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25 fps International Festival of Experimental Film and Video Zagreb September 21 – 26, 2010 Jury's Choice September 24, 18.00h CRASHING MARKETS Curated by Florian Wüst The recent crisis of the Western World's financial system evokes profound doubts about the way we do business. How intrinsic to capitalism is the excess of risk taking and the lack of responsibility against the common good performed by fund holders and investment bankers in the advent of the credit crunch in 2008? While the laying off of employees is celebrated as a measure of corporate efficiency and credibility, managers sack billions of bonus payments. The notion of privatizing profits and socializing losses, as exemplified by bank bailouts as well as this year's major oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, seems to put a new dimension to the uneven distribution of wealth, to the gap between the rich and the poor that increasingly disintegrates democratic capitalist societies, with or without social welfare programs. Economic practice is always a form of cultural practice, it follows normative rules, moral standards, and the logics of power. Where accumulation and exploitation, state regulation and market freedom, egoism and solidarity begin and end, is a question of definition, a consequence of prevalent rationales and collective imaginaries, and last but not least a result of political dispute about what's possible and necessary, what's right and wrong. Crashing Markets presents historical and contemporary avant-garde classics, animation films and works of video art. The program combines a variety of artistic approaches, ranging from satire and visual poetry to fictional narrative and staged performance. This concise choice of works by acknowledged young artists and seminal experimental and documentary filmmakers reflects the interrelatedness of economical, social and cultural transformations in a world full of marketplaces where goods and technologies, knowledge and identities, actions and believes are exchanged and traded – for money or otherwise. Inflation, Hans Richter, Germany 1928, 3' Die Gartenzwerge, Boris Borresholm, West Germany 1961, 10' Het Leesplankje, Johan van der Keuken, The Netherlands 1973, 10' Coal Spell, Sun Xun, China 2008, 8' The Anarchist Banker, Jan Peter Hammer, Germany 2010, 30' Magical World, Johanna Billing, Sweden 2005, 6' SC Cinema Savska cesta 25 10000 Zagreb Croatia 25fps.hr/2010

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