Most of us know the feeling of being homesick. It is the feeling that comes with a sudden, unbearable urge of being in a familiar setting. Of going somewhere we belong to. But is it possible to feel homesick for a place that might not even exist? Or at least a place that only exists in our head? Those are questions to which three individual artists and an artist duo are looking for answers in Sol’s cinema exhibition Homesick for another world.

The four art films that will be screened at two presentations at Rønne Bio and Scala Gudhjem all introduce us to characters who are either living in another world, identifying themselves with another world, or vigorously calling for another world. And it is exactly the imaginative power of the artists and their characters that causes the films to move forward. They are being present and at the same time absent from the setting in which they are placed. They go for a walk in the field, surf the internet, dance alone in their room, or with others at a party. However, they also manage to create spaces that never existed in the real world. We understand that for many of them, being exactly where they are is a lonely experience. But also that they use their surroundings as a stepping stone to enter different, fictional worlds of imagination, and to form new communities, connecting through time, space, gender, species and nationalities.

The title here is borrowed from a collection of short stories, written by American author Ottessa Moshfegh in 2017. And to imagine this cinematic experience like a collection of short stories can be a good approach. Just as a short story, these art films take advantage of the possibility to throw us directly into an intense history or situation, without giving much away to begin with. We are at the mercy of the artists and their characters, and we can only try to swallow whatever morsel of the world, they’ve chosen to serve us. A morsel is really all we get. But it can be all that it takes for making brand new conversations about the future.  

The imaginative spaces that the four artists have made their characters long for, look very different. They have certain similarities with the real world we are all familiar with. But they also happen to come forward as twisted, timeless sanctuaries outside reality. Places where the strongest wishes have the possibility of coming true. At the same time the four films combine grotesque humor, isolation from reality and hyper-specific storytelling. In Tabita Rezaires Deep Down Tidal, we are being confronted with the tough, repressive conditions on which our modern technologies are based, while at the same time, the pixelated aesthetics of the internet are dancing before our eyes. In Pagan Rage by Inger Sif Heeschen we stand face to face with the confusion we meet, when we try and piece together our own past. Ana Pavlovic and Vladimir Tomic’s Dreamland shows us the ongoing feeling of alienation, you have to live with, when you have been forced to leave a nation and join another. And Passage from Ann Oren presents us with a modern, queer take on the traditional femme fatale-figure of cinema history.

Sol is proud to present these four art films on the big screen in the cinemas of Bornholm throughout a weekend in December. During these screenings we hope to awaken your wishful thinking and to make your inner, other worlds come alive.