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  • elephantfish
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  • Taal English, Tagalog
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part of
double bill #1

elephantfish

Meltse Van Coillie, Belgium, 2018, 27’
VAF Wildcard Filmlab

2018

A ship drifts in the middle of an endless sea. Aboard is a crew of five: three Dutchmen and two Filipino sailors. They all cope with boredom—some by trying to overpower it; others by escaping into a parallel world guided by dreams. elephantfish lures its viewers into an enclosed environment guarded by the freedom of the everlasting horizon. The only escape from this confinement comes in thoughts and dreams.

elephantfish (Meltse Van Coillie, 2018)
elephantfish (Meltse Van Coillie, 2018)
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Dreaming Adrift

Meltse Van Coillie’s elephantfish

Mariana Hristova
01.10.2022
essay

Darkness can be mysterious and scary but also mind-provoking and triggering for one’s fantasy. elephantfish, a film as unusual as its title, starts by describing an equally peculiar dream narrated by a quiet voice in the background of the black frame: an elephant in the sea greedily drinks the water as if trying to swallow it all. As the dreamer approaches the monster, it gets smaller and smaller, no bigger than a fish. Instead of turning into a Leviathan1 as the quasi-mythological premise of the tale suggests, it eventually dies, and the film itself unfolds in a hardly expected way.

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Credits

Script
Meltse Van Coillie
Camera
Harm Dens
Sound
Michel Coquette
Film school
KASK School of Arts
Producer
Meltse Van Coillie
26
experimental documentary mystery poetry

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Ours is a Country of Words

Mathijs Poppe, Belgium, Lebanon, 2017, 42’

Filmed in Shatila, a refugee camp built in Lebanon when thousands of Palestinians fled their country in 1948. At an undetermined moment in the future, the refugees’ dream of returning to Palestine becomes a reality.

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Old Child

Elettra Bisogno, Hazem Alqaddi, Belgium, Palestine, 2019, 16’

Old Child depicts the fragmented story of Hazem, who had to flee Gaza. Throughout this stream-of-consciousness montage of dreams and reminiscences, he searches for order but also for the beauty he left behind.

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Swollen Stigma

Sarah Pucill, United Kingdom, 1998, 21’

Swollen Stigma is a visual, surrealistic narrative about a woman travelling both literally and psychically through several rooms. Memories, or fantasies, of another woman, fill her imagination. The film proposes lesbian imagery, and its shifting points of view jump between the protagonist, fantasy spaces, and her lover, making an internal world leak into what is external.

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Downside Up

Tony Hill, United Kingdom, 1984, 18’

With a single camera movement, this film explores humankind’s relationship to the ground. The viewpoint continuously changes. Places, objects, people, and events come in and out of focus. These observations gradually speed up and reveal a double-sided ground, flipping like a tossed coin, which then slows again to oscillate around the Earth’s edge.

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