The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Artists over the moon at film fest
PERHAPS of all visual art, film is the one thing which can most gamely bear the move online. Lucky, then, for Tako Taal and Adam Benmakhlouf, this year’s invited curators of the Artist Moving Image Festival, which normally takes place over a November weekend in Glasgow’s Tramway, and that has, this year, had to move to the internet.
“I got the invitation letter the first day, really, of coronavirus, last March. Friday 13th,” says Benmakhlouf, who had been “up north” at the time and found out the same day that they’d possibly been near someone who’d got Covid.
Some ten months later, the festival Benmakhlouf and Taal have curated is about to open, and in very different fashion to previous years, “So the whole experience really has been parallel with the Covid timeline in a big way. But a positive way.
“It’s been amazing to collaborate with Tako and actually make something during this time when a lot of people have had to stop making.”
The reimagined festival, free to book this weekend via eventbrite, opens with a set of five films, ranging from Korean Kyuri Jeon’s shocking Born, Unborn and Born again, to De’Anne Crooks’ Lief and Sherisse Mohammed’s documenting of Camille Turner’s brilliant Miss Canadiana.
These are artist shorts, varied, refreshing, some quiet, some joyful, some powerfully moving – all thoughtprovoking and a vast yet intimate broadening out from the very rigid and somehow dehumanised mainstream public conversation so dominated by coronavirus and Brexit.
“For both of us, the main interest was looking towards ephemeral moments, the kind of lifestyles and experiences, maybe even the artists, that might be lost along the way,” says Benmakhlouf, who had never properly met Taal before, despite moving in similar art circles, before finding out they were curating the festival together.
“A lot of the films really signal that.” Benmakhlouf points to Hayes’ Fingernails on a blackboard: Bella,, which is a silent transcription of an audio tape of a vocal training exercise between a vocal coach and the American Congresswoman Bella Abzug, to “soften” and de-regionalise her voice. “This is about vocal exercises you do to be heard, so you don’t have an accent that isn’t respected or given agency. It’s about constructing a persona that commands a level of wonder and respect,” says Benmakhlouf. But at what cost?
There is Isabel Barfod’s hand-drawn animation about prayer, about the rituals of hidden religious lives, “doing some work to make them shine a little bit, to give them some dignity,” says Benmakhlouf. There are examples here, too, of artists working in documentary style, “that really challenges the parameters and expectations of the genre.”
Kyuri Jeon’s film is a hugely affecting short, with a personal slant, on the historic yet enduring Japanese Korean belief that a girl born in a year of the Horse, would have great misfortune (largely, it appears, because she would be feisty and make a “difficult” wife) and the subsequent horrific practice of aborting girls in inauspicious years – particularly “White Horse” years – since the early 1970s with the coming of ultrasound technology for sex identification.
“That really flipped everything that I expected to see in that moment. And