Artist Film Festival

A lone actress stands on an almost empty stage. Behind her is a large wall on which the interior of an apartment is projected. Underneath her clothes she wears a motion capture suit that records her body and facial movements, transferring them to three digital figures inside the apartment. thereby breathing life into them. The director, who is in the wings, synchronizes the character played by the actress with her virtual figures on screen in real time, using a control system. The point of departure for the performance is Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (Huis clos) which recounts the story of three people—two women and one man—who find themselves in an apartment without knowing why, gradually realizing that they are there to stay, and that they are each other’s hell. As Sartre put it, “Hell is other people.” Similar to the original play, here too, the apartment is also a model, a representation, a substitute for something else: it is located in an IDF base in Israel’s south, yet simulates a Palestinian apartment in the Gaza Strip. Grass Widow combines elements from the language of theater, television sets, computer games, reality shows, escape rooms, and a military simulator.

Sound:  Binya Reches

Programming: Julia Bogonos

Duration: 30 min

Image-based lecture with Tami Liberman

Jean Rouch, an anthropologist and experimental filmmaker, has made several films since the 1950s that have challenged the existing distinctions between art and science, between “Western” and “non-Western” culture, between researcher and researched, and between truth and fiction. Via creative collaborations with West African and French youth he addressed the key questions brought to the fore by the “crisis of representation” in anthropology in the 1980s, influencing the French New Wave and formulating some of the principles that would underpin participatory art practices prevalent in contemporary art. The lecture will include excerpts from his films; it will analysis of the unique work techniques he has developed, and place his work within the discussion of post-colonialism, documentation, and participation.

Tami Liberman is a scholar and lecturer in ethnographic and documentary cinema and a video editor. She has taught at Freie Universität Berlin, as well as at Tel Aviv University, the Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts, The College of Management, and Sapir Academic College in Israel. Her short ethnographic films have been screened in various festivals, including Festival Dei Popoli, and won awards.

Image-based conversation with

Amir Yatziv, Neta Spiegelman, Maya Arad Yasur, and Dr. Ohad Landesman.

Moderator: Vardit Gross

Behind the Scenes of Grass Widow: a play for three digital characters and an actress, a video performance by artist Amir Yatziv created for Artport’s Artist Film Festival, is based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s eponymous play, combining theater, cinema, reality TV, and computer games. Yatziv, actress Neta Spiegelman, who co-created the work, playwright and dramaturge Maya Arad Yasur, and documentary film scholar Dr. Ohad Landesman, will discuss the significance of the link between different media in the current digital age, and how it dramatically changes the affinities between reality and its representations.

Maya Arad Yasur is a playwright, production dramaturge, and scholar of the theater. Her plays have been translated to many languages; they have been produced in leading theaters in Israel and around the world, participated in international festivals, and published as books. Arad Yasur is winner of the Berliner Theatertreffen Stückemarkt prestigious prize for the play Amsterdam; first prize at the international playwriting competition of ITI-UNESCO for Suspended; and winner of Habima Prize for Emerging Playwrights for God Waits at the Station, for which she was nominated for the Israeli Theatre Award. In addition to playwriting, she is writing her doctoral dissertation on performance narratology. She also works as a dramaturge and artistic advisor in various productions, and sits on several artistic committees.

Dr. Ohad Landesman, is a film scholar and lecturer specializing in documentary cinema, cinema in the digital age, and animation. He is a member of the senior faculty of the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University. His doctoral dissertation, which he completed at the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU, focused on the aesthetic implications of digital technology on contemporary documentary cinema, focusing on doc-fiction hybrids, essay films, and animated documentaries.

Film festivals have long since been a major hub for films made outside of the commercial film industry. At the same time, the number of contemporary artists who focus on filmmaking and call themselves filmmakers continues to grow, redefining the moving image and challenging the concept of “film” as we know it. In response to these trends, film festivals around the world are expanding the frames in which such films are screened. Not only do they present them to a wide audience, but they also fully support them: from helping with funding, through integrating the films into various screening programs to the distribution phase. How are film festivals related to the video works of contemporary artists? Which film festivals play a significant role in institutionalizing art films as part of cinematic culture? And how do you make your film fit into the world of film festivals, especially if you are an artist making his/her first steps in this world?

