KNOCK, KNOCK

Knock, Knock is a film screening of shorts that focuses on relics from the past and how they are contextualized in a contemporary context through a feminist lens. Situated in domestic spaces and homelands, using mother tongues and biographies, and borrowing from historic national archives and popular culture, these works probe the haunting origins of the present and explore the irreducible strangeness of images, animating characters and stories through a diverse range of media. The event includes films by Zuzanna Banasinska, Keren Cytter, Che Go Eun, Helen Anna Flanagan and Alice Theobald, followed by a sonic performance by Janneke van Der Putten.
This event is curated by Helen Anna Flanagan, an artist working across film, installation, performance and writing. She looks to investigate social structures and the political subtext of the everyday, focusing on affects and emotions, labour and the body. Her work was awarded the IKOB Feminist Art Prize (2019), the VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize (2020), a fellowship with Needcompany (2021) and the second prize of Art Contest Brussels (2021).
Janneke van der Putten – Cycles: Overstone and Glottis Attack
In an intuitive and physical way, Janneke van der Putten explores her voice as a sound texture. She has specialized in extended vocal techniques, producing two or more sounds simultaneously: basic tones, harmonics, interferences – like glottic attacks – and spatial reflections. Van der Putten uses architecture as a natural sound amplifier and as a trigger for echoes or other sonic effects. Wandering in space makes the sound move and generates a dynamic listening experience. Her performances are often performed without electrical amplification. In this way, she focuses on the exploration of space itself: how it sounds, whether it is lit or not, and where the audience is located.
Keren Cytter – Four Seasons (12’5), 2009, Germany, English without subtitles Opening with a neo-noir celebration of late-Hitchcock-meets-1980s-kitsch: a record plays dramatic music by Ferrante & Teicher; thick fake blood drips onto white tiles; snow whirls through the apartment and a lone woman climbs a dark, smoky staircase.
Zuzanna Banasinska – Grandmamauntsisterscat (23’00), 2024, Poland and Netherlands, Polish w/ English subs The classic Slavic witch figure, Baba Jaga, is reimagined as a “prehistoric goddess from the times of the matriarchy” using found footage from the Polish Educational Film Studio archive. This transformation incites layered reflections on kinship and identity, guided by a child grappling with binary gender roles.
Che go Eun – ‘The Taste of tea’ (7’22), 2023, Belgium, no dialogue – Inspired by Kusôzu, which means ‘painting of the nine stages of a decaying corpse’ in Japanese Buddhist paintings, the Taste of Tea is an exploration of uncanny visuals depicting a female body decaying, symbolizing the circle of life and the fusion of digital technology with traditional paintings, using AI imagery.
Helen Anna Flanagan – Phil in-progress edit (25’00), 2025, United Kingdom and Netherlands, English spoken without subtitles is a contemporary ghost story that resurrects legendary British comedian Tommy Cooper, who famously died mid-performance in 1984. Combining machine learning,VHS, archival materials and a trained impersonator, the film follows Phil, an unemployed magician trapped in the decaying home of the director’s late schizophrenic uncle. Phil’s hallucinatory act delves into themes of social class, identity, mental health, and delusion, punctuated by his trademark jokes and failed magic tricks.
Alice Theobald – IL Y AURA (THERE WILL BE) (18’54), 2022, France and United Kingdom, French w/ English subtitles is an experimental screenplay initially inspired by absurdist playwright, Eugène Ionesco’s one-act play ‘La Leçon’, 1951. Set in a Parisian apartment, ‘IL Y AURA (There will be)’ depicts a student arriving in an older professors’ home for an ambiguous, ritualised and increasingly menacing language tutorial.
Cineville is valid at the door and online on the day of the screening!