The Artists’ Cinema takes six recently-commissioned films, shot on 35mm by contemporary artists working with the moving image, and injects them into the programme of general release feature films at FACT.

In this playful format, The Artists’ Cinema examines the cultural context of the artists’ moving image by taking it from the gallery – imbued with a critical thinking approach, where audiences regularly drop in and out of the installation – to the cinema, where the suspension of disbelief is encouraged, entertainment is forefronted and emotional vulnerability is cultivated. This change of format brings with it a phenomenological enquiry into what is subjective and material experience of what the moving image is in relation to the interpretation of its content.

Widening the reach of the Biennial, many in the audience will come across the films by chance in a usual night out at the the cinema, creating a surprise or subversive dialogue between the films and the feature releases they are screened in front of. Shown in partnership with Lux and the Independent Cinema Office, The Artists’ Cinema layers the cinematic experience on the growing field of contemporary moving image.

Akram Zaatari – Tomorrow Everything Will be Alright This film depicts a late night online chat, in an unexpected format, between two men who haven’t met since the turn of the millennium. Their exchange is the familiar conversation of old lovers, and leads to their reunion after ten years of separation. The film navigates against time with an unsettling use of communication, recording technologies and temporal gaps.

Rosalind Nashashibi – This Quality This Quality is a film shot in downtown Cairo. It comprises two halves: the first shows a 30-something woman looking directly at the camera, and sometimes acknowledging the existence of others around her whom we cannot see. She has a beautiful face with eyes which seem to see internally rather than outwardly; they almost have the appearance of being painted on, suggesting the blindness of a mythological seer.

Aurélien Froment – Pulmo Marina Against a uniform background of purest Yves Klein blue, a pale yellow jellyfish roils and bristles like a fragment of living lace, while a slightly officious voiceover narrates its baroque but literally brainless anatomy, its voracious cannibalism and its classical forebears (in French, such a creature is a méduse). The apparently depthless blue is, the narrator says, the rear of an elliptical tank at Monterey Bay Aquarium, in which the jellyfish is held in constant stasis by two opposing currents of seawater.

Deimantas Narkevicius – Ausgetraumt A small group of young Lithuanian boys who have just started a band are interspersed with shots of their wintertime surroundings in Vilnius. Pop or rock music have never been fully developed in Lithuania as a means of self-expression, and no one Lithuanian pop musician has reached international acclaim. Narkevicius films these young idealists and their international ambitions, asking them questions about their vision of the future, their reflections on the political situation and the generally unsatisfying cultural environment.

Amar Kanwar – A Love Story A Love Story is a miniature narrative in four acts where time becomes fluid as the image is distilled to its inner self. The film lies at the fringe of the expanding Indian city, a world of continuous migration and therefore of continuous separations. It is in this terrain of separation that A Love Story is located. This film can also be seen as an offering to mainstream cinema, a space where we often lose ourselves in the repetitive spectacle of grand love stories.

Keren Cytter – The Coat A dramatic love triangle develops between two brothers obsessed with the game of sudoku and a beautiful young woman from east Germany. As the story unfolds the viewer is entwined in the turbulent romance between the woman and the younger British brother, who for the past seven years has visited her behind his brother’s back. This colourful tragedy combines a wide range of effects and devices to tell its story, flirting with the cinematic dream, the idea of seduction and the visual representation of happiness.