Festus Toll and Bram Ruiter have made a series of impressive short films that show their willingness to experiment with and explore cinematic language. How conscious are they about working on their own personal language? Or is it something that happens without much thought? And how do they manage to stay true to their own voice when their work has to fit into the industrialized distribution methods?
Combining old and new material, Festus Toll explores themes of identity, belonging and where one feels at home in his films. As a director and self-taught editor, he aims to tell personal stories that carry a social urgency, with an experimental and essayistic style.
We will screen his remarkable graduation movie We Will Maintain (2017), which is still one of the most piercing and reinvigorating works of Dutch non-fiction films of the last decade. The film premiered at IDFA 2017 as the only Dutch student film of that year. His most recent production When You Hear The Divine Call (2020) was nominated for best directorial debut at Dutch Film
Festival 2020. Currently, he is working on a short documentary about the pending discussion regarding the restitution of looted African objects in European museums.
Through his film work, Bram Ruiter focuses on the textural qualities of image and sound. His films are collage-like morphologies concerned with creation, contradictions, labor and the unfinished or incomplete. A recurring fascination is that with objects and materials deemed lost, non-traditional, broken and obsolescent, funding alchemic ways to repurpose the old into something new. This is showcased in the short film that we screen, A Weave of Light (2021), which played in Viennale, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema (Pesaro Film Fest), and the Directors’ Forum of Netherlands Film Festival, amongst others.
Besides the screening of We Will Maintain and A Weave of Light , Festus Toll and Bram Ruiter will also present other short audiovisual works and clips that they are inspired by. In between the screening of these shorts and clips, they will discuss, alongside film producer Steven Rubinstein and film critic Hugo Emmerzael, how these inspirations have informed their own artistic practices and frames of references.
The programme will start at 20:00 and last for 1,5 to 2 hours. Afterwards the bar of MACA will stay open to facilitate further conversation and discussion. The conversations will be in English and all audiovisual works will be English subtitled (if possible).
This programme was made possible with the support of
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