Labour: Side A and Side B

Side A

Smoke Break

10min, 2021, Switzerland

Alan Sahin

In his clever short documentary Zigipouse (Smoke Break), the Swiss-based filmmaker Alan Sahin jumps between seven places where coworkers engage in sporadic conversations while getting their nicotine fix.

About the Director

Alan Sahin

Alan Sahin, born in 1995 in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, is a filmmaker inspired by the quiet, often unnoticed moments of everyday life. He studied film at the Zurich University of the Arts from 2016 to 2021 and graduated with the short film "Smoke Break" (Zigipouse), which premiered at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur. His most recent film, "Going South" (Im Stau), was screened at prestigious festivals such as Visions du Réel in Nyon Switzerland and the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea. Known for his sharp, observational storytelling, Alan creates films with a restrained yet powerful narrative style that leaves a lasting impression on viewers.

We Will Not Be the Last of Our Kind

24min, 2024, France

Mili Pecherer

What if the famous biblical ark, the last refuge of humankind and the animal kingdom during the great flood, was not merely an act of divine intervention but, instead, a meticulously planned programme for professional reintegration? The director uses a video game world she built herself as a filming location and joins everybody on the ark in the form of her avatar. There, her questions about the present collide with the ancient narratives of the Old Testament.

About the Director

Mili Pecherer

After thousands of years of wandering, two immigrants from France and the USSR settled in the Promised Land. From their love Mili Pecherer was born in 1988. Mili chose to go in search of her nomadic roots and, since then, her soul has been out travelling the wide world equipped with a little camera.

She documents as they come her encounters with ordinary people in their ordinary-looking everyday lives, and then transforms them into films. Well: almost banal, and almost films. Her film HOW GLORIOUS IT IS TO BE A HUMAN BEING (2018) was awarded with a Special Mention at the French Competition of FID Marseille 2019.

Her latest film WE WILL NOT BE THE LAST OF OUR KIND (2024) was selected for the Berlinale Shorts 2024.

Side B

Semiotics of the Home

8min, 2023, USA/Taiwan

Jessi Ali Lin & Hsin-Yu Chen

The gentle gestures enacted by large-scale machines subvert our notions of the domestic, imagining industrial equipment as bodies in a home.

About the Director

Jessi Ali Lin

Jessi Ali LIN is an interdisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia. She works with and through video, performance, sculpture and embodiment. She holds a BA in Art and Art History from Barnard College and Columbia University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Pennsylvania. Based on her experience of moving between the US and Taiwan, her work centres on the notion of positionality, both as physical position and as the multivalence of identity. By drawing from feminist theory, minimalism and performance art, she examines the relationship between the performance of identity, its fragmented nature and its location within systems of power.

Hsin-Yu Chen

Hsin-Yu Chen is a filmmaker and artist currently based in Taipei, Taiwan. He works with experimental film, documentary, and moving image to explore the liminal space between seeing and being seen where subjectivity is implicated and constructed. Drawing on border landscapes, embodied knowledge and the notion of measurement and categorization, he examines the intersection of the viewing body and the political subject. His work has been shown at MoCA Taipei, TW; Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, Hong-gah Museum, TW; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, FR; Kassel Dokfest, DE; 25 FPS, HR; and Arkipel – Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, ID. He has participated in the Oberhausen Seminar and residencies including RAIR Philadelphia and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.

No Wonder

11min, 2024, Austria/German

Lia Sudermann & Simon Nagy

"The story of one person responsible for the whole household ... that story had to be made up first. And for that, you need pictures." Based on photographs of people at work, the essay film "No wonder" revolves around the invention of the housewife. In dialogue with each other and with a newspaper photo archive from the 1950s and 60s, Sudermann and Nagy talk about broken household objects, the aesthetic production of the nuclear family and the revolutionary demand of wages for housework. In doing so, they relate the gendered division of labour in our present to the conditions of filmmaking itself.

About the Director

Lia Sudermann

Lia Sudermann is a performer, media artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Vienna. She graduated from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne with the long documentary film Zum Schluss bleibt nur die Berberitze in 2015. Since then she has created various video and multimedia works. She is a member of the art and performance collective Postmodern Talking, performer and (co-)author of numerous stage plays, lecture performances and stand-up comedy.

Simon Nagy

Simon Nagy is a text and media artist living and working in Vienna. As a part of various collectives, he practices artistic research with a focus on collaborative forms of text and theory production. Simon Nagy is a member of trafo.K, an office for art education and critical knowledge production, part of the artist group Schandwache, and founding member of the Pataphysical Society Vienna.