18.10.2026 at 17:15. Prompted Reality 1: Exit From The Lumière Factory, Deserters from the Fields (Leningrad Newsreel story no. 10), Tierra sin pan / Land Without Bread, Necrology, The Girl Chewing Gum, Rodina, Big Hall

Description

Specially for the Prompted Reality program

The Lumières’ classic was shot in three takes. Statistically, over a working life, each worker leaves the factory some 9,000 times.

About the director:

Sid Iandovka

Artist and musician, from Novosibirsk. He works with video, sound, and new media — always independently, outside institutional structures. His films have been shown at IFFR, the Viennale, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Courtisane, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and many other festivals.

Description

A fragment of Leningrad chronicle about trained agricultural specialists who dodge work in the field and prefer the city. They are named, mocked, called deserters outright; the commentary demands that the Komsomol send the runaways back to the farmland, where, the narrators insist, they belong.

About the director:

Yuri Ryabov

Description

A surrealist film, a pseudo-documentary portrait of Las Hurdes, a remote region of Spain where civilisation has barely developed, showing how the local peasants try to survive without even the most basic utilities and skills.

About the director:

Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel (born February 22, 1900, Calanda, Spain—died July 29, 1983, Mexico City, Mexico) was a Spanish filmmaker who was a leading figure in Surrealism, the tenets of which suffused both his life and his work. An unregenerate atheist and communist sympathizer who was preoccupied with themes of gratuitous cruelty, eroticism, and religious mania, he won early fame with avant-garde experiments in France and then pursued an obscure career in Mexican commercial cinema before earning international acclaim with his late films made in Spain and France.

Description

People ascending into darkness.

About the director:

Standish Lawder

Born in Connecticut in 1936, Lawder studied at Williams College, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He later earned a Ph.D. in art history from Yale, publishing his thesis as The Cubist Cinema, an influential study of film’s impact on modern art. His body of work spans over 25 experimental films and several essays, with his filmmaking beginning in his basement during a sabbatical in the late 1960s-early 1970s.

Description

As random events unfold in an ordinary and busy London street, a commanding voice-over directs the action.

About the director:

John Smith

John Smith was born in Walthamstow, London in 1952. He studied at North-East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, after which he became an active member of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. Inspired in his formative years by conceptual art and structural film, but also fascinated by the immersive power of narrative and the spoken word, he has developed a diverse body of work that subverts the perceived boundaries between documentary, fiction, representation and abstraction. Often rooted in everyday life and personal experience, his meticulously crafted films playfully explore and expose the language of cinema.

Since 1972 Smith has made over sixty film, video and installation works that have been shown in independent cinemas, art galleries, museums and on television around the world.

In 2012, John Smith attended Message to Man as a jury member for the In Silico experimental competition, and also presented a retrospective of his work. Since then, he has participated in the festival on numerous occasions. This year, two of John Smith’s films have been included in the Prompted Reality special program.