Many film projections coming up in A Coruña!

For its 12th edition, which starts on May 28th, (S8) Mostra Internacional de Cinema Periférico relaunches its trademark on-site activities, renewing its commitment to the unique experience of analog film screenings and live film performances.

This year, the festival’s programmers have prepared a program with some of the most exciting names of contemporary experimental cinema. (S8)’s 12th edition will bring together remarkable well-established personalities as well as young emerging filmmakers from around the world, counting among them Deborah S. Phillips (Germany), James Edmonds (UK), Tomonari Nishikawa (Japan), and Bruno Delgado Ramo (Spain).

Deborah S. Phillips, who will participate in this year’s edition with a selection of her 16mm and 35mm works, is a key author working in the intermediary space between fine art and cinema. Collage and painting techniques invade her works. In her films, Phillips – member of analog film lab Labor Berlin – explores the meaning of color in art, all the while engaging in ethnographic and visual explorations of the patterns and motifs of Islamic and Indian art. A multidisciplinary artist, Phillips had her first foray into the art world in the ’80s. Since then, using a hands-on approach and a wide range of techniques and materials, she has created many pieces in which color plays a major role. She has used a variety of surprising materials such as edibles, drinks, nail polish, found objects, translucent materials… among many others. Phillips will visit A Coruña to participate in (S8)’s on-site activities and present live sound performances to accompany the screenings of some of her featured pieces.

James Edmonds, another filmmaker based in Berlin, is also a painter and a programmer. His works in super 8 and 16mm resonate with the work of filmmakers like Helga Fanderl and Ute Aurand. In Edmonds’ films, the documentation of the everyday intersects with the exploration of cinema as a medium through studies of light, exposure, color, composition and visual rhythm. The author, who will visit A Coruña to participate in several on-site activities, will present some of his expanded analog pieces.

Another much-awaited guest that will be joining the festival this year is Japanese filmmaker (now living and working in the USA) Tomonari Nishikawa, who participated in last year’s edition via an interview in an episode of (S8)’s online program Camera Obscura. Nishikawa, whose works have been featured at many important festivals around the world, has devoted his career to documenting places and exploring autobiographical experiences in audiovisual creations in which the movie camera and the photochemical processes play a major role.

This program closes with a solo section devoted to the young Sevillian filmmaker Bruno Delgado Ramo, who recently received the BAICC scholarship for artists-in-residence (a collaborative initiative by (S8), the Spanish agency for culture – AC/E, and Toronto’s LIFT). This year, the festival brings us a selection of films, a film performance, and an installation by the author, all of which explore the processes and mechanisms of filmmaking and film projection.

(S8)’s program devoted to the Spanish scene will feature the latest piece by Esperanza Collado, one of the most important Spanish filmmakers in the domain of expanded cinema. Collado’s new film performance will premiere during a special session as part of (S8)’s section “Desbordamientos”. The piece, Kicked With the Front Foot on the Dark Side of the Deck, is a fascinating study of the intersection between cinematic instruments, the exhibition space, and the human body. The multifaceted artwork combines chromatic experiments in 16mm, live sound performances, and live interventions by skaters and performers that contribute to creating mutant installations.

For this 12th edition of (S8), Las Synergys (Bruno Delgado Ramo, Paula Guerrero, and Esperanza Collado) will present an expanded reinterpretation of Nicholas Ray’s classic Johnny Guitar (1954), which they will show in a reduced super 8 version. The piece – a project that takes inspiration from Gabinete kino~okno –  is a kind of prototype resulting from a research project devoted to approaching how cinema and music are experienced live. In the film, Johnny is an expert gunman that decides to lay down his arms to play guitar – the instrument will now be his only defense. In Spin the Wheel / I Like to Hear It Spin, Las Synergys play with the apparent functional connections between music, images, and the human body, swapping their logic and tools.

James Edmonds and Deborah S. Phillips will also participate in this section of the festival. On July 4, (S8) will celebrate its Berlin Night, a soiree during which Phillips will accompany the screening of her films with live sound performances and Edmonds will show his multi-projection works (a series of expanded presentations that will be exhibited as double and triple super 8 projections).