VIDEO IDIOM at Four Cultures Festival in Łódź
Wieża Babel, 42m36s, a collaborative film by: Alek Sarna, Anna Łuczak, Asia Krawczyk, Erika Roux, Joanna Glinkowska, Kamila Karska, Łukasz Tokarczyk, Marta Hryniuk, Maja Szewczykowska, Michał Szufla, Nick Thomas, Sophie Bates, 2019
Video Idiom, a summer school led by WET FILM at the Four Cultures Festival in Łódź, September 5-9th 2019.
Over the last century, the idea of a universal ‘language of cinema’ has dominated the discourse around film-making. At the experimental fringes, however, countless dialects, slangs, idioms and vernaculars have been fostered as challenges to the mainstream.
In this summer school, participants spent five days with the WET film collective, watching and discussing inspiring experimental works, and producing their own collaborative piece, which was screened for the public on Friday 13th September, in the Łódź Film School Cinema.
Using the Wieża Babel housing block as a base, participants learned low-budget and alternative video techniques and strategies. The workshops drew on the experiences of the WET film collective, and of participants, with the aim being to share skills while practising a non-hierarchical, collaborative form of production. Together, we thought about how filmic languages can express or embody different politics, social attitudes and subjectivities, and considered how ways of working together can manifest themselves in a film’s aesthetics.
Image credits: stills from the film / photos from the final screening by Erika Roux
