Come experience 3 days of photochemical film, witness different practices in image making, and get a feel of what immersing yourself in a medium could be!

Along with some beautiful submissions from around the world, this year we are thrilled to welcome Luis Macias from Crater lab, Barcelona, who brings with him a programme of his films and a live expanded cinema performance; Raju Roychowdhury, a physicist moonlighting as an experimental film curator with a selection of experimental films from Brazil, a (secret) 35mm print screening of a popular old Hindi film, & a very special yearly programme of Harkat’s freshly made Ek-minute 16mm films and straight 8 UK's India entries of 2024!

Films appear from various times, landscapes, dreams, personhoods, photochemical habits. Often touched by a hand, sculpted softly into something you can call a home. 

FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

Please note: the Festival Pass gives you access to all 3 days of film programmes. Workshops must be registered for separately.

WORKSHOPS:

Thursday - Friday, 5th - 6th Dec | 10 AM - 3 PM

Cyanotype Animation Workshop *sold out

Saturday - Sunday, 7th - 8th Dec | 10 AM - 5 PM

Moving Stills - 35mm slide projection workshop by visiting artist Luis Macias

FILM PROGRAMMES:

Visit 16mm.harkat.in/festival-2024-schedule/ to learn more about the films.

Opening Night | Friday, 6th December

8 - 11 PM | Secret screening! *35mm print

Come watch a 35mm print of a popular old Bollywood film!

Day 2 | Saturday, 7th December

12 - 12.50 PM | Wondrous Kiental  *feature film

A historically special little village in the Swiss Alps: Kiental. In the fifties the mysteriously unknown Mr. Landtwing filmed there. Filmmaker Christina Zurbrügg was born in Kiental and tells us with poetry and humour about memories and reality, past and present. A found footage remix. 

2.30 - 3.30 PM | I see a moon while looking at the sun *short film programme

Minevissam (I am writing) | Niki Kohandel

Horizons | Charlie Marois

The Dissolution of the Landscape | Anne-Marie Bouchard

Butterfly Manoeuvres | Gor Margaryan

The Initiation Well | Chris Kennedy

Aka 赤 | Abinadi Meza

4 - 4.30 PM | sea foam palace *short film programme

Abgad Hawaz | Robin Riad

Más cables que personas | Camila Dron

Glitter for Girls | Federica Foglia

Riding Day | Michael Alexander Morris

Man of Aral | Helena Gouveia Monteiro

Brass Band Weds Cyanotype | Siddharth Kaneria

Scum Show | MaLo Sutra Fish, Marie-Laure Cros

why i never became a driver | Yuula Benivolski

5 - 6 PM | Saudade *short film programme

Experimental films from Brazil, curated by Raju Roychowdhury.

Curator’s Note: Talking about "Saudade" poses a challenge especially considering its powerful meaning and significance. Probably, it is one of those Brazilian-Portuguese words that are arduous to explain. Though akin to nostalgia, melancholy, a complex pithy sentiment of missing, loneliness, love, hope, suffering, pain, and so on, it is the object of intense research in the Lusophone world. The complexity and ambiguous sentiment that "Saudade" invokes take place in the intersection of a paradoxical feeling that has been explored vastly over literature, music, philosophy, and cinema, not only as a key idea of the "Alma Brasileiro" but also as an essential way to understand human relationships; a condition over temporality. Assuming the complex foundation of Brazilian cultural process "Saudade" shall be one of the most important cultural interventions, that I claim to territorialize in this curatorial work following it as a cultural trace existing as a social visual entity, with powerful mechanisms of temporal preservation in the process of daring experimentation in analog cinema. The programme will feature short films shot both in 16mm and super 8, by filmmakers ranging from north eastern state of Recife to the southern state of Santa Catarina, and encompasses a variety of cinematic techniques and emotions that gives rise to the proliferation of an exceedingly local dispositif in the parlance of Brazilian experimental cinema.

7.30 - 8.30 PM | Visiting Artist Spotlight: Luis Macias | Your Eyes Are Spectral Machines | *live performance

Your eyes are spectral machines is a selection of films in which Luis Macias investigates the concept of what he calls spectral cinema. Exploring each of the different components of the film spectrum: the process and structure as a challenge, the photochemical transformation in the laboratory of created and/or appropriate images, editing/manipulation and re-photography through the optical/contact printer, and the projection as an event. These are parts of a filmic form organised in closed structures allowing intermediate spaces that force/activate improvisation. The properties of the image and its forms and the modification/alteration of the mechanical structure of the projector are combined in new proposals for the exercise of a human eye that explores the images of nature and/or how it is revealed to us.

Luis Macias is an artist, filmmaker and image composer. His pieces deal with the formal and spectral properties of the moving image, through the exploration of the cinematographic device itself and the photochemical nature of the medium. Focused on experimental and procedural practices of analog image, his works in Super 8,16mm, 35mm and video formats are composed for projection, performance or installation. 

Day 3 | Sunday, 8th December

12 - 1 PM | something like a letter *short film programme

Monotokens | Shruti Chamaria

164 San Antonio Abad | Yuula Benivolski

Crushed Between Ocean and Sky | Ella Morton

Swells | Kaiwen Ren

Kauaʻi ʻōʻō | Samy Benammar

a film with sound (take three) | Josh Weissbach

your loving mother | Cristina Zar

Immortals | Mark Durand

3.30 - 5 PM | Le Voyage Indien *feature film

A film by Philippe Cote, screened in collaboration with Light Cone, Paris. In this film, shots from two voyages unfold in parallel. First, 8mm images made at the beginning of the seventies by an unknown traveler: this 20-minute film was found at a flea market. A handwritten text described an itinerary, while the boxes indicated the years 1973 and 1975. These shots, left as they are, punctuate super8 images filmed by Cote during two trips to India, in 2008 and 2010, organised in the sequence with respect to the itinerary followed. The soundtrack comes from the ambient sounds recorded on location as well as from online sharing sites, while the "found footage" has been left silent. It is a film of snapshots revealed and developed by a gaze, taken in a geography dreamed up by the author: not a travel journal but a travel film: a voyage to the interior of a signifier, a desire of a poetics of image and sound.

6 - 7.30 PM | It ends with a kiss :* 

A tender roundup of some new, homegrown short films on film! A few films from the Harkat lab 2024, including a selection from this year's Kalimpong residency, works made during the 2 festival workshops, the 5 newly produced Ek-min competition films, and straight 8 UK's 2024 India entries.

About the 16mm Film Festival

As we zoom past Instagram filters, editing apps and countless videos on our timeline, we want to relive the magic of analogue film, evoking its material qualities. The 16mm Film Festival was conceived with a view of re-connecting with the cinematic medium through it’s celluloid history and present. A festival for works made on all photochemical formats. With year long film engagements via the Harkat lab and theatre, we have been working our way through re-building and supporting an infrastructure for filmmakers and artists who want to work on film; to foster a growing community.