Through a crack in the autumn’s door LUFF invites you to cross the threshold of the inaccessible and to venture out to the obscure fringes where the festival is carefully breaking new ground - joyfully and unashamedly letting you decipher what you might stumble upon along the way. From the 16th to the 20th of October 2024 sound performances, film screenings, workshops and exhibitions will jostle each other between different locations in Lausanne and the indispensable Casino de Montbenon that has been the home system of LUFF’s universe since its emergence.

This year’s film programme is enriched by an additional dimension with an Expanded Cinema offer, courtesy of LUFF’s alliance with the Baltic Analog Lab from Riga. LUFF EXPANDED is curated in collaboration with SPECTRAL, a European network of six laboratories dedicated to the creation and promotion of expanded cinema – completes the FILM programme of this edition. The gravitational centre of this series of performances is the 16mm screening around which will orbit the artistic offerings by Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki, Jan Kulka, Ieva Balode and Biliana Voutchkova. Fragments of analog film, lenses galore, a hand-made projector and other subverted devices push the limits of the cinematic medium and invite us to rethink the relationship between the audience and the screen.

It took a long time for it to open its leaves by Ieva Balode and Biliana Voutchkova, Audio-visual performance , 3x 16mm film projectors, external shutters, violin. 35min

Ieva's and Biliana’s first collaboration engages in a multifaceted dialogue between their artistic tools and the environment they reflect upon. They are responding to the stimulus found in the processes of transformation in nature, applied to human psychological states which informs their real-time audio-visual composition. A tree documented throughout winter, spring and summertime reflects on the time passing and inevitable transformation involved in it. As whimsical as it happens the tree fell down shortly after being documented for this very work leaving its only remaining trace on the photochemical film and its multiple copies.

16mm abstract film loops alongside a textural sonic mix of field recordings by machines used by Ieva whilst producing the work using contact printer, steenbeck and other sounds together with violin and voice by Biliana, create a complex artistic ecology, subtly changing the perception of the natural world.

Preliminary exercises by Jan Kulka (Czech Republic), 60mm film performance with Archeoscope, 30 min

Live re-animation of 16mm found footage - study of illusion of movement and musical potential of frame rate (aka frame rhythm) performed on Archeoscope – 70mm projection device designed and built by the artist.

Jan Kulka (1985) is a Prague-based experimental filmmaker dedicated to analog film who explores the fundamental principles of the film medium, it's phenomenology and physiology of perception in contemporary context. His aim is to dig to the core, reaching to the primary essence, which we all share in common somewhere deep inside and bring it into a live, shared experience. He incorporates the creation of own instruments in the creative process. His primary focus is on inventing of special projection apparatuses for live performances. Rather than telling a story, he tries to target the very senses of each spectator directly with light and sound to reveal some of the foundations of our perception, that makes our being.

Warm Data by Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki (FI), 25 min.

Step into the bustling streets of Toronto through the project designed as live expanded cinema, where the visual narrative unfolds in layers of urban information captured entirely on 16mm black and white film to tell the story about the city symphony.

Entitled "Warm Data," it shows deep into the fabric of the metropolis, where every frame pulses with the city dynamics and offers another dimension of understanding to what is typically learned only through quantitative data, (cold data).

Here, two 16mm film projectors are joined by an old, school-type overhead projector. I use this machine like a puppeteer tool, where I rhythmically animate folded silhouettes of paper that echo the  shapes of the city. Adding a kaleidoscope of filters, I fill in the simple black-and-white frames of the film with colors, textures and mesmerizing patterns. With live projections and hands-on manipulations, I carefully orchestrate the pace and flow of the story.

Natalia Kozieł-Kalliomäki (FI/PL) is a visual artist living, working, inventing and having fun in Helsinki, Finland. She is a knee-deep in photo-sensitive film and expanded print-making adventure. The core of her practice became a fusion of film and print, often oscillating between different scales from large canvases to 16mm films, space projections and live-cinema performances. She uses analogue machinery as optical brushes to paint her stories located somewhere at the borderland of print, theatre and film.

“I'm on a quest to find magic in the simplest mechanisms I find in film, print and paper to bring a smile especially in the current times of what’s unsure”.

SPECTRAL project is Creative Europe's funded project uniting six artist-run film labs from Europe WORM.Filmwerkplaats (Rotterdam, NL), Mire (Nantes, FR), Baltic Analog Lab (Riga, LV), LaborBerlin (Berlin, DE) Crater Lab (Barcelona, ES), Laia (Porto,PT). Starting from year 2022 the project has an emphasis on expanded analogue film art and focuses on the creation, presentation, and circulation of expanded cinematic art projects. Over 4 year period (until 2025) there are various events organized by SPECTRAL team members bringing up the discourse of expanded cinematic art practice and its place in contemporary film art.

Financed by Creative Europe, Latvian Ministry of Culture, Riga City Council, and Baltic Analog Lab