INTRODUCING CIFF LOVE LETTERS: Valentines day has come early! We’ve thought a lot this year about how we can build connections between audience members and filmmakers within a virtual space. One of the hardest things about this year for filmmakers, is that they have not been able to forge spontaneous connections with audiences and hear from them directly. If you’ve seen a film you have loved, click <a href="https://airtable.com/shrYRzigloM195wPc" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">HERE</a> to write a love letter to a filmmaker!

"Memory is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means, and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist" - Rebecca Solnit The film VILLA EMPAIN draws a mental map of a space, as it goes through time. Concrete marble, brick and steel: little else made by human hands seems as stable, as immutable, as a building. Yet the life of any structure is neither fixed nor timeless. Outliving their original contexts and purposes, buildings are forced to adapt to each succeeding age. To survive, they must become shapeshifters. Villa Empain’s atmosphere is strange and full of wonders. The camera touches gently upon textures as if to glimpse the moments they witnessed, to read the inner meaning of time. There is a secret to unveil but as with every good secret it evades us, it is elusive, we can never grasp it. The entire film is the attempt to find out about something that we cannot put our fingers on. So we put our fingers on wood, water, marble instead, and feel.

Villa Empain

VILLA EMPAIN compares the life of Louis Empain and his creation. It bears witness to how a fixed idea, an architect’s dream, has disappeared in favour of a living architecture. The work is activated.

Collaboratively developed with members of my family, shortly after the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2010, a narrative was improvised around an investigation into my mother's interactions with spirits in the village where she grew up. Landing somewhere between horror fiction and "spectral' ethnography, the film describes a population reeling from devastations of the past, where distinctions between the living and the dead are thinning.

The Eyes of Summer (Gimhanaye Netra)

In a small and remote hamlet, a young girl develops a friendship with a spirit who lives in an abandoned house.

“Today, people listen with their eyes… The image, the right colors… As always, looks matter.” Steps, gestures, memories. Money, costumes, folk music. Reflections, acetilene lamps, flashes of light, shadow lines. The life of a band leader.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Steps, gestures, memories. Money, costumes, folk music. Reflections, acetilene lamps, flashes of light, shadow lines. The life of a band leader.

A crossed telephone line propels Receiver into a suite of heated and intimate conversations in which we encounter scenes of protest at a university for deaf students, Q&amp;A cross-fire interrogation, vocal confrontations and lip-reading practice. In its various moods the film presents a heady and multi-layered assemblage of Deaf history, drawing on research into The Milan Conference of 1880 which led to a ban on teaching sign language in schools for the deaf. Receiver considers how we both speak and listen, and the question of who has the right and capacity to be heard.

Receiver

A crossed telephone line propels Receiver into a suite of heated and intimate conversations in which we encounter scenes of protest at a university for deaf students, Q&A cross-fire interrogation, vocal confrontations and lip-reading practice. Receiver considers how we both speak and listen, and the question of who has the right and capacity to be heard.

Shorts: SCALE

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The 19th edition of the Camden International Film Festival will be held throughout venues in Maine from September 14-17 and online from September 18-25, 2023.

Here's what's coming up soon. Can't make it? No sweat. Many live streams will be available for on-demand viewing as well.