Lessons of Darkness
The lessons of darkness stem from a simple contradiction. Darkness is a fundamental condition of the cinema experience, but it also increasingly defines the world outside it in broad daylight. Wars, ecological and climate collapse, political violence and technological changes are not distant threats but part of everyday life that we follow in real time. Never before have we had access to such a vast array of images, and yet it is no clearer whether these images actually help us see better.
The title of this year’s edition draws its inspiration from the need to order and understand the images that surround us, as well as from Werner Herzog and his Lessons of Darkness, a film shot amid the burning oil fields of Kuwait following the Gulf War. Herzog captures this genuine humanitarian and ecological catastrophe as if he had landed on an unknown planet. There is something essential precisely in this detachment. It alienates the familiar enough for us to see it anew and, in the otherworldly images from more than three decades ago, recognize something eerily familiar, something that is returning today and could appear at any moment in an even more cataclysmic form.
Herzog’s film therefore served primarily as a starting point for the question of what it means to watch today. Wars, ethnic cleansing, fires, floods and political violence in all their varied forms and ever-changing configurations alternate on the same screens with advertisements, footage from summer holidays, humour, brainrot and cat videos. Catastrophe has become part of the everyday flow of images. The problem is no longer that we cannot see what is happening. It is much harder to hold our gaze on something long enough for it to truly affect us.
This year’s programme explores this reflection in various ways. The Herzog retrospective takes us on a consistent journey from his early films to Lessons of Darkness, leading us through a world of fanatics, dreamers, visionaries, untamed nature and people who test the limits of their own perseverance. The films of Gala Hernández López, this year’s “filmmaker in focus” in the Instant Cult section, turn to dreams and technology, online communities, finance and virtual worlds, as well as the ways in which these increasingly intrude upon our desires and perceptions of reality.
Three guest curators open up this year’s topic even further. Lyse Ishimwe Nsengiyumva seeks new territories through migration, belonging and new beginnings, while, with her programme Feral Rising, Anne Duffau draws on Herzog’s apocalyptic vision and pushes it in a rebellious direction. With an intergenerational and intersectional selection, she understands curating as a political act and seeks ways of thinking and creating outside established cultural and social frameworks. Sanne Jehoul, on the other hand, turns her attention to colonialism, imperialism, extractivism and their consequences, which continue to shape the political, social and ecological landscapes of the present. In the archival program Deadly Indifference, the gaze also turns toward us and the ways in which, through silence, denial and adaptation, we grow accustomed to things we would once have found unacceptable.
The topic is not merely a metaphor for catastrophe, though. In the programme FeXXX: Spaces of Evasion, it becomes a space of community and resistance against gazes that seek to categorise, control or erase bodies and identities. In the exhibition Kela: Lessons of Darkness, however, it returns to its material origin: the darkroom and the process of image-making.
At the same time, FeKK is, of course, still first and foremost a short film festival. This year, it brings more than 150 films from 45 countries. For the first time, we are introducing the FeKKids international competition program; Cyprus and Moldova are joining the international competition programme featuring films from Southeast Europe; Clermont-Ferrand is coming to Ljubljana; the European Film Academy and ESFAA programmes are returning; and alongside them, there will be VR, workshops, discussions and opportunities for socialising.
The lessons of darkness are thus not an attempt to derive a single lesson from the films. We primarily hope that something from the six festival days will linger and slightly contaminate our gaze – an image, a sound or a thought that will make us see something familiar in a new light. And if there is indeed a light at the end of the tunnel, let it not be a train for a change. Let it be a projector.
Matevž Jerman, Peter Cerovšek