SO, WHAT EXACTLY HAPPENS AT PAF?

“The dichotomy of PAF is that you want to tell the world about it while jealously wishing to keep it to yourself, lest it becomes touristy.” The umbrella theme of the 2024 PAF, Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art, was “Diaries”. Since autofiction seems to be all the rage for the past five years or so, I’ve decided to toy with the format of an “autofictitious diary” to write my report from the 4-day event. All actual act reviews are genuine but some of the accompanying commentary might be not. Enjoy. P.S. There’s a contest for an awesome PAF merch bundle at the end of the article!

INTRO ABOUT PAF 2024

The PAF Festival, Olomouc, Czech Republic, has been a key player and an internationally connected curatorial platform in the world of film animation and contemporary art for over two decades. The anticipated December edition (Dec 5-8) featured screenings, performances, installations, exhibitions and a packed accompanying programme, and brought together diverse art forms and environments at the intersection of art, moving image, music, theory, and long-term collaborations and residencies.

About “Diaries” from the festival website: Diary as a survival strategy. Diary for sharing. Diary as an emancipation tool. Diary as a manifestation. As a law of attraction. Diary as a memorial device. Diary as a marketing strategy. As a profession. As a source of income. As a promotion tool. Gossips. About you and others. Diary as a description. Of the weather, sports results, achievements, mood. Diary as a habit tracker. Diary for keeping history alive. Diary as an interpretation. Diary as therapy. Diary as telling the stories of others. Diary as telling your story. […] But all these forms of recording raise the question – are diaries meant to be read?”

DAY 1 of PAF /Thursday/

5/8/2024

Feels good to be back in quaint Olomouc after nearly a decade. I almost ended up studying at the local university in 2010. I wonder what kind of person I would be if I hadn’t chosen Prague instead. Anyway, back on track: the reason I arrived here this wintery afternoon is the launch of PAF 2024, Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art, 23rd edition.

The headquarters of PAF is the former Jesuit college, an imposing Baroque building that now houses the Art Centre of the Palacky University, which lends its screening halls and auditoriums to the festival. However, PAF sprawls all across the city’s historic centre, encompassing bookshops, cafés, gelaterias, cinemas, churches, and galleries. After scouring the fascinating 4-floor building complex, I attended the festival launch with city council representatives and organisers who also introduced the 2024 Other Visions CZ contest awarding “contemporary art of the moving image”. Having the first chance to observe the gathered audience, I immediately felt a sense of shared camaraderie and relaxedness. Obviously a cultural highlight of the season for many. 

One of the most eye-catching screening rooms I found myself in later was the attached Corpus Christi chapel, with monumental frescoes covering the entire concave ceiling and walls, which screened the first series of video artworks: A–Z Chronicles: Act 1. This series (Act 1 through Act 4) became my anticipated part of the programme over the four days as I’ve always been partial to greatly curated and coherent series of short films, in this case sometimes cleverly interspersed by TikToks and music videos. 

The topic of a diary is also nicely tied to the document format, which, sometimes highly stylised or fictitious, featured a lot in the festival programme. One such case today was Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave where the artist decided to tackle the 1984 violent confrontation between miners and police in South Yorkshire by creating a brilliantly staged re-enactment with some of the original participants and several historical re-enactment groups in 2001. This day-one curatorial choice already signalled that I’m going to enjoy myself going forward.    

Sara Pinheiro, a name I was already familiar with from Prague’s invaluable Synth Library, prepared a late-night über-intimate live performance, which combined sampling and foley, resulting in utterly minimalist gossamer soundscapes, stirring like tiny creatures in an otherwise asleep house. I cannot think of that many events where the audience would stay so almost reverently silent and receptive the whole time. 

Before the much anticipated Zein Majali’s DOOMSCROLL III, I stole away for a late-night halloumi wrap half of which I deposited into my coat pocket for later. The pocket in question now smells faintly of pickled cabbage and herb sauce, still. Nevertheless, DOOOMSCROLL III, an obvious audience favourite of today due to the queue size, was a disorienting act that combined live music performance and projections on multiple screens (featuring lots of AI-generated videos of Britney Spear’s famous Knife dance). Formerly an engineer and data analyst, Jordanian-Palestinian Majali turned to the arts out “of an urgency to archive and examine the accelerated cultural shifts in the Arab world.” 

