THE FRUIT TREE
In The Fruit Tree a young woman, Sharleece, wanders through a house that is available to rent in the sleepy desert town where she lives, California City. Looking out of the window evokes unexpected memories of her childhood home in Los Angeles.
Director: Isabelle Tollenaere
Belgium, 2022
14:30 min
Isabelle Tollenaere is an independent filmmaker/artist from Belgium, making short films, feature length films and installations, playfully moving between the codes and conventions of documentary and fiction, film and contemporary art. Her work deals with the connections between the current shifts in reality and the memory of the past. Her filmography includes VIVA PARADIS (2011), BATTLES (2015), THE REMEMBERED FILM (2018) and VICTORIA (2020).
Her films have been widely presented, amongst others at the Berlinale Forum (Caligari Film Prize 2020), IFFR (Fipresci award 2015), Centre Pompidou, Viennale, Visions Du Réel, FID Marseille, IDFA, CPH:DOX, 25FPS (Grand Jury Prize 2018), IndieLisboa (Special Jury Prize 2020), and many others.
UNEXPLORED EXPERIMENTS
Movies
PLSTC
Welcome to the world of PLSTC, an undersea dystopia that submerges you in the disturbing reality of plastic pollution. Through a series of graphically confronting AI-generated and hand-composited images, this animated film confronts you with the devastating consequences of our habits on marine life and leaves you gasping for breath....
THE DOG’S LEASH
The bell tower rings and the birds fly away. In the countryside on the outskirts of a small village, a dog tied to a very long rope, watches them disappear in the horizon. It’s time for him to go; and pull on its rope....
THE TWO BÉRÉNICES OF RÉJEAN DUCHARME
In a 1967 interview, a woman named Bérénice recalls her encounter with the reclusive Québécois author, Réjean Ducharme. The main character of his novel “Swallowed” is also named Bérénice....
WROUGHT
A stunning visual exploration of matter in various states of microbial transformation begs fundamental questions about human cultures’ complicated relationships with other species. Wrought begins with that universal moment of disappointment: despite all best efforts, our food has gone bad! But instead of turning away in disgust, Wrought zooms in, approaching the usually hidden world of decay with curiosity and stunning time lapse photography. Spoiling dinner leftovers bloom with successions of geometric bacterial colonies. Yeasts churn and froth in the torrential flood of juice leaking from a decaying melon. Cheese is slowly engulfed by carpets of furry, green mould. But, the narrator asks, would rot by any other name still reek? In answering this question, Wrought unfolds a larger story about the ways humans create categories for the world around us that can be limiting. It explores (and challenges) terms like spoil, ferment, compost and rot as it coaxes audiences to decompose these categories and their associated binaries: self and other, human and non-human, and nature and culture. As the film title implies, we are all forged out of the relationships that transgress such binaries; we are all, indeed, wrought....
KINDERGARTEN
Valeriya tells Yann a story of her childhood while Yann is giving her directions. What we hear is her story, what we see is her silence....
FROM OUR SIDE
History flows, the darkness wets our clothes. ...
WILL YOU COME WITH ME?
A Berlin born little story... The city which fools you with its liberated outlook, tends to give you a slap in the face when you get into intimate relationships, only to find out that things still aren't so different then they were in the dark days of the past, when women had take responsibility for not only their actions, but also men’s, and had to bare the consequences all on their own......
THE FRUIT TREE
In The Fruit Tree a young woman, Sharleece, views a property to rent in the sleepy desert town where she lives, California City. Looking out of the window evokes unexpected memories of her childhood home in Los Angeles....
MOTUS
Motus: a body in motion. A stop-motion animation where conception, degradation and regeneration cohabit in a unique way. A creation on a metal sheet using ethanol as the raw material....
WHATEVER MOVES IS ALIVE
While slugs wander across the kitchen floor, Noémie draws up her sel-portrait, shifting and fragmented, on the edge between the intimate and the hubbub of the world. ...
SALINE
Formed by visual and sound loops, this work explores organic textures related to images shot in Gaspésie in 1966. My grandfather's nervous camera, combined with his fascination for certain innocuous movements, resonates with my artistic practice. An organic algae-based film creation workshop gave me the pretext to play with these images, allowing me to work with the film in an organic and ecological way, but also playful. The workshop offered by TAIS - Toronto Animated Image Society gave me the excuse and the impetus to create this short experiment. Vladimir Konic imagined during a period of confinement, a method to create and digitize a film made from algae. The textures and colors created with these organic inks and films grabbed me. Their combination with recently digitized family archive images came about naturally. What could be more natural than combining images of Gaspésie with textures of algae? The process combines analog and digital technologies, 8mm film and organic film. The soundtrack comes from unused scraps from other projects....
LOVE AT FIRST BYTE
With security camera footage obtained via a CCTV data request, this short distorts reality to embody a missed connection between a lovelorn surveillance system and a passenger....