Taste of Hope

The imagination of a harmonious life brings various hopes for a better world. Reality does not always favorable to the imagination. Irony and the utopian reality of various events from various parts of the world bring us to certain limits of awareness and sanity to see more deepest that various cultural contexts. This year, this program appears with a selection of films that bring dynamics and long-lasting impacts to each element, individual, and their social order.

In a world driven by competition and capital, there is a fascinating story of a workers’ cooperative factory on Taste of Hope (Laura Coppens, 2019), there’s a dynamic journey to real utopia. Representations that combined reality and visual trace were being one of the central elements of new media in the observational documentary. A sensorial journey about practice and tourism global impact through Onlookers (Kimi Takesue, 2023) teases out complex and paradoxical questions of cross-cultural travel. An interesting analogy and the storyline from a mechanic in a village outside Beirut, who receives many visitors were need to repair their cars, and realized that was not only their cars, but has to fix the owner as well, Thiiird (Karim Kaseem, 2023) bring the audience distanced from the “hustle and bustle” politic of Lebanese through village outside Beirut.

Turning to the barren landscape of south-eastern Morocco, supported combination of two basic concepts of sound design were shaping our auditory journey, follows a nomad and scientist seek the meteorite fragments on Fragment of Heaven (Adnane Baraka, 2022), that bring us traces of existential questions to longs for a better life through powerful image that worked on like cinematic sleeping pill. Continuing on an essay film exploring how colonial logic has influenced sense of self and others in a footage collage that intersecting sci-fiction on the Odyssey (Sabine Groenewegen, 2018), questions the extent to which these frames of perception have been decolonized today. And the journey intensifies with each new wave on the sea surface, with the constant movement, in A Wander into the Ocean (Toma Zidić, 2022) which reflects our conflicted relationship with the environment in the present moment. Eventually, how we construct the real journey is reflecting on how we all live as observers on a traversing journey that moves at geological speed.

– Alia Damaihati
Programmer