The seemingly simple question of How to do things together, gathered 10 Estonian and international films during Tallinn’s Photomonth (Tallinna Fotokuu) in the Artists’ Film Program titled „Polar Coordinates“. This renowned international biennial of contemporary art, which gathers artists working within wide range of artistic practices, took place from Oct 6th until Nov 26th 2023. Alongside the main exhibition, “Trance“, held in Tallinn Art Hall, there was an extensive Satellite Program across several institutions and galleries in Tallinn. The Artists’ Film Program “Polar Coordinates”, curated by Estonian artist and filmmaker Piibe Kolka, along with New York-based critic, film programmer, and Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at The New School, Genevieve Yue, ran for two days at the Sõprus cinema in Tallinn.
The “Polar Coordinates” film program, which was part of the expanded PÖFF (Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival) program, aimed to showcase films resulting from sincere collaborations and joint efforts, emphasizing how to do things together. The selected films depict everyday life, our efforts to understand our fragmented existence, and our longing for closeness and communication. Alongside themes of togetherness and intimacy, the films also embraced a modest and sincere approach in their making. Unlike films made by large crews with a substantial budget, these films emerged from intimate collaborations and artists’ personal fascination with the medium itself. The assembled films are a result of various close partnerships—those of lovers and romantic partners, scientists, artist duos, friends, or activists. The works were made within the personal habitus and, as such, contain tenderness, humour, vulnerability, messiness, and reflect dynamics of such relationships. Deliberately departing from conventional narrative structure and film language, these films depict the clumsiness and ordinariness of our everyday life, allowing viewers to enjoy and appreciate the authenticity and sincerity within them.
The first film program, “A Frame That Holds Us”, portrays the intimacy and domestic scenes of shared life. The frame that holds us together – whether the walls of our home, the bonds within families, the ritualistic routines of domestic life, or a film frame documenting our shared moments – serves as a comforting reaffirmation of the ties that bind us. The camera, as an observer and witness, documents daily life and sheds light on seemingly trivial moments and fleeting fractions that otherwise go unnoticed. Yet, these outwardly insignificant details that occur during our day contain all the beauty and authenticity of our daily existence.
The film “Is It a Knife Because…” (2022) invites us into a frame of a family home, where collaborative practices are shared between filmmakers Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat. This collaboration extends beyond the filmmakers, to their children, Rita and Nilus, who both appear in front of the camera, acting, and behind the camera, recording. In a domestic setting, the camera is handheld intuitively and often in close-up, as a child zooms in and observes up close in curiosity and wonder. One seemingly trivial yet critical detail is the understanding of where the light comes from, which is a common ground for the parents whose creative practice revolves around capturing the light, and children having the same awe and puzzlement while observing the light and its flickering.
Still from “Is It a Knife Because…” (2022), Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat.
Similarly, “Come Coyote“ (2019) is a collaborative work of partners Dani Leventhal ReStack and Sheilah (Wilson) ReStack, documenting their fear, joy, tenderness, and despair regarding same-sex motherhood. The camera serves as an autobiographical tool recording confessions but also captures subtleties and things unspoken. The frame holds something that can hardly be expressed through other means. There is an intrinsic quality to film, which is exclusive to this art form, when one witnesses raw and unprocessed emotions on the big screen, which resonates and touches upon our similar depths.
Ren Ebel and Laida Lertxundi’s “In a Nearby Field” (2023) also celebrate filmmaking as an integral part of family life, akin to other domestic practices such as cooking, cleaning, learning, playing, or dancing. Domestic chores are superimposed onto green landscapes, heightening the everydayness with an impressionistic and experimental quality, and infusing the film with unusual warmth and consolation. Such a setting where film and family life go hand in hand celebrates humble pleasures and moments of togetherness.
Still from “In a Nearby Field (2023), Ren Ebel and Laida Lertxundi.
In contrast, solitary, diaristic storytelling, as seen in Tõnis Jürgen’s “A Practice for Surrender” (2022) and João Pedro Rodrigues’ “Where Do You Stand Now, João Pedro Rodrigues?” (2017) serve as a personal and internal exploration. Reflections that come from the surface of glass, an interactive interplay of passing lights, provoke reflections, the retrieval of memories, and internal dialogues. The frame evokes a familiar space, firmly anchoring our sense of identity and borders of the self. Yet, amidst this, there is a subtle uneasiness in deliberate letting go while slipping into amnesia, surrender, absence.
