Hyperlinks (February 21-23) is the first festival from Static Vision, a local collective who have been presenting Australian and NSW premiere screenings of important international films (Long Day’s Journey Into Night and the Academy Award nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening among them) since October 2018.
Hyperlinks will screen 12 feature films and 8 short films, most of which will be Australian premieres, at Pink Flamingo Cinema in Marrickville. Tickets and festival passes are now on sale at hyperlinks.sydney.
The Opening Night Party will be a retrospective screening of Personal Shopperdirector Olivier Assayas’ 2002 cyber thriller Demonlover, followed by a set from Atro (Slim Set) and Static Vision Sound System.
“Demonlover tackled data hoarding, the dark web and the excesses of late capitalism way before they became major areas of concern in the cultural consciousness,” says co-programmer Felix Hubble. “It sets the tone for the festival as well, right down to our underground screening space’s ad-hoc aesthetic.”
Leading the festival's documentary line-up are the provocative Searching Eva, a Vice-funded feature which gives a young model and sex worker navigating their way through Europe the opportunity to think through their identity online and on camera, Sakawa, a window into the world of Ghanaian scammers who build their computers from scrap parts and catfish Americans to escape a life of poverty, and Lynch: A History, a YouTube collage film about former NFL star Marshawn Lynch and the racism embedded in the American media machine.
Digital connection isn’t only limited to the screen. Hyperlinksalso boasts a handful of films about global exploration: Leave the Bus by the Broken Window, a gonzo documentary about the Hong Kong art market from Moonlightproducer Andrew Hevia, Tourism, a gentle comedy of travel misfortune from Japanese director Daisuke Miyazaki, and Sophie Bédard Marcotte’s L.A. Tea Time, about a Quebec-Los Angeles road trip in search of filmmaker Miranda July.
There will be a late night double feature on Saturday 22nd February of two microbudget American indies, the proto-desktop comedy 0s &1s, from Wobble Palace director Eugene Kotlyarenko (whose latest film Spreeis premiering this month at Sundance), and Jobe’z World, the slacker film answer to Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time (shot by their regular collaborator Sean Price Williams).
The Closing Night film is Swedish documentarian Lina Maria Mannheimer’s Mating, which began its life as a social experiment about online dating, before morphing into an intimate and sharp look at modern love as two of the film’s subjects started dating one another. The film received a Special Mention in competition at CPH:DOX in 2019.
Hyperlinks will also showcase two feature-length gallery works during the festival. AIDOL 爱道, from German artist and musician Lawrence Lek, is a film built in a video game engine that depicts a world where war between man and machine plays out through e-sports championships and pop idol hits are used to placate the human masses. The Task, from American artist and photographer Leigh Ledare, is a documentary experiment that follows a multi-day group discussion about power structures that descends swiftly into internet comments section-style debates and fissures.
“Part of the reason we went with the theme of digital progress and culture is that we knew it would push us outside of the usual festival cinema fare and into gallery works,” says co-programmer Conor Bateman. “We often talk about how many great films can’t fit into our local festivals, but we also can’t ignore the brilliant work being done for non-traditional cinema spaces.”
The short film programme in Hyperlinks reflects this sentiment, bringing in work from video artists from around the world. It includes the award-winning Thai short A Room with a Coconut View, Australian artist Tiyan Baker’s Reddit-focused The Witness, a desktop essay by French filmmaker and academic Chloé Galibert-Laîné, and Sunstone, an ingenious work of documentary from artists Louis Henderson and Filipa César.
Hyperlinks runs from 21-23 February 2020 at Pink Flamingo Cinema in Marrickville.
Individual tickets and passes are now on sale at hyperlinks.sydney
Contact press@staticvision.com.au for any press enquiries.
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