Starting in 2014, the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival expanded its profile by the presentation of a European film and media distributor, addressing both structural aspects and the substance of their activities.
Video Power is a non-profit organization based in Maastricht, Netherlands, dedicated to process-driven and experimental filmmaking practices, focusing on supporting filmmakers whose drive is deeply personal and who value the process of filmmaking as much as the result.
The program aims to highlight the diversity of the practices Video Power supports. The importance of the filmmaking process is at the heart of each work, oscillating between playful improvisation, conceptual explorations and introspective investigations. Throughout attempts, experiments, challenges, failures and successes, filmmakers drudge through with boldness and willingness, chanting in a singular key. At the same time, they heed a strong call for togetherness, fighting alienation one film at time.
After winning a life coaching session in a raffle at her local village hall, Helen is guided through the help she never really needed. Together with her life coach Hazel, they explore healing strategies to cope with fear, rejection and grief, raising the important question as to whom this pain really belongs to.
… >>>Entering from the intimate and often complicated relationships between fathers and sons, DREAMS OF MY FATHER explores memories and visions from God, gods, and ghosts and their reverberations in family lives.
… >>>A lecture by an ambiguous professor who, in a mix of rhymes, skipped thoughts, stories, repetitions and actual facts, and with the use of props to illustrate his points, questions the way we perceive and understand the world around us.
… >>>A polyphonic narrator — filmmaker, parent, forest, insects, fungi, childcare worker — declare their absolute refusal of labor exploitation, and their necessity to join collective bodies in resistance. Who ordered legibility? In an incantation to conjure authority, the film unfolds the connections between the inventions of nuclear families and managed forest plots as controllable normalized units of profitability. EXTRA LIFE (AND DECAY) celebrates hospitality as a survival tool to fight morbid politics of isolation. An ode to the multitude, the illegible, the unmeasurable.
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