Competition #3
Hauntology

The Alternative Film-Video Festival 2020 is being held in extraordinary pandemic circumstances and exclusively through an online platform. In difficult conditions and uncertainty whether the festival will be held at all, but with the support of the “Student City” Cultural Center, the festival team, unlike the previous year, was late in announcing the competition for submitting films. Despite that, and thanks to the interest of numerous authors from all over the world, over 400 entries were received, of which we included 27 films in the international competition program. Exceptionally, this year’s edition of the festival will present the regional program South-Southeast, otherwise curated as an accompanying program, as a competition program because it consists of registered films, and they were selected by Greg de Cuir. Hence, this year’s edition of the Alternative Film-Video Festival will offer four competition programs – three international and one regional. This year’s festival has no theme, that is, we considered it impossible to determine a framework theme in the given real circumstances in which only one theme dominates. We allowed the received films to spontaneously shape the program units.

We named the three program units of the international competition program after certain plot associations of selected films and fitted them into loose theoretical concepts. The first program, called The Narrator, refers to Walter Benjamin’s idea of ​​the narrator as an archaic man “who would allow the stone of his life to burn completely on the gentle fire of his story.” The program consists of different types of essays: visual pedagogies, historical narrativizations, identity quests and political statements that challenge the very principle of narration, as understood by Benjamin, as a combination of individual experience and world experience, as a science, as a moral story. At the same time, it is history and chronicle, epic and politics. Second program called Colors and Horizons mainly relies on the dominant subgenre of hybrid film forms – landscape films. Films of colored landscapes, visible and invisible, external and internal, past and future. They move through landscapes, always conquering them, sometimes abandoning and forgetting, pointing to the fateful connection with nature as a mythical unity of man and the world. Hauntology – Derrida’s term – is the name of the third program of films, which perhaps most closely and strangely communicate the current state of consciousness. Ghosts and wraiths are our failed regret. We do not give up on our spirits. Or do they not give up on us? They do not allow us to nestle in the world of capitalist realism (Mark Fischer).

doplgenger (Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran)

selectors of the international competition program

Francisco Bouzas, 12:30, Argentina/Spain

Betty Blitz, Austria, 04:28

Fritz Polzer, Germany/Canada, 12:30

Salise Hughes, USA, 04:22

Eneos Carka, 12:40

Juana Robles, Spain/Ireland, 04:20

Guli Silberstein, UK, 13:40

Rodrigo Gomes, Portugal, 03:01

Michael Fleming, UK, 12:00