Evgeny Gusyatinsky is a curator and film critic working in the fields of cinema and contemporary art. He has been one of the programmers for the International Film Festival Rotterdam (since 2011), and the curator of Garage Screen, Moscow (since 2018). Gusyatinsky is a guest with Artport’s International Residency Program.

For workshop pre-registration click the link below

Image-based lecture with Ariel Avissar

Once Upon a Screen is an international project that was created during the COVID-19 pandemic, dedicated to the processing of cinematic childhood traumas through the creation of personal video essays, in an attempt to revisit the origins of trauma through the editing table. The project received great acclaim around the world, and the various works created for it were screened at international festivals and topped the Sight and Sound magazine’s list of “best video essays of 2020.” Ariel Avissar, one of the initiators, will present the project, screen selected works from it, and discuss videography and its affinities to the worlds of art, criticism, and academia.

Ariel Avissar is a lecturer and doctoral student at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University. In recent years, he has been promoting the field of videography in Israel as an academic practice, initiating and involved in a number of international videographic projects. His works have been published in several online academic publications and screened at various conferences and festivals around the world.

Jonathan Omer Mizrahi

In the years before and after the establishment of the State of Israel, the area surrounding the Gaza Strip thrived as a result of the construction of civilian, military, and agricultural communities serving as a front, facing the border with Egypt. For the last 17 years, following the dismantling of Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip, the area has become known in the Israeli consciousness as the “Gaza Envelope,” a term that has gained legal status. In his performative lecture, Jonathan Omer Mizrahi offers a creative and associative psycho-geographical analysis of the area, using forensic and landscape images, moving between the notions of territory, land, and soot.

 Jonathan Omer Mizrahi, a graduate of the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne (KHM), is an artist working primarily in video and performance art. In his mixed media works he explores environmental images and their relation to power and culture. His works transpire at the moment of encounter between creativity and emergency.

Duration: 50 min

Roi Boshi will talk about the projects of the Forensic Architecture research agency based at Goldsmiths College and the new models it proposes for intervention in the public space and its documentation. 

 Roi Boshi will discuss the projects of the Forensic Architecture (FA) research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Using digital and graphic tools developed by its researchers, the agency proposes new models for the documentation of and intervention in the public space. How do these projects allow us to rethink the materiality of photographic documentation in the digital era? What types of resistance and human rights struggles can be adopted from FA’s various studies?

Roi Boshi is a doctoral student in the Faculty of the Arts at Tel Aviv University, and lectures on the history and theory of photography at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Hadassah Academic College, and Shenkar College of Engineering, Design, and Art

Right before he enters his new position as the Head of Photography Department at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Vardit Gross, Artport’s director, will talk with Gilad Reich, the festival’s curator. They will discuss the decision to initiate the Artist Film Festival, the need to create a stage for local artists working in this field, and what “Artist Films” really means.

A lone actress stands on an almost empty stage. Behind her is a large wall on which the interior of an apartment is projected. Underneath her clothes she wears a motion capture suit that records her body and facial movements, transferring them to three digital figures inside the apartment. thereby breathing life into them. The director, who is in the wings, synchronizes the character played by the actress with her virtual figures on screen in real time, using a control system. The point of departure for the performance is Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (Huis clos) which recounts the story of three people—two women and one man—who find themselves in an apartment without knowing why, gradually realizing that they are there to stay, and that they are each other’s hell. As Sartre put it, “Hell is other people.” Similar to the original play, here too, the apartment is also a model, a representation, a substitute for something else: it is located in an IDF base in Israel’s south, yet simulates a Palestinian apartment in the Gaza Strip. Grass Widow combines elements from the language of theater, television sets, computer games, reality shows, escape rooms, and a military simulator.

Sound:  Binya Reches

Programming: Julia Bogonos

Duration: 30 min