In the minimalistic and subtle work “Orbs” (2016) by Liina Siib, two disembodied hands tenderly stroke a sphere. Within this mysterious play, there is a present need for connection, pushing and pulling dynamics become a means of communication, building a bond in an attempt to understand one another.
In the second part of the program, “A Question That Can Be Answered Yes or No”, tactics for fostering togetherness and cooperation extend beyond the limits of one’s home. Instead, they encompass vast distances, spanning across time and space. The gathered films employ a wide lens to examine a broader, macro perspective, offering insights into micro-occurrences in return.
Filmmakers Jenny Perlin and Jacqueline Goss, in “The Measures“ (2011), trace the journey of two astronomers on their quest to determine the true length of a meter and explore the origins of the Western metric system, all during the growing violence of the French Revolution. Landscape and natural forms are overlayed with persistent straight lines, measurements, and angles, while the authors reflect on political and personal turmoil and the subtleties of collaboration.
In Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk’s “New City of Friends” (2021), macro is reflected within the microcosm as we observe a city and its suburbs, in a subtly desperate and disintegrated setting, through the gaze of a teenage flâneur. In the following scenes, we lose the insider’s sight and observe the boy as an outsider as he narrates and maps his tour on the ground and microcosmically restages a city-dérive.
“Similar Image” (2021) by the fantastic little splash collective reveals dissonance between order and chaos, structure and disorder in technologically mediated landscapes and a quest to find one’s place in a such environment.
The film program ended with an expanded cinema performance titled “Distant Feeler” (2022), that included two slide projectors, by the artist duo OJOBOCA. The Distant Feeler was a contraption initially created by another artist duo, Goliatus & Carábida, used while creating “telepathic cinema”, a project they worked on from 1977 to 1997. Adopting their peculiar device and a manifesto titled “Distant Feelings or Signs of a Perfect Lover”, the artists reassembled the device and presented their own interpretation of it through a performance.
Through rapid flickering light and rhythmical beating of the shutter in the dark, the performance brought an ecstatic and immersive experience of seeing and feeling the film. The projection was made of the singular slides, lined up and projected through two projectors, creating a joint image on the screen. The OJOBOCA performance and its visual language serves almost as a response or a conversation with Goliatus & Carabida, creating a direct bond between the two artist duos that transcends time and space between them. This form of collaboration also emphasizes mutual inspiration and interconnectedness of our practices.
The simple question of How to do things together, aims to introduce filmmaking and film processing as a communal and collaborative practice that nurtures and strengthens our bonds as artists, collaborators, family members or romantic partners. The autoethnographic approach to filmmaking, adopted in some of the films, provides us with an observer’s distance to analyze our lives from another angle. This approach also offers viewers an opportunity to recognize and empathize with our struggles and insecurities in the contemporary, disconcerting world. It genuinely reenacts life with all its flaws, randomness, imperfections, and ordinariness.
Thinking further of possible communal strategies in filmmaking, hands-on processing of the film can serve as a self-sufficient alternative to industrial processing. Engaging directly with the materiality of film, besides being more financially viable, opens up a wide range of artistic possibilities and offers a seductive sense of freedom. Hand processed film is meant to reflect the randomness of the process, of trial and error, of individual decisions, and as such is meant to be imperfect and spill over the limits of what a film can be. It also reveals the process as not being perfect and smooth; on the contrary, it is full of unexpected errors and (un)pleasant mistakes (much like life itself), which, when enlarged on the screen, are celebrated precisely as such. This rule-breaking within the film practice reflects a tendency to employ non-hierarchical, collaborative production practices, self-sufficiency and critical thinking.
Being exposed to various styles of cinematic experiences and filmmaking practices, we are increasingly recovering from the rigidity of standardized film language and expanding our ability to digest different kind of moving image. In breaking-down of rules and boundaries, one should stand freely in front of the screen allowing the film to reassemble us and to impart whatever it has to offer. Films arriving from the personal and intimate sphere of one’s home generously invite us to closely inspect their lives. In doing so, they encourage us to see ourselves on the screen, urging us to become humble spectators who are able to reflect the similarities of our shared lives and experiences. By exposing us to their narratives, they initiate a dialogue and collaboration with the viewers as well, encouraging us to leave the cinema enriched, provoked and puzzled.
