Lo Sum Choe Sum
Lo Sum Choe Sum (3 Year 3 Month Retreat) by Dechen Roder
Bhutan 2015, 20 min
In the traditional Buddhist mediation practice of Lo Sum Choe Sum, monks, nuns and other devout practitioners withdraw from worldly life for a 3 year and 3 month retreat. This period is defined as the time deemed necessary to attain a higher level of clarity and transformation.
Lhamo is a young woman living in Bhutan. She is on a journey. Driving through the mountains by bus. During a stop, she climbs a mountain on her own and almost misses the bus. Then all the travellers are brought to a halt when police search the bus. Lhamo is arrested. In carefully composed tableaux that juxtapose city and rural life as well as traditional and contemporary ways of living, the director tells the story of a woman whose perception of autonomy is owed to the experiences and spiritual practices of her past.
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Architektura by Ulu Braun
Germany 2015, 15 min
In the beginning there was a brick, which flew through space. It flew past skyscrapers in a city in Asia and keeps reappearing in this film about construction and destruction. Brick by brick – where will that ultimately lead? A father shows the world to his child – that will be all yours one day, he says. Soap bubbles float upward. It is all a cyclical affair. The tableaux Ulu Braun assembles are playful, associative, colourful and powerful. In his realm of imagery, sizes, relations and contexts become malleable. Owing to the deconstruction of proportions and coherencies, Ulu Braun’s narrative becomes a fable. Architecture is the game of positioning bodies in light. Darkness needs its space. The future is already misaligned.
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Lembusura by Wregas Bhanuteja
Indonesia 2014, 10 min
Lembusura, or the legend of the mountain demon. A rain of ash falls on Java. Kelud, a volcano located to this east of the Indonesian island, is active. As one of the island’s most dangerous mountains, it is known for violent and explosive eruptions. And when it rains ash, it pours. Time and again, everything gets covered in fine grey dust – houses, streets, blossoms and umbrellas. According to legend, the ash rain is caused by an angry demon named Lembusura who wears a magic hood and lives inside the volcano.
Young men set off to conquer their mythical past. One is dressed as a demon – with the largest breasts, immediately provoking the others to laugh. The enactment of the search is shown in its entirety. Lembusura dances, climbs over trees and hills. All the earnestness applied in ethnological and particularly, in postcolonial discourse when referring to the mysticism and tales of other cultures is suspended. Suspended from the legacy of the story itself. The rain of ash falls relentlessly, and the muezzin calls.
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Blood Below the Skin by Jennifer Reeder
USA 2015, 32 min
Blood Below the Skin chronicles a week in the lives of three teenage girls who attend the same high school class. Coming from different social circles, the girls prepare for the most important night of their life – Prom Night. They have formed a dance group and rehearse the choreography. Two of the girls are drawn to one another and fall in love. The third is forced to take care of her distraught mother in the wake of her father’s disappearance. Each girl finds refuge in her room and bed, comfort and a place to explore new feelings. The music blasting from the turntable provides a magical synchronicity between them all – the space-time continuum is expanded by the dimension of music.
Jennifer Reeder tells everyday stories with stylistic elements of magic realism that recall Latin American cinema. All it takes is the power of thought in order to express your love to another.
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maku (veil) by Yoriko Mizushiri
Japan 2014, 6 min
The curtain rises: a Kyōgen stage, an examination room at an eye specialist’s, a sushi counter. There are two people who meet in this. Feelings of the most diverse kind, alternating between fear and fascination, between tenderness and sanctuary, flare up and are immediately put into practice. The feelings of the other are explored. In slow, flowing movements, and carried by a web of sounds, Yoriko Mizushiri’s pastel-coloured animation blends and fuses colours and gestures, actions and objects into a sensual, erotic experience. The connotation of an object is determined by emotion.
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MAR DE FOGO (SEA OF FIRE) by Joel Pizzini
Brazil 2014, 8 min
In1930, the Brazilian filmmaker and poet Mario Peixoto produced a masterpiece of Brazilian film history, the two hour long silent filmLimite, inspired by European expressionist and avant-garde cinema. In 2014, Joel Pizzini paid homage to the film, and in particular its filmmaker, by creating a film montage using images from Limite and additional documentary material of interviews from the 1970s and 1980s. Mario Peixoto never finished another film, even though he continued to work on diverse projects. MAR DE FOGO also features a freely imagined new sequence for Peixoto’s next, but never completed film as envisaged by Joel Pizzini. He tries to invoke Peixoto’s vision while making Limite and to visually explore the feeling he had when he had the inspiration for the film.
Berlinale Shorts 