At around midnight, after a day of travelling and culture, I stashed myself into an attic screening room for some super-slow TV. If Reiji Saito’s series of miscellaneous quotidian sequences had to be summarised in one message, it would be: don’t be afraid and ashamed to observe people’s faces from extreme proximity for prolonged periods. 

Some stayed behind for SCIVIA’s DJ set but I was bound for bed. Going back to my hotel, I found out that after-midnight trams are not really a concept in compact Olomouc so I enjoyed a 20-minute walk through the hoarfrost-sprinkled streets. As I was finally settling into bed at about 3:00 am, I felt a touch of genius and texted a friend: “omg, it occurred to me that I missed the opportunity to call my failed tea a monstrosi-TEA”. Earlier, at a joint dinner, I dared to pour my milk directly into the teapot instead of mixing the milky tea in my cup like a civilised person. They’re British and gasped audibly at such an abomination. The inaugural day of PAF comes to a close.

DAY 2 of PAF /Friday/

6/12/2024

The second I looked out of my hotel window in the morning, my gaze was automatically, almost subconsciously, drawn to the crouched behind of a dog amid defecation. Lovely. Made me think of coffee. I headed down to the hotel lobby but not before I put up the “do not disturb” sign that will stay there until I check out. I never need room service. I want to have my little temporary den wholly undisturbed. Does that bother the hotel crew? Someone tell me.

Over my fried eggs, I studied the PAF programme. Today is the first “full” festival day and it’s packed. I already love the sweeping spectrum of events and activities the curatorial team prepared. There’s a delicious mix of something to enjoy for kids and their parents, people who seek industry education and insights, film and video art lovers, new media buffs, those who love a good vernissage, and music fans. What I find especially cute are these so-called AniScreens where local bistros, cafés, and cake shops screen animated shorts, mostly kid-friendly ones. Pavlova and cautionary tales? Count me in.

It started snowing heavily so festivalgoers were mostly gathering at the festival centre. Even in the early afternoon, which isn’t a festival prime time, the venues were filling up. Some were playing the continuous festival game Compass: Diaries, some were attending workshops and symposiums, and others, such as myself, were gathering in screening halls. My first film of the day was the much anticipated Diego Marcon’s La Gola, an epistolary piece where Gianni and Rossana, realistic, elaborate, and uncanny-valley human figurines, exchange letters with increasing disconnect and disregard for one another. I distinctly remember seeing Marcon’s disturbing work, The Parent’s Room (also screened later today at PAF), at the Venice Biennale two years prior and, to use an euphemism, it really stuck with me. 

The notional watershed between the “day” and “night” programme seemed to be the premiere of the new feature film Satan Kingdom Babylon by the curatorial duo Marie & Petr Šprincl, which also recently debuted at the Spectacle underground cinema in New York. A mixture of formats, from video-game-like 3D sequences to original VHS footage shot and collected by Marie and Petr, the film was a dizzying patchwork probe of cults, conspiracy theories, and religious hate groups in Trump’s America, making you leave the cinema with a slight uneasy tingle in your nape. Coincidentally, I attended high school with Marie so I was intrigued to find out what she’s up to now.

Afterwards, the programme picked up the pace with the first performance, Flesh, Wax & Glass II: The Age of the Son, about the flagellant traditions in Calabria, by Scottish filmmaker G. F. Ramsay, who performed the voiceover, and London musician Coby Sey, who scored the screening live.

One should note here that the programme was planned as back to back from morning to night, offering something for any kind of energy and socialisation level. If you didn’t feel like the strobe-, vocoder- and chanting-intense performance of Honour: Imani “Untitled-Summer-03 (1)”, the enigma whose work bridges Lagos, London, and New York, you could slink into one of the two screening halls, e.g. for George Kuchar’s Weather Diary 5, and recharge. Or, if you, for some unfathomable reason, wished to miss Kenichi Iwasa’s idiosyncratic improvised musical performance in one of the festival’s cafés, you could treat yourself to Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me in the Corpus Christi chapel until 2 am. Here I’m extending another pleased nod towards the PAF programming crew. 

