Miscellaneous Avant-garde festival Videoex shows films outside the mainstream
Scotland is the guest country at this year's 27th edition of the Videoex festival for avant-garde filmmaking (May 16 to 25). Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory and US filmmaker Sky Hopinka are expected as guests.
13.05.2025, 11:14
SDA
Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk nation and often deals with indigenous languages and language as a carrier of culture in his films. In his mostly poetic films, he combines language and song, color and movement. "With his 'ethnopoetry', he breaks down the ethnographic documentary view and creates his own narrative style of poetic indirectness," writes Videoex.
Strategies of concealment
The Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory stands for research-based projects. She now lives in the UK. During the Covid lockdown, she delved into the archive of Iranian cinema since 1979 and is now revealing communication strategies used to conceal certain bodies, intimacy, history and stories. She shows how Iranian cinema reacts to state moral concepts and censorship.
The Scottish guest appearance "Views on Scotland" addresses the gap between popular myth and private reality with "works about madness, deviance and gender". Another "Special" is dedicated to the Scottish artist Margaret Tait (1918-1999). She is considered one of the pioneers of poetic experimental film.
The program about Tait is by Ute Aurand - also a pioneer of the experimental film movement in West Germany in the 1980s. Aurand presents ten films made by Tait between 1951 and 1998.
Laurence Favre in CH Focus
The CH Focus section is dedicated to the work of filmmaker Laurence Favre from La Chaux-de-Fonds, who explores climate change in her films. She searches for images of nature in which humans play no role. In Zurich, she will be presenting her new film "Lettres au Docteur L." (2025), which celebrated its world premiere at the Visions du Réel festival. Her work has also been shown at other international festivals such as the Locarno Film Festival.
In "Lettres au Docteur L.", she shows four personalities reacting to the memoirs of Doctor L. in the African south; the film is a mix of adventure stories, religious fervor and medical reporting from the 19th century.
The awards ceremony for the two competitions will take place on the last day of the festival - the international competition, which is divided into five thematic blocks, and the Swiss competition with nine works.
The organizers of the international experimental film and video festival claim for their program that "the stories of our time are told beyond conventional narrative structures". Experimental films are shown to "broaden perception because they find other approaches" than the audience is generally used to.
https://videoex.ch/
