Yalda Afsah

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Named after its setting, the French river Vidourle, Yalda Afsah’s film documents a strange and subtly unnerving choreography, capturing a group of young men performing what could be a ritual, a spectacle, a game, or a fight. In their collective movements as well as individual moments of concentration, anticipation and occasional forlornness, the adrenalin-fuelled adolescent protagonists seem to embody the frailty of the human condition awaiting an environmental change, much like an unexpectedly forceful current in a river.

The film accompanies an Afghan teenager who was raised as a boy according to the tradition of "Bacha Posh" on her search for her identity in Germany.

A group of men is fixing their eyes onto the sky. High above, a swarm of pigeons is moving in an unrecognizable formation, when suddenly individual birds drop in mid-air, spinning backwards with their wings extended and tumbling down in a circular motion before resuming their ordinary flight path. Yalda Afsah’s short film SSRC slowly dissects this aerial choreography, revealing its nature as a form of animal training and gradually zooming into the at times almost intimate details of this interspecies relationship. Focusing on the specific social context of the Los Angeles-based „Secret Society Roller Club“ and its members’ identification with and through the animals, Afsah’s film negotiates positions of co-dependency and care, domestication and dominance – calling into question the ambivalence reflected in the symbol of the soaring bird free in its flight, yet simultaneously bound to human will.

A bullfight in the South of France. White foam is flowing into the arena, blurring the view of animals and humans. Tourneur shows young men in the ring with a bull – their gestures are between archaic subjugation and modern dance. Image and sound, foreground and background, on-screen and off-screen combined in a highly artificial and surreal way. Up to the moment when the bull suddenly breaks through the presentation.

The figure, dressed in a costume, remains invisible. People, armed with turnips, now turn against each other in battle. In real time and slow motion, we see streets, fights and a traditional ritual in an unreal, modern setting.