[Editorial] The 2018 Lab competition explores and reinvents the world
For this 17th edition, the Lab is working to shake up rules and reality by exploring every land, nook and cranny, real or imaginary, that speak volumes about us. We steadfastly dig into the same track: that of the inexplicable and of parallel worlds. “I believe that the universe is 97% rational,” says the French director Clément Cogitore. “But it is within the remaining 3% that my work as an artist and storyteller can be found: we create stories to coexist with that which we do not understand.” His film The Resonant Interval opens up the skies of Alaska and winds between astrophysical theories and Inuit beliefs.
With his fourth selected film in Clermont-Ferrand, Shadow Nettes, Phillip Barker mystifies us with a fascinating tradition that drives fishermen into a remote valley to demonstrate their strength and skill in using a traditional fishing apparatus that casts their silhouettes on the water. The Dutchman Rosto, a regular at the festival who has been selected numerous times, served on the Labo Jury in 2007 and who authored the festival poster in the same year (the Collections program is devoted to him this year), offers a fantastical tour of his childhood. Blending diverse animation techniques with real footage, Reruns is a magistral trip, a dive into the intimate amplified by the bad apple music of The Wreeckers. With his film Retour, Pang-Chuan Huang, a young Taiwanese student from Le Fresnoy (National Studio of Contemporary Art in Tourcoing, France), makes a two-fold journey into his family history but also across a continent, all with a gentleness and humor that owes much to Chris Marker.
But certain films are also driven by the ambition to change the world order. In Beirut, in the film Tshweesh by the Lebanese Feyrouz Serhal, the World Cup is underway. The inhabitants, aware of the imminent Israeli invasion, are nonetheless excited about this sporting event and want to experience it all the same. When the attack begins and they can no longer receive the broadcast signal on television, they climb up on their roofs to witness live the attack against their town, as if they were on the other side of the world, watching the Israeli attack against a town called Beirut on their TV screens. The Chilean directors of Snap use Instagram to document the journey of Axel, Bastian and Alfonso as they seek to undergo sex changes, offering a razor sharp reflection on the body, on self-image, on the city and the segregation of which they are victims. Black America Again twists Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”. Set to music in a sumptuous black and white, the film honors the African-American community at a time where it is essential to display another slogan, “Black Lives Matter”.
We must ask of art to create tension and to act as a question that is asked by society. The Lab is here to set that question ablaze.