While on my now customary early morning walk to the hotel, after getting steamrolled by Jeanie Crystal’s and Kenichi Iwasa’s joint DJ set, I found a motionless lad of about 21 lying peacefully on the snowy pavement, hands in trouser pockets. Long Friday night, huh? I helped him up and propped him against a shop window while trying to coax the name and address from his slurring mouth. He never questioned who I was nor was surprised I was helping him, he just rolled with it while trying not to roll off the ledge, smiling. I called him a cab, shoved him into the backseat to the amusement of the driver and sent him off. Goodnight.

DAY 3 of PAF /Saturday/

7/12/2024

I was woken up by the sounds of kids having a snowball fight. I wondered when the streets would turn muddy again. Childhood nostalgia hit me nevertheless and I’ve found myself craving cocoa and fairytales. Luckily, besides more morning workshops and talks, PAF also foresightfully offered a noon screening of Karel Zeman’s immortal Journey to the Beginning of Time, a fever dream lodged in the minds of Czech(oslovak) millennials and older. The cocoa was graciously provided by the in-house Konvikt Café. 

Afterwards, I set out to cruise all the exhibitions PAF offered, which ranged from a small outdoor showcase to your typical white cube. My highlight was the joint exhibition of Jeanie Crystal, Zein Majali, and Emily Pope at the XY Gallery, called You Make Me Feel. I became an instant fan of the spot-on, self-deprecating, and stand-up-like humour of Pope’s commentary on the life of a creative in London in her video artwork, BUST, and the subsequent performance. Crystal’s new music video piece with her band Jeanie and The White Boys had an utterly hypnotic chanting effect, and Majali’s was a video-installation extension of her brilliantly unease-inducing Thursday live performance. 

Over the lunch break, I popped into a local upscale trinket shop where I managed to drop a perfume sample and splatter it all over my winter boots. The entire day onwards, I was plagued by whiffs of jasmine incense. 

Continuing with my day, I stumbled upon one of the proofs of PAF being THE place to premiere something highly experimental: the Game Sauna project. A joint venture of Jan Bára and Jan Karhánek, Game Sauna invited visitors to play various digital games while the two musicians soundtracked them live with improvised adaptive music. Another testament to the complete freedom the curatorial team clearly nourishes was today’s cake decorating workshop for kids by Štěpánka Trčková.

What I was really looking forward to today, though, was the collab between Qow (Cairo, Egypt) and Theo Alexander (London, UK), So Afraid to Show I Care. I was already familiar with Alexander’s work with modern-classical undertones and looping-tape fragments from a recent concert with koruth in Prague. As the venue, the Husův sbor church, featured an organ, my anticipation was high. Together, the musicians, joined by a double-bass player, presented as self-described “foragers and gleaners” and drowned the mesmerised audience in wave after wave of droning, majestic, and monumental sounds, masterfully accentuated by a pastel-hued light design drenched in fog. In short, I was very satisfied. 

It’s not easy to describe the impressive concentration of art forms that took place today because – let’s be honest – who wants to read FOMO-triggering reviews about events they haven’t been to? Let me just say that the rest of the night onwards was a sensory, inspirational rollercoaster with two main operators in the engine room: Olan Monk, Irish musician, performer, and writer, and Coby Sey, composer, producer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist from the UK. 

At about 4:00 am when I was finally about the leave the insanely smashing b2b set of DJ GÄP and Isama Zing, a friend I hadn’t seen for ages gave me an entire enthusiastic speech about how everyone, including myself, should learn how to sail and gave me a step-by-step guide on how to obtain my license in Croatia – the fastest way, I’m told. While walking the early-morning, deserted, mist-bathed, and noiseless streets of Olomouc, a humungous hare suddenly appeared on the cobblestones, eyed me suspiciously and dashed away. I couldn’t believe my luck. 

DAY 4 of PAF /Sunday/

8/12/2024

When I woke up, I realised my decision to dance until the wee hours and sleep it off later was most unwise indeed. As the hotel checkout was at 10 am, I could not, in fact, sleep it off later. I felt palpitations and a subtle eye twitch as I consumed a week’s worth of coffee at the breakfast buffet before I had to hand in my key card. Luckily, PAF’s seasoned festival crew has taken the previous three, somewhat high-intensity, days into account and geared today’s programme towards quiet contemplation. 

