suffers from acute paranoid schizophrenia. In Bjørn Melhus’ elaborately produced science fiction film SUGAR, a robot attempts to free the inhabitant of a post-apocalyptic consumer world from the prison of his routines through physical proximity.

The finely staged Shepherds by Teboho Edkins shows cattle thieves serving time in a prison in Lesotho. They talk about their lives and why they came here. The closed room becomes a stage for universal dramas of mankind. In A Month of Single Frames, on the other hand, Lynne Sachs processes material that was given to her by filmmaker and performance artist Barbara Hammer shortly before her death. The result is an expressive study of life in all its forms and the difficulty of facing death. The film, which was awarded the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen, is convincing in its ability to find poetry and complexity in simple things.

More info: https://www.goethe.de/ins/ca/en/ver.cfm?fuseaction=events.detail&event_id=22296140

About DARC's Events

Digital Arts Resource Centre (formerly SAW Video) is a not-for-profit, artist-run media art centre that fosters the growth and development of artists through access to equipment, training, mentorship, and programming. Our mission is to support a diverse community of media artists empowered by technology, programming and the exchange of ideas.

Our core principles are independence of expression, affordable access to all, and paying artists for their work. Digital Arts Resource Centre values diversity and actively promotes equity for all artists regardless of race, age, class, gender, sexual orientation, language, or ability.

We acknowledge that Digital Arts Resource Centre is located on land that is part of the unceded and unsurrendered Traditional Territory of the Algonquin people. We honour the Algonquin people and elders, whose ancestors have occupied this territory since time immemorial, and whose culture has nurtured and continues to nurture this land and its people.