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part of
double bill #27
Cyclepaths
Annecy
Official Selection 2023
Ottawa Int’l Animation Festival
Best Student Film 2023
On the outskirts of the city, the new modern buildings are silent, and the motorway bridge drones. Birds are circling in the sky, and a young man, concealed by his hoodie, is riding his e-scooter along a park path. The only irritating element is the rifle over his shoulder. Cyclepaths conveys a mood of high alert, even though the disaster has, in fact, already happened.
Bio Anton Cla
Anton Cla is a media artist and filmmaker based in Belgium. Working across film, animation, and interactive media, he interrogates the mechanics of contemporary narrative through digital animation and game aesthetics. His practice reflects a critical engagement with mainstream cinematic forms, reconfiguring their political and emotional codes through constructed, atmospheric timelines. Drawing on the symbolic and expressive traditions of modernist painting in Belgium, his work leans into dissonance: immersive landscapes repurposing traditional spectacle through abstract structures that unravel undercurrents of human tension and societal instability.
Anton Cla’s film depicts a mood of high alert, while the disaster has in fact already happened. Unexplainable scenes that could not be more disconcerting unfold calmly and grow increasingly drastic. The screaming silence is decisively enhanced by the imperceptibly accumulating mixed drone of the daily sounds of a mechanised world: motorway, tramway, clicking indicators, pulsating emergency signals. What the soundscape adamantly refuses to deliver is a loud discharge that would release the tension. The suburban landscape is steeped in a red theatrical warning light, and blurs restrict the view. The 3D computer design masks neither the artificiality nor the computer-based deformations of the images of a normality that has become a combat zone—the machine matrix seems to rule already.