We want to show great stories and ideas made with minimal means in this spring’s film screening. The film «Søster» is suggested by Mike Sperlinger, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo.

As a response to this choice, the Turner-Prize awarded Charlotte Prodger’s work follows up in our program. In «SaF05» she lets the viewer inhabit her viewpoint, through the camera of an iphone to a drone. Writer, poet and mountaineer Nan Shepherd (1893-1991) wrote: «It is necessary to be sometimes exclusive, not on behalf of rank or wealth, but of those human qualities that can apprehend loneliness.» (from «The Living Mountain», 1977). In common with Shepherd, Prodger has seeked periods of solitude in her motherland, Scotland. Through her filmmaking, she attempts to connect with different communities. In the wilderness, with emotion and memory, she reflects upon ways in which queer bodies might understand and be understood.

Franciska Eliassen: Søster
Norway, 2018, 12 minutes (with eng. subtitles)

"Søster is an amazing example of condensed storytelling: narrative cinema meets conceptual art. A story about two sisters and the long shadow cast by an older sibling, it takes all its limitations (of budget and resources) and turns them miraculously into a resource. Presenting itself as a kind of moving-storyboard or sketch for a feature-length film, it is in fact a kind of essay on the relationship between what we see and what we imagine." - Mike Sperlinger


Charlotte Prodger: SaF05
United Kingdom, 2019, 39 minutes

«SaF05 is named after a maned lioness that figures in the work as a cipher for queer attachment and desire. This animal is the last of several maned lionesses documented in the Okavango Delta and is only known to Prodger through a database of behaviours and camera-trap footage logged across several years. These indexes of SaF05’s existence are intersected with autobiographical fragments from Prodger’s own life that fluctuate between proximity and distance. Her voiceover traces a chronology of intimate gestures and interpersonal connections from prepubescence to the present, inscribed with the incidental details of territorial delineation, sovereignty and land use. Central to these fluctuations is a tension between macro and micro, the experienced and the described» (from LUX collection)