The bi-annual AV Festival returns for an entire month of audio-visual delights this March. The concept for this year’s festival is slow motion, with major exhibitions, over 50 screenings and music events taking place at different speeds, paces and times of day across Newcastle, Gateshead, Middlesbrough and Sunderland.
At The Sage Gateshead on Friday March 2, the opening weekend, leading influential US minimalist composer and filmmaker Phill Niblock presents his epic 1973-91 filmic survey of labourers working around the world including in Peru, Mexico, China and Japan, accompanied by his music, that together create an otherworldly experience.
Then on Saturday March 3, film directors Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh introducing the The Art of Time, a film exploring how leading artists and thinkers are inventing new and radical notions of time. The film includes interviews with Vito Acconci, Doug Aitken, Chantal Akerman, David Claerbout, Stan Douglas, Sylvere Lotringer, Paul Morley, Alexander Sokurov, Robert Wilson and others.
Beginning Sunday March 4 there is an almost daily programme of slow film, including Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s sensational Cannes Grand Prix winner Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and Pablo Girogelli’s slow-paced Paraguay to Buenos Aires road movie Las Acacias.
That’s all before the Slow Cinema weekend which kicks off on March 8, where some exciting filmmaking talent will be welcomed to Newcastle to screen and discuss their rarely seen work across Tyneside Cinema and Star & Shadow Cinema. Among the filmmakers on show are German dynamo Fred Kelemen, ideological father of the New Philippine Cinema Lav Diaz and up-and-coming UK filmmaker Ben Rivers.
For more programme info and to book tickets visit avfestival.co.uk
AV Festival 2012 – Preview (text) by Adam Woodward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
