Storyteller

At the International Short Film Festival in Mecal, Spain (8 – 17 April) Stardust by Nicolas Provost took the Award for Best Short Film in the Obliqua section. The visual artist and filmmaker is heading for a busy spring, from April till May his short Stardust is scheduled for no less than eight international festival presentations whilst another one of his films,Storyteller, is selected for the Videonale 13 in Bonn.

After its award in Mecal, Stardust is scheduled for the Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea. At the same time the film is running in the Brussels Short Film Festival, immediately followed by the Curtocircuito International Short Film Festival in Santiago, Spain. In May the film will make a short stop in Oslo for the Norwegian Short Film Festival, before returning to Spain for the Cinema Jove IFF. The list closes with Vienna Independent Shorts and the Image Forum Festival, the latter fest tours a number of locations in Japan, starting in Tokyo.

The installation version of The Good life (a guided tour), a video by Katleen Vermeir and Ronny Heiremans will be presented at Videonale 13 in the Kunstmuseum Bonn (14 April – 29 May). A second Flemish Videonale entry isStoryteller by Nicolas Provost. For the fest’s 13th edition, programmers screened over 1,700 submissions this year and invited around 50 artists for its official programme.

The Good Life was commissioned by the Arnolfini in Bristol, one of Europe’s leading centres for the contemporary Arts. The experimental film also screened at prestigious venues such as the Parisian Centre Pompidou (Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid) and the Frankfurter Kunstverein (exhibition ‘Notions of the Artist’). In The Good Life a smartly dressed lady is guiding a group of people around a series of pristine white spaces.

This year's 23rd Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival (4-12 February 2011) pays tribute to Nicolas Provost. In addition to two of his shorts, Stardust and Storyteller, being presented in the Labo competition, the fest is also screening eight of his earlier works.

In Nicolas Provost Retakes, Clermont-Ferrand presents eight early works by this versatile filmmaker and artist. The programme contains Bataille, Exoticore, Gravity, Long Live the New Flesh, Oh Dear, Papillon d'amour, Plot Point and Suspension.

Two shorts by Nicholas Provost - Storyteller and Stardust – are selected for this year’s International Short Film Festival of Clermont-Ferrand (4-12 Febr). Both titles are competing in the Fest’s Lab programme, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Clermont-Ferrand’s Lab is the right prescription for visual addicts, presenting works by artists dangerously in love with images and sounds.

Stardust is a 20-minute short and the second part of a trilogy. Provost uses a hidden camera to film everyday life – in Plot Point he took his camera to Times Square, while Stardust is set in Las Vegas. The gambling capital of the world is a great setting to let the regular life evolve into an exuberating crime story. The third part of this trilogy – still in production - is shot in Tokyo and portrays a dark journey of a fictitious serial killer.

In Storyteller the director creates a reminiscent of science fiction by using found footage of the city of Las Vegas. Visual arts and cinematography are intertwined by the manipulation of time, codes and forms.