Cherry Kino is the forum for wondermental cinema at the festival – films that fill you with, and make you, wonder. The first weekend focuses on contemporary Australian film as Cherry Kino and East Street Arts partner up to welcome Brisbanite Sally Golding to perform three expanded cinema pieces and to hold a photo-sonic 16mm workshop, and we welcome Nanolab’s Richard Tuohy who will present his films and run a 16mm workshop on selectively applying film processing chemistry by hand along with Nanolab partner and filmmaker Diana Barrie at the Cherry Kino Lab at Patrick Studios, East Street Arts. This focus on hands-on filmmaking practises continues into the second weekend with two Super8 workshops on how to make crazy coloured film, and processing black and white film in an environmentally responsible and quirky way, using coffee (!) and Pip Chodorov’s excellent documentary Free Radicals provides a brilliantly accessible introduction to the history of experimental cinema. The final weekend will take place in a temporary Microcinema space by the waterfront in Granary Wharf, thanks to the generosity of ISIS. This year’s programme is packed with an array of exciting new wondermental cinema including a conceptual programme of Destructural Video, selections of work inspired by the notion of obscurity, the prismatic vision of the Camera Lucida, language as a form of possession, and a screening of the newly restored and subtitled 1967 surreal Japanese film Galaxy by political film activist Masao Adachi. Complete with in-house cafe, the Cherry Kino Microcinema offers audiences the chance to dip their toes into the programme or to dive right in, with the informal, relaxed and welcoming atmosphere helping to make experiencing wondermental cinema a free, social and artistic activity.
- Can the electronic stutters, crashes, errors and glitches that we encounter with technology in our day-to-day lives be considered beautiful in their own right? This programme of extraordinary video work showcases contemporary artists who exploit and explore the imperfections hidden in the signal/ data structures of moving image technology to striking effect. Recalling early video [...]Click to read more about this film »
- A highly acclaimed experimental filmmaker in his own right, Pip Chodorov has crafted a highly accessible and infectiously enthusiastic history of the artists and poets of experimental cinema. His’free radicals’ are crazy about filmmaking and pushing the artform in radical new directions, trapped in a no man’s land, excluded both from the art world and [...]Click to read more about this film »
- A surreal masterpiece, newly restored and subtitled, and Japan’s first feature-length underground film. One of the leading figures of Japan’s 60s avant-garde art scene, Adachi co-founded the communal living space and artist’s lab VAN Film Science Research Centre, was scriptwriter for Koji Wakamatsu and Nagisa Oshima, and joined the Palestinian liberation movement in the early [...]Click to read more about this film »
- A gloriously free-wheeling selection of films on Super8 and 16mm, made by artists at DIY film labs and chosen for their sense of fun, freedom and their uncompromising attitude, which seem to emanate from the very material itself. Enjoy some black and white Lithuanian cat-stroking in Paris, a Portuguese radical manifesto, Berlin’s kaleidoscopic art and [...]Click to read more about this film »
- Two medium length films which explore the relationship between language and possession in politically resonant ways. Roee Rosen’s film Tse confirms his status as one of Israel’s most interesting and provocative experimental filmmakers, forming a link between S/M bondage practices and the policies of Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, renowned as one of [...]Click to read more about this film »
- The Camera Lucida is a prismatic device that was used as an aid to drawing and David Hockney would argue that it ushered in Renaissance perspective of art. These wondermental film and video works consider life through the cinematic magic of the prism, as light spills its bounds, inviting us to see the world in [...]Click to read more about this film »
- A shop unit in Granary Wharf by the river Aire has been transformed into a temporary Microcinema for this long weekend of experimental film, offering stunning pieces by original filmmakers for your pleasure and illumination! The Microcinema shows that any location can become a cinema given a few basic ingredients. Enjoy complimentary drinks and the [...]Click to read more about this film »
- An innovative 16mm workshop run by Richard and Diana of Australia’s Nanolab! Usually, reversal cine film is developed as a negative and then converted to a positive image through a series of chemical baths, but it is possible to intervene by hand with a brush, thereby limiting their effect to particular areas of the film [...]Click to read more about this film »
- A dazzling selection of recent artists’ cinema from some of the most interesting and engaging contemporary artist filmmakers, bringing together an eclectic mixture of ideas, aesthetics, technique and forms. Wondermental cinema has a long relationship with obscurity and these films emerge out of the shadows into the blinding light of the Microcinema space for one [...]Click to read more about this film »
- Working with the photogram technique, participants will use 16mm analogue sound and image samples to ‘compose’ in the darkroom, and hand-process the film! The result will be a sound/image collage, played back at the end of the workshop to produce ‘photo-sonic’ film strips. Using the area usually reserved for the 16mm soundtrack, sound is recorded [...]Click to read more about this film »
