The Periphery of the Base + Bliss Point 

Director Gerard Ortín Castellví in person

Dir. Zhou Tao. 2024, 53 mins. China. DCP. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Originally trained as a painter, Chinese mixed media artist Zhou constructs mutating digital landscapes that confound classical notions of scale, composition, and visual realism itself. His latest sets us adrift in the desolate expanse of the Gobi Desert, where an amorphous infrastructure project of massive proportions is underway. Zhou films migrant laborers as they shuffle dazedly from one indistinct node of the site to another, or crawl into makeshift camps to catch a wink of sleep between shifts, his singular camera-eye remaining in restless gear at all times, panning, zooming, reframing, and focusing in movements that bear an uneasily indeterminate signature between the gestural and the mechanical, the improvised and the preprogrammed. Building to an ecstatic crescendo that pushes past the limits of the visible, Zhou’s film recasts the cinematic landscape tradition of James Benning and Peter Hutton for our posthuman age. North American premiere 

This work is produced by Topography Practice and Vitamin Creative Space.

Preceded by: 

Bliss Point 
Dir. Gerard Ortín Castellví. 2023, 26 min. Italy/U.K./Spain. DCP. Filmed with elegance and technological precision, Bliss Point portrays the automation of food production. Artificial intelligence manages a warehouse, identical rows of burgers are flipped, and robots glide through factories; these processes are all parts of a system designed to optimize food ingredients to a “bliss point” for consumers. Following Agrilogistics (First Look, 2023), Bliss Point is the final film in Ortín’s trilogy examining the technocapitalist production, distribution, and consumption of food. Part of Science on Screen. North American premiere 

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About the filmmakers:

Gerard Ortín Castellví is an artist, filmmaker and researcher born in Barcelona and based in London. After completing an MFA at the Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam), he did an MA in Artists’ Film and Moving Image at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is currently a PhD candidate. He is a mentor at UCL Creative Documentary by Practice MFA and has been a tutor at the MA Art & Ecology (Goldsmiths). His work has been shown in places like Tate Modern (London), Eye Museum (Amsterdam), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Anthology Film Archives (NY), Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice), and in festivals including Visions du Réel (Nyon), Open City Film Festival (London), Cinéma du Réel (Paris), KVIFF (Karlovy Vary), HKIFF (Hong Kong) and Berlinale (Berlin).

Zhou Tao, born in 1976 in Changsha, Hunan Province, studied at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in oil painting in 2001 and a Master of Fine Arts in mixed-media studies in 2006. Currently lives in Guangzhou. He received the awards including The 46th Cinéma du Réel International Film Festival-Short Film Award 2024, FUGAS Feature Film Section – Jury Award, DocumentaMadrid in 2018, the 1st Prize of the Jury of the Ministry, 61st Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in 2015, and the 1st Han Nefkens Foundation BACC Award for Contemporary Art in Asia in 2013.