Katarakt
Sofia DonaKatarakt links blurred vision and the borders between Turkey and Greece. In Katarraktis, testimonies of a woman who once fled the Nazi invasion to Turkey and a political exile now stranded and facing Turkey intertwine, tracing memory, distance, and the strained act of looking across water toward an unreachable elsewhere.
Last May in Theaters
Arief BudimanSet in Jakarta and Gwangju, this film lingers with two ticket clerks during the May 1980 and May 1998 uprisings that toppled dictatorships in South Korea and Indonesia—events they never joined. Stories and rumours reach them like an endless war film, unfolding inside ordinary lives behind the box office.
Manal Issa, 2024
Elisabeth SubrinFilmed in Beirut hours before bombing escalated in 2024, Subrin’s portrait centres acclaimed Lebanese-French actress Manal Issa, who refuses to appear on camera. Distilled from yearlong conversations, Issa’s disembodied voice reflects on acting amid global conflict, echoing and extending Maria Schneider’s critique of sexism, exploitation, and the politics of looking prompted by her mistreatment during the making of Last Tango in Paris.
[ pink noise ]
Clint EnnsA silent cinematic text, [ pink noise ] proposes an anti-immersive experience: a black screen with closed captions but no synchronous sound or image, leaving viewers alone with language and their own imagination. Each screening becomes a collective experience, unique to every viewer.
Weird Absurd Whatever
Zeynep DadakWorking from the enforced absence of filmmaker-producer Çiğdem Mater—sentenced to 18 years in prison in a trial tied to the 2013 Gezi Park protests for a documentary she never shot—Dadak and Kahraman braid dreams, screen captures, and AI images into a rehearsal for release, summoning Mater as a still-imagined free artist against the state’s attempt to erase her.
GRAC Co-Presentation: Unstill Image
Images is thrilled to co-present GRAC's screening of Unstill Image!
Originally presented at Images Festival in Toronto, Unstill Image brings together films by Arief Budiman, Clint Enns, Çiçek Kahraman, Elisabeth Subrin, Sofia Dona and Zeynep Dadak.
The works in Unstill Image both submit to and sabotage that capture.When power reduces each of us to a single frame, can we move out of it together by moving with moving images?
An imprisoned filmmaker, Çiğdem Mater, imagined into freedom in Zeynep Dadak and Çiçek Kahraman’s Weird Absurd Whatever, where rehearsal becomes a fragile space to think and speak with someone the state has excised from view. The double shoreline of Sofia Dona’s Katarakt, filmed from the village of Katarraktis on the island of Chios, where a fixed strip of sea between Greece and Turkey becomes a blurred horizon through which a WWII refugee and a contemporary political exile look toward, and away from, their lost homelands. Arief Budiman’s Last May in Theaters, where ticket sellers in Jakarta and Gwangju stay at the cinema counter while uprisings rage outside, remembering revolt as an endless war film the screen could never translate. In Elisabeth Subrin’s Manal Issa, 2024, a Lebanese Arab actress revisits questions once posed to Maria Schneider, whose exploitation in Last Tango in Paris hangs heavily over the conversation, while an empty balcony in Beirut under bombardment holds the frame. And Clint Enns’ [ pink noise ], a silent cinematic text in which a black screen and closed captions, drawn from the SRT file, invite spectators to “see” only through imagination. Across these correspondences, freedom/incarceration, exile/homeland, screen/street, text/sense, presence/absence, images move as they resist the isolating frame, loosening vision from sovereignty so that impaired looking may proceed through unusual alignments
Inngang fra bakgården, Setesdalsveien 43, 4617 Kristiansand, Norway
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