Oberhausen's Unreal Asia catalogue

55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen ended with a record attendance. The festival counted the highest number of entries since 1998, even more than in 2004, when the festival celebrated its 50th anniversary.

During the six festival days almost 600 short films and videos were screened in 91 programme. More than 1.000 accredited guest visited Oberhausen.

The festival catalogue of the 55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is now available for download at their website. <--right click this link and save.

A special program in this year's festival, “Unreal Asia” focuses on short films from Southeast Asia and the complicated post-colonial legacy of this region. 

Excerpt:

U n r e a l A s i a
 curated and presented by Gridthiya Gaweewong and David Teh

Does realism have any native counterpart in Asian aesthetics? In the West, claims
to reality are underwritten by recourse to observed fact, or the scientific method.
Film often makes its own claims on the basis of, and as an instrument of, this paradigm.
In much of Asia, however, this rationalist episteme – part and parcel of modernity
– is yet to assert itself. So should we not reassess realism’s various modes
(social realism, surrealism, the hyperreal, “real footage”, documentary, “reality
TV”, etc.)? For the basis of the exchange between art and life – how lived reality is
registered by and entered into culture – is far from universal, and ought to be
theorised from local perspectives.

This task is complicated, however, by film’s privileged relationship to reality, and
by the prominent role moving images have played in Asian modernisation. For over
a century, film has been a vehicle of the traffic between Asian and non-Asian cultures,
of articulations between past and present, of the imaging and imagining of
these inter-cultural realities. Still, real-footage may not imply the same “indexical”
relation to reality as it does elsewhere. Might we interpret documentary images in
other ways, or re-examine fictive and non-realist(ic) modes for their recording
value?
What other indices of the Real might prevail in this region? The family? The
state? Tradition? Death? How do they frame culture and social life? And how do
visual media, particularly digital media, transmit these framings? What would a
realism look like – or social realism, or surrealism – if it was informed by the tropical
metropolis, Confucian family values, Buddhist funerary rituals, localised Islam,
or Asian paternalistic dictatorship?

In contrast with the West, many Asian beliefs stem from ancestral worship and
animism. Everyday spirituality retains much that is superstitious and supernatural.
The transformation from agricultural societies to modern states might appear to
be well advanced, but mentally, these older, “irrational” beliefs play a significant
role in our way of life – feng shui masters, fortune tellers and shamans still advise
CEOs and heads of state, as well as artists and curators.