THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN PLANTS AND HUMANS WAS THE FOCUS OF THIS YEAR’S EXPERIMENTAL FILM WORKSHOP AT THE PORTO/POST/DOC FESTIVAL
Last November, we held our Experimental Cinema Workshop Criaturas da Luz (Creatures of Light) for the fourth consecutive year as part of the Porto-Post-Doc festival’s School Trip educational project in Porto.
Ana Domínguez and Ángel Rueda, directors of (S8), offered secondary school students in the city of Porto a practical immersion in experimental cinema. The workshop, entitled “Towards a Common Language between Plants and Humans,” explored the forms and patterns of our thoughts alongside the forms of plant life, with an eminently ecological and environmentally conscious approach.
Students from Dr. Joaquim Gomes Ferreira Alves Secondary School and Escola Artística Soares dos Reis in Porto acquired technical and creative skills, exploring the artistic and technological dimensions of cinema in a purely practical workshop. They were able to create their own films on celluloid using phitography, an experimental technique that uses the internal chemistry of plants and flowers to create images on photographic emulsion on 35mm, 16mm, and photographic paper photochemical media. With all these elements, we put into practice organic techniques of direct manipulation on film, learned to create our own natural developments without polluting products, and created individual collages on photographic paper made with plants, resulting in a collective film that was the fruit of this common language between plants and humans.
THE ACTIVITY OF (S8) IN RECENT MONTHS HAS BEEN MARKED BY A SIGNIFICANT PRESENCE AT MAJOR INTERNATIONAL EVENTS.
In October, we visited DOCLISBOA to take part in NEBULAE25, the festival’s professional space. As part of this initiative, we participated in the ARCHE project: a meeting for development and creative thinking that brings together film projects by Ibero-American filmmakers. We were part of other events and institutions such as Visions du Réel, DocsBarcelona, EuroDocs, RTVE Docs, Punto de Vista, and the Sundance Film Festival. There, we had the opportunity to see firsthand the projects in development that will undoubtedly be the best films of the future. We were also able to share processes and concerns with their authors, but above all, our love for free cinema.
We then attended the 71st edition of SEMINCI in Valladolid, where we participated in the Spanish premiere of Gabriel Azorín’s film Anoche conquisté Tebas, co-produced by Filmika Galaika.
From there, we continued on to Gijón, where our director Ana Domínguez was part of the jury at the Xixón International Film Festival (FICX). In addition, this 63rd edition of the event paid special tribute to our colleague and programming manager Elena Duque. Ángel Rueda, co-director of (S8), led the discussion and meeting with the audience at this session.
