Present Tense
"What I want is to make people feel the passing of time."
These words of Chantal Akerman run like a thread through this program selection. For more than two decades, directors from around the world have used time and long duration to investigate and explore what it means to be human today. Yet, the films selected for this program not only put the human at the centre of their work, a human who struggles, who searches, who confronts the dark side of life. They also make clear that, despite cinema having become a global industry which seeks to cash-in on people’s need for entertainment, there is a form of cinema which takes its time to look into characters, and not only at them. Set in the Indian desert or in Latin America, following a global production line or exploring family history, calling for mysticism in times of despair and hopelessness, or projecting us into a future of ‘life after life’, the films selected for Present Tense ground us, anchor us in our fleeting present through their use of vertical time, a time that allows us to feel what we see.
Guest Programmer - Nadin Mai
Nadin Mai is the founder of The Art(s) of Slow Cinema, a blog dedicated to Slow Cinema, which today counts over 350 articles on slow films and on their directors. After having finished her PhD on the films of Lav Diaz in 2016, she became a freelance writer and critic. She has written for the British Film Institute, Multiplot!, Lo Specchio Scuro, and more. In 2018, she joined the programming team of the Slow Film Festival. Her first monograph, Human Condition(s) - An aesthetic of slowness, was published in April 2021.
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Present Tense Trailer
"What I want is to make people feel the passing of time."
These words of Chantal Akerman run like a thread through this program selection. For more than two decades, directors from around the world have used time and long duration to investigate and explore what it means to be human today. Yet, ...
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Nadin Mai introduces Present Tense
Nadin Mai introduces Present Tense, a program of films looking at time and duration in contemporary contemplative cinema.
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A Place Called Lloyd
CPH:DOX
IDFAA huge, over-towering hangar is opened. The static camera is positioned at a distance, so that the full grandeur of the hangar and simultaneously that of the Bolivian airline Lloyd Aereo Boliviano is shown. Danish director Sebastian Cordes’s A Place Called Lloyd is a record of loyal...
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Centaur
Indielisbao
Sarajevo Film FestivalFirst, a black screen with a woman’s whisper in the background. Then, a naked man with a horse-shaped head walking towards the camera. Aleksandra Niemczyk’s film Centaur begins obscure, almost otherworldly. Vlado, a man in his late forties, early fifties, strug...
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El Corral Y El Viento (The Corral And The Wind)
Cinéma du Réel
CPX:DOXReturning home, experiencing time, exploring traces from the past. Miguel Hilari, from Bolivia, uses his camera to look into the past, and created with El corral y el viento a film that seems like a portrait of another time. Hilari returned to the Aymara village of his fat...
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FOGO
Cannes Film Festival
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
Moscow Film FestivalDark clouds hang over the island of Fogo. An evacuation order has been issued as a result of an increasing decay of the local community. People leave, often reluctantly, but they submit to their fate. And so do tw...
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Letters from the Desert (Eulogy To Slowness)
Camerimage
Thessaloniki Documentary Festival
Montreal World Film FestivalOne defining characteristic of our post-modern life is the drastic change of our ways of communication. In the last fifteen to twenty years, emails and text messages have cast aside letters as a preferred way of communicat...
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O laboratório (The Laboratory)
Incuna International Film Festival
porto/post/docA Tarkovskian Stalker-like atmosphere surrounds Fernando José Pereira’s O laboratório. The ruins we traverse, they are a landscape of memories. Memories of the past, above all. But they also foreshadow a future, a future of ‘life after life’, a f...
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Spoon
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
Tallinn Black Nights Film FestivalThere are many aspects that have defined our turn towards modernity and our plunge into the post-modern era. There are the ways in which we communicate, there are the ways in which we travel, the ways in which we work an...
