About the program:
Movements of a Nearby Mountain (Dir. Sebastian Brameshuber, Austria, France Nigeria, 2019, 86 min)
At the foot of the Austrian Alps, a Nigerian mechanic works in a garage, repairing and exporting cars to his homeland. In the distance is Erzberg, a mountain that’s been mined for iron ore since Ancient Rome. Against this backdrop, the mechanic toils away in relative solitude, his routine labor standing in stark contrast to the resources being mined for capitalist gain in his periphery. A result of director Sebastian Brameshuber’s friendship with the film’s real-life subject and framed around a centuries-old legend of the mine’s mysterious creation, Movements of a Nearby Mountain commingles fact and fiction, myth and memory, in a meditation on man’s place in our globalist economy. Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2019 Cinéma du Réel.
Preceded by:
Preserving Cultural Traditions in a Period of Instability (Dir. Sebastian Brameshuber, Austria, 2004, 3 min)
In a voiceover Stan Brakhage articulates his resentments about the use of computers for art production and in general. This comment is contrasted by video imagery turning more and more abstract until it bursts into a sea of square pixels. The video is an ironic illustration of Brakhage’s views as these “defunct” images reveal a kind of beauty of their own.
Of Stains, Scrap & Tires (Dir. Sebastian Brameshuber, Austria, France, 2014, 19 min)
A remote industrial site in a valley in Upper Styria has new users. Cliff, a young man and native of Nigeria, has been managing a company exporting used cars. It is a Nigerian microcosm in the middle of the Styrian nowhere which seems to have fallen out of time and space.
TRT: 108 min
In person: Sebastian Brameshuber
"Through his materialist approach, Brameshuber [in Movements of a Nearby Mountain] links the exploitation of iron to the earth spirits and contemporary leisure activities." —Antoine Thirion, Cinéma du Réel
"[In Preserving Cultural Traditions,] the viewer’s gaze glides past the representation and illumination to the beauty of the pixels and abstract surfaces, which now stand for themselves and condense to form something new and original. In this case, digital compression is just another term for poetry." —André Siegers, Bilder, Falten (Le Studio Edition 1)
"Of Stains, Scrap & Tires is a calm, documentary miniature that chooses the auto export business of three young Nigerians in the Erzberg region as a point of association and departure for formulating something more fundamental about the first and third worlds, movement and standstill, business, space, and freedom." —Stefan Grissemann, Bilder, Falten (Le Studio Edition 1)
"Without false romanticism, [Movements of a Nearby Mountain] depicts honest work. How it feels, what happens with breathing and movement, and the relationships between worker and product that emerge from them are soaked up in images that always remain at a slight distance, expressed in the calm, relaxed, but nevertheless dynamic editing, and conveyed in the concentrated density of the sound." —Alejandro Bachmann, Bilder, Falten (Le Studio Edition 1)
(Available to download after screening date)