Glued and Screwed edition 8: Recollect - Poet - Tree

I'm just lying there(2022) - Frederique Pisuisse
This movie is a ficto-memoir about the filmmaker’s teenage relationship with her first boyfriend, a 36 year old man who was a pedophile. Through poems and popsongs, the film brings back memories of their grown-updates. Having dinner at a restaurant for the first time without parents, or being picked up from her birthday in his Mercedes. The coming of age film looks at the shaping experiences in which the female body is first subjected to the malegaze, and therefore becomes an object of desire. The protagonist, who is 14 years old at the time of their affair, is pulled towards the sensual experiences of being with this man, and simultaneously feels the danger in these experiences. There’s a sense of dissolution of the self. She uses her intellect to separate and watch over the body she owns, a detachment strategy, whereby the scene appears to us in birds-eye-view. The bird, a raven with a scratch on her beak, accompanies us.

‘I’m Just Lying There’ is a haunted experiential short-film with music produced especially for the film. The visuals, consisting entirely of an African snail family crawling over a naked body, allow us to perceive the tactual sensations of memories. Time is warped and the body is stretched, creating a body-mind separation experienced while watching.

Make the Birds Quiet so I can Hear Myself Singing (2022) - Emily Stevenhagen
"Why is it so hard (...) to remember something when you actually think about it, to close your eyes again and transport yourself back into the same dream."

In 'Make the Birds Quiet so I can Hear Myself Singing' a person wears a painted costume of themselves and interacts with a wooden frame. A minimal 'painted world' is introduced. A pre-recorded monotonous glitching voice reflects on an everyday experience of memory, wondering why it is so hard to remember things when we want to, and why memories pop up when they do: Reminding us of people we have not seen for some  time, reminding us of the smell of someones sweat, because we heard that song at a house party once. What flicks memories in and out of our minds?

Turtleneck Phantasies (2022)- Gernot Wieland
Turtleneck Phantasies is a poem that comes to us in fragments in this video. This work is dedicated to the murmuring, the illegible, the unspeakable, the sketches and doodles, fragments of childhood memories, the absurd moments. In other words, all the little forms that are so central to our relationship with the world, but are given relatively little attention.

Man or tree (2021) - Varun Raman & Tom Hancock
In the wilderness, a tree begins to question whether it may actually be a man tripping on hallucinogens.