Glass, Meet The Future 2023 Programme

GLASS, MEET THE FUTURE FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Glass, Meet the Future Film Festival is dedicated to presenting a selection of new films pivoting around the medium of glass. The festival showcases a cross section of international diverse and engaging series of short films curated and directed by female identified and non-binary filmmakers using glass as the predominant feature.

GMTF is a microcosm to explore the human relationship with glass and film, exploring dynamics with the physical and environmental context, together with the human and social context. The amalgamation of material and ephemeral, glass and video, are at the heart of the film festival. Exploring the stories of how art is made, how artists survive, how they think and work, and what makes creativity our most important skill.

Alina Orlov (Israel) I set Frank Barcelona on fire & Maria Pechstein (Germany) Sleep Erin Hoffman (USA) Consideration of the Dust & Fionn Duffy (Scotland) A Mineral Dance

Madeline Rile Smith (USA) with Amy Nam and FiveByFive Of Breath and Fire & Jessalyn Mailoa (Indonesia) Consumption of Shame

JANUARY

SUNDAY 15TH JANUARY SATURDAY 14TH JANUARY

Ivana Rashlich (Serbia) Eternity & Zou Desbiens (Canada) Arcane Parhar (UK) Terminal Hair & Park (Korea) Unreadable Words JANUARY THURSDAY 12TH JANUARY

Mils Bridgewater (UK), Rinoi Imada (Japan), Michaela Tkadleček (Czech/Germany) The Gift & Chenyue Yang (China) Exam & Vanessa Hafenbrädl (Germany) Ghost squat Prchalová (Czech Republic) blackness come from & Jasulevicz (USA) of Innocence

WEDNESDAY 18TH JANUARY

THURSDAY 19TH JANUARY

20TH

COMMISSIONED FILM

GLASS, MEET THE FUTURE FILM FESTIVAL 2023

A LEAKY ROOM

The room leaked, the wall skin started dripping, and I started dreaming.

CHENGYU LI

Recently, my room was affected by a leak. The wall next to the window has become an ever-changing abstract painting, changing colour, growing, and shedding. As I observe it, the anxiety of its spread and expansion is reflected in my dream. I start to accept it as part of my life, just like I accept that we are always indoors, learning how to get along with ourselves and the daily objects that surround us. The wall skin grows and falls off, and this cycle goes on and on, just like the blooming and withering flowers that appear repeatedly on the table.

FRACTALS

(WORKING TITLE)

A short film exploring the dynamics of an artists life living within complex intersectional and socialised margins of acceptance.

It is an intimate exploration in how the medium of glass can be used to represent such vulnerable yet powerful life stories and experiences, through the artists own words. Documentary in style, it follows the making of new glass works and uncovers insight into Estabrak’s multi faceted creative process.

Through centering the relationship of glass and water and the deep connections these mediums have to nature and our environments, this film chronicles the use of glass in representing deep human complexities; including invisible systems.

I was attracted by these subtle and continuous changes. I documented the fragments of change in my life, remodelled them into a fictioning life narrative, and placed them into a film. Creating an experience allows the audience to enter it, and also feel this subtle but growing change.

Working across the mediums of water, wood, sand and ice, key conversations explored in this film are biology, love, war, food, security, culture, structures and family; all through new ways of engaging the medium of glass.

Chengyu Li - A Leaky Room 2023

“A single leaf in a forest of green; one tiny, red speck. I cannot look away.” Excerpt from ‘Red’, the poem.

RACHAEL BROOKE

CUMULATIVE

RIIKKA HAAPASAARI

ELECTRIC WORDS

This short film documents the act of reading a dictionary with a plasma sculpture.

YING CHIUN LEE

Lightening up words with the touch on the glass, the reader explores and questions the mainstream definitions of gender and sexuality.

Red investigates both the artists individual connection with the impactful colour, as well as the associations so many of us have with the wonderful yet confronting hue.

The artwork features a poem written by the artist exploring the metaphorical value of red; while blown glass forms, nature studies and movements of light and reflection are layered to express the prose in visual form. Rachael explores the tension between the desire to both recoil from and lean in to the intense and volatile emotions of life.

Can a fictional dialogue with it spark new strategies to tackling our (human) problems?

Haapasaari explored research and writings in contemporary and end of 20th century physics, psychology, philosophy, and poetry relating to topics such as relativity, animism, and the human brain that offered insight into existence and the meaning of it. She then attempted a dialogue, a book club of sorts, debating these topics as herself and as her debatecompanion, a glass window. A collection of perspectives rooted in the materiality of the window glass and the human body ensued and Haapasaari shaped this into a short film script, based on these dialogues, exploring the boundaries of how moving image can be produced and read as well as how narration that tiptoes around logic and cohesion can convey ideas and stories.

This commissioned work features a 1978 Mandarine-English dictionary and a plasma sculpture. In this video, the reader will guide us through pages of words in two different languages. The act of touching will be translated through the movement of electricity in the glass tubes. Using a dictionary as a metaphor for internet information nowadays, this film questions the stereotyping of gender and sexuality in mainstream culture.

Rachael Harris - Red - 2023

Rachael Harris - Red - 2023

KINDNESS IN THE NOWTIME, WHERE I CHANGE TOO Can glass provide us insight from its unique perspective into what it means to be a human and an inhabitant of our universe?

Ying

GLASS, MEET THE FUTURE FILM FESTIVAL 2023

The selected films show a strong creative narrative, whilst bringing together a collection that illustrates the breadth and wonder of female glass artists’ lives, skills, environments and materials from across the globe.

All genres have been encouraged, from glass art film, documentaries, to story-led films. The wonderful range of approaches in glass technique, story and film-making shows talent from every corner of our glass community; celebrating the diversity of the sector.

This project is supported by Creative Scotland and in partnership with the Shanghai Museum of Glass.

Find out more at www.northlandscreative.co.uk