UK Premiere; World Premiere at IFFR 2023
Wheelchair accessible, English subtitles, partial SDH captions (only for Burial), Pay-what-you-can tickets (£0-£8)
Prompted by the complexities of her own family stories, Khrystyna Bunii travels across remote south-west Ukraine, to the transnational region of Hutsulshchyna, in search of personal photo archives. There, she encounters silent traces of a generation and a community silenced by the Soviet state. The struggles of breaking the silence passed down in historical memory and the poetic correspondence between the researcher-protagonist and the filmmaker guide the flow of the film subtly and naturally, providing the framework for the voices, faces, and stories revealing themselves along the way. Made as a close collaboration between the film’s directors and its protagonist, Weightless combines observational and direct cinema styles with staged performance and elements of documentary-essay.
Presented with a live Q&A with Marta Hryniuk and Nick Thomas.
Curated by Natalia Guzevataia
Director’s statement
We are interested in the complicated entanglements of Eastern European countries: we want to know what can be learned and reclaimed from these histories and narratives, and how they shape people’s intersubjective experiences. We see these narratives as a part of a shared political space, and as a catalyst for imagining alternative ways of living and working together.
Khrystyna’s practice is an example of writing this history from below, in her home region, with a grassroots methodology. She works on a human scale, and her methods are non-totalising, concerned with the lives of ordinary people. Her archiving forms a collective memory, and a call not to forget but to live with the joy and difficulty of Hutsulshchyna’s history.
dIRECTOR’S BIOGRAPHY
Marta Hryniuk and Nick Thomas are visual artists and filmmakers based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. They have worked together since 2019, collaborating on films, as well as leading workshops, programming, and assisting others in video and sound production.
Hryniuk and Thomas are founding members of WET film - a production and distribution cooperative for film, video and artists’ moving image, and are members of Filmwerkplaats, an artist-run lab for 16mm film processing. They have presented their work internationally, predominantly as video and film installations. ‘Weightless’ is their first feature length film.
Before relocating to Rotterdam, both artists combined their individual practises with cultural organising. Hryniuk co-founded an artist-run space Silverado (2013-17, Poznań); Thomas worked as programme assistant at LUX Scotland, and a committee member at Transmission Gallery Glasgow.
Short: Burial (dir. Jerzy Czachowski, Poland, 2022)
Poland today, after the publication of the near total abortion ban regulations. A man and a woman bury a chest on the random field, and the owner of the land calls the police. The couple is detained and interrogated about the mysterious contents of the chest.
Content notes: references to abortion, depictions of grief, alcohol consumption.
Access notes: occasional loud sounds (sirens).