ZINETIKA Festival has hosted in its VI edition a program a festival meeting, three masterclasses, two performances, an installation, a workshop and several special screenings as a complement to its cinematographic menu of 23 films framed in three sections –Official Selection, Open Screen and Zinetiks–, in addition to the documentary DNA Creation 2021 and children’s screenings.
Before We Collide is a short film shot on a Nishika N8000 analog lenticular camera consisting of over 800 photographs pieced together. In a haunting encounter, the film captures our fragmented perception of time during the pandemic while exploring the dynamics of mutual support.
A young woman and her friends join a car repair shop as “Belia” (colloquial Egyptian for apprentices) to learn the craft from the ustas (craft headmasters). They explore what this relationship creates as it merges labor with everyday life rhythms to open up a new space for movement.
We can easily say that our life is a game, not an ordinary one where you can determine the story, the space and the characters, but a game which comes with opportunities and traps, with gains and losses, a game we have to play every second, a game in which we are rooted. Sometimes we choose the virtual space in order to escape reality, but in the end it turns out to be just a way to avoid the real game, our everyday life.
Through a dialogue between movement and landscape, Lazarus reflects on the objectification of the woman body in film. The famous quote by Edgar Allan Poe "the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world" triggers a succession of falls and recoveries that escape the poetic by trying too hard to find it.
