Text by CLOT Magazine
Norient Film Festival is a music film festival based in Bern, Switzerland, that explores the contemporary world through music and sound. This year on its 11th edition, the festival will run January 12-16, 2022. It will feature live performances from Sculpture, Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, Giant Swan, & more, alongside a selection of films that explore the contemporary world through music and sound.
The team behind the festival researches films that portray musicians, music, sound or noise as levers of current times and which speak of the possibilities and challenges of the Now. The festival mainly screens documentaries and features films, short movies, video art, and other experimental formats. The team shares that they aim to nominate films that are getting close to people and phenomena.
Some of the films screened at the NFF have won remarkable awards or were nominated at major international A festivals, and some have been produced very DIY and low budget, also with a special in films by filmmakers from outside of Europe and the US.
Among this year’s selection of films, we can find The Sound of Metal by Darius Marder, Before the Dying of the Light by Ali Essafi, an archival film about the music and art scene in 1970s Morocco. Desert Lights by Félix Blume is a film exploring the Mexican desert’s sounds. And, A Symphony of Noise – a film about Matthew Herbert’s creative process.
The programme also includes a live performance by cellist and co-founder of the experimental art collective TQS Sandro Mussida who will present Solo Set for Cello and Electronics for Quadraphonic Audio and a performative lecture Future Shock: The Club as a Space to Cultivate Audio-Visual Practices, Curated and presented by Karolina Magnusson-Murray, where the filmmaker will reflect upon the development of the multidisciplinary art platform Futur.Shock at London’s FOLD Club that she directs.
