An Ode to a Time I Loved Bread

Earth’s cycles, it can be argued, gives meaning to human existence with each unique rhythmic expression and being communicated with living on another part of the earth. A culture’s rhythm is its continuing and evolving narration, linking events, time, people and generation to underlying themes, archetypes, structure, values, expectations and recurring motifs. It pivots around complex and interrelated rhythms and reality about occupation, origin, colonial extractivism and a simple reminiscence. This program offers a journey across time and geographic distance to open conversation and interaction over various complexities of rhythm and other realities.

In the middle of a shipwrecks, an exploration through a ghostly reality of the past in Abyssal (Alejandro Alonso Estrella, 2021) brings us into the wonder of wishes and dreams. Conversations and activities within a narrow physical and mental spaces lead us to believe that we are the wandering wounded souls. Echoing them, An Ode to a Time I Loved Bread (Neema Ngelime, 2021) and Shanghai Quarantopia (Clarissa Zhang, 2023) peek into the past that might spark hope for a new rhythm of heartbreaking reality.

Yarokamena (Andrés Jurado, 2022) carries us through time, tracing the dark realities recorded by world history from a space that created a spiral of betrayal and death. The colonial ghost that has been haunting since two decades ago is repeatedly reborn through the destructive forces preserved in the oral memory of the survivors of exploitation and extractivism in Casa Arana, Colombia. Recognizing itself through the landscapes, traditions, rituals and people depicted in six chapters, The Maestrat on Film (Fermín Sales, 2022) shows the duality of region and ethnography as a point of departure that can reach the point of experimental cinema.

Featuring a hypnotizing journey to and through death, an elderly man who has worked for 14 years in the university hospital morgue is inseparably connected to the corpses he works on. Playing with the daily cycle of life and death, Laboratory No. 2 (Edris Abdi, Awara Omer Saeed; 2021) signals to us that eternal life is in the possession of those who dares.

Now that we are in the emerging state of awareness that we are standing in the middle of a rhythmic motion, at least, we could try to reproduce the faith in life.

– Alia Damaihati
Programmer