Beside feature-length films in the main competitive section, Ecofilms, the annual film festival (June 21-26, 2005) dedicated to ecology in Rhodes, also screens a series of shorts related to the environment. Among them, it presented this year two short documentaries by Dutch director Jos Neutgens : Reminiscentia (2004, 10 minutes) in the short films competition section and Allocation (1999, 14 minutes) in the non competitive Panorama section.

Both are creative documentaries expressing a fascination for an industrial landscape that seems to dwarf men.

In Reminiscentia, the camera explores an empty factory building that looks abandoned in a series of long static shots on remains of past human presence. The stillness of the camera and the ethereal soundtrack composed by Morton Feldman illustrate how time seems to have stopped there. The only movements are very slow, as the camera pans over neat piles of white laundry, and even somehow dramatic as it dollies into what looks like an administrative office, the place from which orders must have been given. In the end of this impressionistic short, the music fades out and we hear the echoes of dripping water underlining the size and desolation of the place we finally discover in a large ensemble shot of the inside.

In Allocation, the camera focuses on the movements and the sounds of soil as it is extracted by huge wheels in a brown coal mining site, and transported to some titanic piles by long conveyor belts. The deafening and rythmic sound of the gigantic machinery contrasts with the soft and natural sound of coal as it is poured onto these stacks. The machine ends up looking like an oger who dwarves the only human being of the short in the closing scene.

Olivier Delesse


Full coverage of Ecofilms 2005 on filmfestivals.com :

Ecofilms' opening stroke a sensitive chord

A decent factory tackles corporate responsibility at Ecofilms

Ecofilms also gives room to short films

Ecofilms grants a Medwet award for the second year

A spiritual angle on ecology at Ecofilms

Ecofilms presents an experimental answer to poverty in doc

Consumer society under the spotlight at Ecofilms with Czech Dream

Rhodes Golden Deers Awards