about us

exf f. is a festival dedicated to experimental and avant-garde film in all its diversity, both historical and contemporary. for four days, we would like to create a space in which various cinematic works in their specific medialities and materialities are brought into focus as an independent art form. films of this kind have a difficult time in regular cinema operations. they often “fall between stools” in a film landscape that focuses on feature films and documentaries as well as in the art world and there are few opportunities to experience them as part of an expanded, lively cinema culture. our program will include various analog formats, from super 8 to 16mm and 35mm, as well as digital productions and digital copies of restored films.

a big thanks to our sponsors, the HessenFilm und Medien GmbH, the Kulturamt of the City of Frankfurt, the AStA of the Goethe University Frankfurt, Instituto Cervantes Frankfurt as well as our cooperation partner the Filmkollektiv Frankfurt e. V., without whose support this festival would not be possible.

At the end of June this year, over a hundred filmmakers, programmers, artists and aficionados from all across the world gathered in a small field in the rural countryside of Greece in order to watch over 4 nights, starting from sundown and until 1 or 2 am, the most recently restored cycles of Gregory J. Markopoulos' ENIAIOS. This year's was the 5th iteration of the Temenos, what Markopulos called "the intuition space".

Markopoulos is the first name that jumps out from this year's exf f. program. Maybe no other filmmaker, be it in alternative or "traditional" cinema", has become myth to the extent of the Wunderkind Markopoulos: from his precocious interest in filmmaking, to his early masterpieces, full of youthful desire and homosexual erotics, Markopoulos could have become a Rimbaud-like figure of experimental film. Like Rimbaud then, he would leave a life behind, in the United States, but unlike the French poet, he would not give up his art: together with his young partner, the filmmaker Robert Beavers, to whom we dedicated a retrospective last year, Markopoulos pursued his filmmaking while leading a nomadic existence in Europe. In the years since his death, the mythical aura surrounding his person and his films has only intensified – while, paradoxically, the films have remained largely unseen. Conceived in echo to this year’s Temenos gathering, we at exf f. are therefore delighted to present four programs with works from all periods of Markopoulos' filmmaking, curated in collaboration with Robert Beavers and Francisco Algarín Navarro, including a very rare screening of films from the ENIAIOS cycle.

The second homage is dedicated to a figure who has none of Markopoulos' overshadowing aura: The films of French filmmaker Marcelle Thirache have hardly been shown in the last thirty years and appear neither in any established nor in most discussions of great experimental works. It was therefore all the more important for us to put these two programs together in order to present the Frankfurt audience with a work that is "minor" in the sense that in Thirache’s subjective universe, a single shot opens up a space of unlimited potentialities. Meticulously studied and carefully, her films are carefully composed poems about the female I and lesbian desire - they are anthems that capture the pure pleasure of seeing the world through someone else's eyes. We're espacially happy, that Miguel Armas from Light Cone Archive (Paris) will come to Frankfurt to present Thirache's work.

Homosexuality and queer desire are also of central importance in our this year's frankfurter forms-program, which is dedicated to the largely unknown Städel student Thomas Feldmann, who organized legendary gay film evenings at the Berger Kino in Frankfurt and died of AIDS in 1985 at the age of just 27. Karola Gramann and Heide Schlüpmann have put together the program in collaboration with the filmmaker Regine Steenbock, who will be present for the screening.

Another great cooperation is the program of the Alternative Film Archive Belgrade, which was initiated by the Filmkollektiv Frankfurt. Archive curator Ivan Velisavljević will present within three programs films from a timespan of over 60 years and give insights into the historically troubled movements of experimental filmmaking in (Post-) Yugoslavia. One focus will be on the more recent works of Milan Milosavljević, who we will also be welcoming as our guest.

We’re furthermore extremely happy that Valentina Alvarado Matos and Elena Duque have accepted our invitation and will be staging a program for our opening night. Conceived in multiple phases, their program will combine performances and super 8 and 16mm films. Through their shared love for collage as an artistic practice, their works enter dialogue with each other, where colors, shapes, forms and gestures enter into correspondence and open up a space for reflection: reflections on the artists' respective biographies, and reflections on cinema as a tool for plastic intervention.

Jeannette Muñoz, born in Chile and living in Switzerland, was featured in our very first edition, with her film Strata of Natural History. Three years later, we will finally be able to welcome her to Frankfurt for a monographic presentation of a selection of her works. Muñoz, like many of the filmmakers in this year's edition, conceives her films in cycles or series, of which we will each present parts.

This same preference for conceiving the singular film as part of a larger constellation applies to the filmmaking of Velu Viswanadhan. Viswanadhan, who was born in India, but has been living in Paris since the 1960s, is an internationally acclaimed painter, but his work as a filmmaker has largely been ignored. Curated and introduced by Arindam Sen, this two-part program will showcase Viswanadhan as one of the great artists who use their camera not as a tool to analyze, dissect and dominate, but to record and embrace the world. Through Viswanadhan's refusal of the ethnographic gaze, he becomes one of the essential postcolonial filmmakers, recording the world and its phenomena as they unfold before his eyes.

This refusal for cinematographic manipulation can certainly not be applied to the filmmaker of our closing night program: more than any other filmmaker of his generation, the US-American Paul Sharits conceived of filmmaking as a tool to directly alter the spectator's psyche. In Sharits' hands, cinema is broken down into its core elements, the photogram and the unrolling movement of the projector, darkness and light, in order to push the limits of human perception.

Finally, we would like to thank all of the filmmakers, archives, venues and those with whom we worked together to make this year’s edition of exf f. possible: The whole Pupille team, Natascha Gikas and Andreas Beilharz at the DFF, Svetlana Svyatskaya from Filmkollektiv Frankfurt and Ivan Velisavljević, Karola Gramann, Heide Schlüpmann and Regine Steenbock, Miguel Armas, Arindam Sen, Robert Beavers and Francisco Algarín Navarro as well as all of our helping hands supporting the festival. We would equally like to thank Julia Rosenstock for designing the catalog, Luisa Mielke for the flyer and poster and Simon Bugert for the website.

to keep you updated, be part of our mailing list: exff.filmtage@gmail.com

martin klein, larissa krampert, björn schmitt