This world around me

Visions of a better life, wishes for a better world, and the realisation of a better self: seven films that portray just that. A collage of news snippets, speeches, programmes and images establishes the state of the civil rights movement, particularly in the USA: Black Code/Code Noir evokes dreams of an ideal world and compares them with reality. A whole new world is created in in between identities: virtual individuals and surroundings simulate a surreal California in the computer-generated second life. Passport photos of Green Card Lottery participants, of friends and acquaintances, blend into each other in Mohsen Zare’s film DVLottery, merely becoming images, fading memories. Nazli Dinçel writes and tells of her desires, her arousal and her first sexual experience, putting her body and masturbation into relation to sounds and colours, passion and her conservative childhood: solitary acts #4 and solitary acts #5. So-called “China Girls”, an allusion to their porcelain complexion, were used in film production to compare colours. Lili is one of them; using her light skin and found archival footage, old questions regarding the principles of exclusion of darker skinned people are posed afresh. Scales in the Spectrum of Space delves into the memory of Chicago City, and composes an experimental urban symphony consisting of found 35mm material on the jazz sounds of Chicago music legend Phil Cohran.