All That Goes Before Forget

2021 | 15 min

All that goes before forget is an experimental short film about traumatic memories and flashbacks caused by PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder). The film is composed of fragmented stories from a young girl in post-war Norway, a Japanese schoolgirl during WWII and an androgen person in their twenties in a contemporary domestic setting. These three individuals belong to very different places and time, meanwhile, a voiceover, which is interwoven in between images is indeterminate: the voice might belong to one of the characters on screen, or all, or none. Scenes are depicted with close-up images, which bring with them a suggestion of significance, as if they were hinges to memories, but the overall narrative remains tantalizingly elusive. As the voiceover puts it, “details of the periphery repeat themselves again and again, whilst the centre of the event takes place somewhere else.”

Based on personal accounts of surviving trauma, the film uses fiction as a form for speculating about those events that might define a life, while simultaneously defying our ability to narrate them.

A False Weight

2019 | 49 min

A Japanese architect, Tadashi has lived his life in accordance with modern, rational, and constructive ideas of control and efficiency, ideas which also found physical expression in his life after retirement as a bodybuilder. This ideology faces dilemma after he has been diagnosed with an unusual and incurable progressive brain disease affecting his movements and speech.

A False Weight is an experimental portrait of a character closely based on the filmmaker’s father (Masanori Kosugi) and partly filmed in his apartment in Tokyo. The film’s apparently simple, almost Ozu-like observation of daily routines is in fact the product of an intensive behind-the-scenes collaboration between Masanori Kosugi and Toru Iwashita, who plays the protagonist. Toru is a Butoh dancer whose movements are inspired by the freedom found in the body’s limitations; Toru and the Masanori worked together throughout the production, on the details of the character’s movements, and how his body feels in scenarios that are portrayed in the work. Through a meticulous choreography of both body and camera, the film slowly unfolds Tadashi’s ongoing struggle for dignity and self-reliance: a story in which maintaining everyday routines and gestures becomes the most intimate form of drama.

Daisuke Kosugi (b. 1984, Tokyo) lives and works in Farsund, and is educated from the Oslo Art Academy. In addition to film and video works, the artist works with installation, performance, sound and sculpture. He has had solo exhibitions at Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux; WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; Museo Amparo Puebla, Mexico; and Fotogalleriet, Oslo. Furthermore, he has participated in exhibitions such as the Aichi Triennale 2022, the 11th Gwangju Biennale, and MOMENTUM 11 at Galleri F15, as well as in group exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; and Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm.

Ane Hjort Guttu (b. 1971) is a Norwegian artist and filmmaker based in Oslo. She works in a variety of media, but has in recent years mainly concentrated on film and video works, ranging from investigative documentary to poetic fiction. Among recurrent themes in her work are the relationship between freedom and power, economy and the public space, social change and limits of action. Guttu is also a writer and curator, and she is a professor at the National Academy of the Arts, Oslo. An anthology of her written works was published in 2018, edited by Rike Frank and published by Sternberg and Torpedo Press. Her most recent project is the full feature film VOICE, released in 2023.