It consisted almost exclusively of screenings apart from the closing performance, a rerun of Medard Zeman’s and Vojtěch Šembera’s operatic piece The Lighthouse of Everything, which premiered on Saturday. Set in the Corpus Christi chapel, the opera offered a critical probe into the position of the artist in today’s world, channelling slapstick and the Czech grotesque of the 1970s and 80s, paired with the focused and playful barytone of opera singer Šembera and some tongue-in-cheek statuettes.

I firmly decided to melt into a seat today and enjoy a marathon of meticulously curated cinematography. I was chuckling away at Amalia Ulman’s Tumblr-y video lecture, Annals of Private History, about the phenomenon of “girl diaries” with little heart-shaped padlocks. The series of short works Me+: The Notes of the Augmented Me featured what its author aptly described as “the love notes of a young Uber Eats Werther”. Jacky Connolly’s Descent into Hell was the second film I saw during PAF that had a little direct reference to the uncanny death of Elisa Lam at Hotel Cecil, both created in the GTA game world. The authors had no known connection. This brings me to another important theme: if you like to consume written and visual narratives and love a good allusion or three, PAF will be your happy place. The entire programme was cleverly stitched together by sometimes admitted, sometimes less obvious self-referential threads, which, for me, created a very compact feeling over the 4 days. 

One festival guest who really struck a chord with me was an award-winning filmmaker Michelle Williams Gamaker (House of Women, The Bang Straws) whose eloquent, poetic, and poignant visual language dealt with, e.g., smart observational critique of the inner processes of the film industry, a hegemonic entity, which often sidelines certain genders, identities, and races. I thoroughly enjoyed the after-screening debates, often finding myself nodding along to Michelle’s insights and conclusions. This is another huge plus of PAF: people curious about various kinds of audiovisual craft can discuss their interests with experts and authors in a very low-key and relaxed setting, even on the dancefloor later. 

I stayed for the closing ceremony where the international jury announced the winners of the Other Visions CZ’s Main and Audience Awards (congrats to Michaela Kozáková and Veronika Poslední, and Teodor Nosál, respectively!) but then it was, sadly, time to catch my night train back to Prague. I kept looking over my shoulder as I was walking away from the magical sprawling festival building – I’ve already decided I’ll be back next year. 

DAY 1 of no PAF 🙁 /Monday/

9/12/2024

Back home a day later, I’m still feeling the bubbly giddiness of experiencing something into which a lot of love, affection, care, elbow grease, and brilliance was poured in. It’s challenging to encompass all that is PAF but if I were to describe it in a word, it would be “cute”. Or better yet, two: cute and convivial. OK, three: cute, convivial and captivating. I could just continue with the C-words (just the complimentary ones): curious, contemporary, conceptual, cartwheeling, clever, calming, contemplative, critical, case-study-in-small-festivals… I cannot emphasise enough the curatorial and booking effort that went into everything I’ve seen and heard. 

The dichotomy of PAF is that you want to tell the world about it while jealously wishing to keep it to yourself, lest it becomes touristy. Because, now, it feels like that sweet secret spot for those “initiated” while it absolutely deserves more attention. What’s left to say is: visit Olomouc, go to PAF, look around, savour all you can, notice the details, zoom out for the bigger picture, and never rein in your curiosity. See you next year.

P.S. Wow, you read (or scrolled through) all that, thanks. Your award is right here: contest time! There’s only one instance in the text that I made up, the rest did indeed happen to me. Take a guess which one it was and win a cute PAF merch bundle, you have until January 31!

 

To make it easier, here are some options. The thing that didn’t happen was:


  • the pooping dog
  • the drunken guy rescue
  • the perfume smashing


Head to our Instagram for the full set of contest rules and a sneak peek of the PAF merch bundle (socks, a diary, and a baseball cap).

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Bio

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Credits

Text / Františka Blažková

Photos / Tomáš Kozohorský @‌tomas_kozohorsky, Monika Abrhámová Dražilová  @‌mono.nika, @‌sidicek, analogue photos Michal Patycki @‌mpatycki

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