The official lineup for the Pearls of Cinema section at the 7th Hainan Island International Film Festival (HIIFF) has been announced! When conventional narratives have paved familiar sailing routes for the audience, experimental images are more like underwater reefs—hidden beneath the surface, yet capable of overturning the entire course. This year, the festival once again welcomes the Pearls of Cinema experimental film section, salvaging these experimental works that drift between different forms and deconstruct the ontology of the image through pioneering perspectives. From December 3 to December 9, let us gather these pearls scattered on the beach: they may not be dazzling to the eye, yet the moment they are picked up again, their unique luster reminds us that cinema still holds infinite unknowns to explore.
Night Shift, directed by British avant-garde experimental filmmaker Robina Rose, had its restored version premiere at the New York Film Festival last year, giving countless film lovers the opportunity to see this dreamlike film for the first time in decades. As the gritty, grainy, and handcrafted textures of the images are polished anew in a new era, they once again refract the rebellious energy and experimental courage of that era, allowing us to feel a trans-era pulse within them.
Returning to the present, experimentation in filmmaking has never ceased. The Venice International Festival award-winning Agon blurs the line between fiction and documentary; director Giulio Bertaina juxtaposes the arena with medical imagery and video game aesthetics, deconstructing the physical and mental gamble and solitude of judo competition, much like Solitary Afternoon screened at HIIFF last year, once again presenting audiences with a refreshing take on sports competition films. The World Upside Down, co-directed by Agostina Di Luciano and León Schweichert, is a hybrid experiment infused with Latin American magical realism, where reality is quietly inverted and fable overlaps with the everyday, embarking on a philosophical journey of meaning-seeking. Portuguese emerging director Gabriel Abrantes' Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes unfolds a dialogue that breaks the boundaries of time and space amidst poetic imagery; as inner emotions are released on a steamy night, it serves as both an echo of history and a sincere exploration of male vulnerability and intimacy.
Julian Castronovo's Debuts, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued, made with an extremely low budget and limited resource materials, connects the dots by salvaging debris and collaging and reorganizing archives and media, constructing a narrative maze of desktop cinema. Canadian director Reinier van Meurs' second feature film Levers was shot with a broken Bolex camera; its extreme image texture and symbolic narrative of "the sun no longer rising as usual" create a mysterious dark aesthetics. The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, co-written by director Pete Ohs and the lead actors, is a bold attempt at improvised co-creation completed within two weeks; driven by eccentric characters and eerie sound design, it allows horror and absurdity to pull each other, presenting a grotesque profile of contemporary anxiety.
It is worth mentioning that Pete Ohs is also the screenwriter of Obex, a film selected for this year's Island-Wide Carnival: Midnight Thrills section (Screening Lineup | Island-Wide Carnival: Echoes of Diversity), and both films star Carlie Hernandez, the lead actress of last year's Golden Coconut Awards finalist Invention. The continuous and close collaboration among these American independent filmmakers also brings to mind the creative approach of last year's "Focus Filmmaker" Omnes Films group. From December 3 to December 9, Pete Ohs will also attend HIIFF to engage in face-to-face conversations with film lovers.
If the global cinematic landscape is regarded as a vast ocean, then experimental films are the deep-sea creatures that refuse to surface; they may appear slightly obscure due to their reconstruction of narratives, or remain far from the mainstream due to their medium self-reflexivity. Damaged film strips, desktop ruins, actors' improvised ensembles, moving bodies, and sudden mutations of sound. Here, everything acts like levers, interconnected, prying and amplifying each other, generating new possibilities in the crevices and a renewed gaze to understand the world.
More screening lineups for the 7th HIIFF will be announced soon. We look forward to embarking on a journey of cinema with filmmakers and film lovers from home and abroad, and, through inclusivity and creativity, seeing a broader world.
