For our opening program, we asked Eva Claus and Ewelina Rosinska to show some of their current works. Besides a collection of their films, each of the two will present a film of another filmmaker as a reference, a commentary or just a little addition to their selection.

Eva Claus makes films since 2015, primarily on 16mm. After her formation at Viennese Friedl Kubelka school, she studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in Ghent. Her films are characterized by observations of the everyday of people and landscapes. In a contemplative way, she pays attention to small, but often surprising encounters and impressions. They’re marked by her specific sense for repetitive rhythms that reflect the filmmaking process itself. Claus presents three of her latest films: 2Heim (2018), Tirana (2020) and Any Way (2022). 2Heim was filmed in Vienna, right before moving away. There is a strong farewell feeling, time is running inescapably. In the Albanian capital Claus observes with amused curiosity children and adolescents who are climbing a brutalist building in shape of a pyramid. In Any Way the camera follows the movements of three runners, changing between slow motion and real time. Details that get usually unnoticed get visible and the changes of rhythm create a trance-like ambiance. In addition to this selection, Claus shows All My Life (1966) by Bruce Baillie which he filmed in summerly California. The camera moves in a simple and continuous movement along an old picket fence, the sky is radiant blue, we listen to a scratched record of the same name by Emma Fitzgerald and then something “magical – call it cinema” (Manohla Dargis) happens.

Ewelina Rosinska will present her film Popiół imieniem jest człowieka (working title/work in progress). After studying art history in Kraków, she visited the DFFB (German Film and Television Academy Berlin), where she attended Ute Aurand's Bolex workshop. Her artistic approach is intuitive and personal, in search of impressions collected at different places of her life, images that she finds and get recombined in the editing process, creating new relations between them. Popiół imieniem jest człowieka collects images from Kraków and Lviv and is a personal approach to her own experience of growing up in Poland. She shows the world of her grandparents, tender close-ups mix with observations of a Catholic-patriotic reality marked by narratives of national pride and victim myth. The film attempts to break up identities that have been practised over generations and to renegotiate them with their ambivalences. We see sacred objects and buildings, ruins and cemeteries that are experienced and not remembered in a pathetic way. In between, there are many landscape shots, we see deer, birds, cows, foxes, which give a different framing to the complicated and often violent entanglements of this region, showing that it is not only shaped by the human. She’ll also show Mojave (2006) by Wilhelm Sasnal that he filmed in the US-American desert of the same name. His work was an important companion in the making of Rosinska's film. With a hand-held camera, Sasnal films his wife and son among aeroplane ruins to the music of Polish films from the 50s.