[Shot from Jacqueline Lentzou’s ALEPOU (Fox) Credit: Konstantinos Koukoulios (DP)]
The Locarno International Film Festival, which takes place 3-13 August 2016, will screen films from four London Film School alumni, with one in competition.
Fateme Ahmadi’s CHANDRA will be screening as part of Open Doors: Shorts. The film has also been officially selected to screen in both the East End Film Festival and Palm Springs Film Festival this year. In CHANDRA, seven-year-old Chandra and his elderly grandfather have to travel on foot through earthquake-hit Kathmandu in order to get to hospital, where Chandra's mother has just given birth. Chandra is oblivious to the scenes of misery on the streets, and is fascinated by the many curious and beautiful sights, and excited about meeting his new sibling. Grandfather, who knows the sheer scope of destruction, attempts to protect Chandra from the grim reality of it all, while gradually coming to terms with the fact that the city is no longer the same, and that the hospital may not even stand.
Written and codirected by LFS alumnus Fateme Ahmadi and supervised by Award winning director, Naomi Kawase, CHANDRA is the result of South Korea’s Busan International Film Festival and Youku (the biggest Chinese video hosting website) collaboration project titled "Asian Masters and Newcomers”. It was premiered at the 20th Busan International Film Festival and Fribourg International Film Festival in Switzerland. Ahmadi's graduation film from LFS titled ONE THOUSAND AND ONE TEARDROPS was one of the nominees for the Best UK Short at the East End Film Festival in 2015 and got Special Jury mention.
Watch the trailer here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i1lAbamYHYI
Official page: https://facebook.com/chandrashortfilm/
THE CINEASTE by Aboozar Amini, has been selected as part of the Open Doors Hub. In THE CINEASTE Asef is an Afghan cineaste in his late 20’s passionate for cinema. He runs a small screening room in Kabul to show films of his collection. In 1996 Afghanistan falls into the hand of the Taliban who ban any kinds of arts and culture with death penalty. Despite the ban, Asef cannot abandon his most precious ten films that include the works of Ozu, Kurosawa and Chaplin etc. Caught by the Taliban, Asef asks them to screen just one film before they kill him. He chooses to show ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. Unexpectedly, the Taliban like the film and let him live after the screening, under one condition: that he must show them a new film every day. The Taliban are now confronted with all kinds of stories of humanity, which gradually causes deep dilemmas inside themselves.
Jacqueline Lentzou’s ALEPOU (Fox) is in the Pardi di domain, which showcases forty shorts and featurettes made by young directors that “may be short in duration but pack a powerful punch”. The Pardi di domain has two separate competitions: one limited to recent Swiss productions, the other international, featuring films from all over the world. In ALEPOU (Fox), On a very hot day in Athens, Stephanos, the eldest brother, is working while his mother is planning a day out. After another intense argument, Stephanos is left alone to take care of his two younger siblings as well as Lucy, the family’s sick dog. The day is spent pleasantly between summery laziness, pizzas, teenage flirtations and phone calls that remain unanswered. The film is eligible as Locarno’s short film nominee for the European Film Awards 2016.
Christos Massalas has been selected by the 69th Locarno Film Festival as one of the 15 most promising young directors from around the world for the festival’s Filmmakers Academy. The festival will screen his latest short film FLOWERS AND BOTTOMS, which premiered at the 46th Tampere Film Festival and is continuing a highly successful festival run (BFI, Paris, Madrid, Toronto, Montreal, Sao Paulo and more). An unidentified man sits in a dark room and watches an obscure film titled “Flowers and Bottoms”. The film is "a narrative of “still lifes” featuring flowers and human bottoms. The setup is inspired by the practice of ‘cyber roulette’. The flowers are there, adorning every scene of our life – from the first instance of romance to the long hours of mourning. The bottoms are there, vulgar and erogenous, concealed under the notion of obscenity for most of our life. But, in the confines of privacy, they are exposed to the gaze of the other. Here, a variety of blossoms and bottoms co-exist humorously in a love-letter to those private glances, which we all share."