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Johannes Förster and Elkin Calderón Guevara, 2024
28:30 min 2K DCI / 5.1
Colombia, Germany

About Happy Hippos and Sad Peacocks is a decolonial fable of the 21st century, in which two animals are
juxtaposed, sharing a similar fate but couldn't be more different.

Places and times merge, identities are excluded; a non-anthropocentric perspective reflects upon the
force-migrated lives of the protagonists and the recurring patterns of colonialism. The story begins
with "a great exploration journey," which poetically illustrates how the resulting, mostly one-sided
trade relations continue to shape all our lives till today. History continues to manifest itself and is embodied
in this film through living animals. The peacocks and hippos, both mascots of former rulers, represent our complex (and at times absurd) relationship with the past and present and our inability to come to terms with it.

Happy Hippos and Sad Peacocks explores the connections between humans, nature, and history.
It is a cinematic journey of discovery, in search of a new narrative.

April 13, 2024: World Premiere - Visions du Réel, Nyon, Switzerland
October 12, 2024: Underdox Film Festival, Munich, Germany
October 18–23, 2024: Seoul Animal Film Festival, South Korea
September 8–15, 2024: OKO International Ethnographic Film Festival, Kyiv, Ukraine: Festival Team Special Prize for Cinematic Innovation & Craft
October 25–30, 2024: West Lake International Film Festival, Hangzhou, China
November 1–6, 2024: MIDBO - Bogotá, Colombia
November 8–11, 2024: Festival Villa del Cine, Villa de Leyva, Colombia: Premio Fosil Best Short Documentary
November 13–24, 2024: RIDM (Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal), Canada
November 18–24, 2024: Rencontres Paris / Berlin, Paris, France

Screenplay Elkin Calderón Guevara, Johannes Förster
Cinematography Johannes Förster
Narrator Detlef Tams, Elkin Calderón Guevara
Editing Johannes Förster, Elkin Calderón Guevara
Editing Assistant Leoni Faschian
Color Grading Julien von Schultzendorff
Music Denise Onen
Sound Design and Mixing Marten Rux
Sound Elkin Calderón Guevara, Johannes Förster
Script Copyeditor and Co-Researcher Yu'an Huang
French Translator Elsa Benamouzig
5.1 Dolby Mix Studio Funk GmbH & Co. KG
Re-recording Mixer André König
Post Producer Katharina Knieling

Executive Producer: Elkin Calderón Guevara, Johannes Förster
Produced by: Studio Förster
Co-Producer: Calderón & Piñeros
Scouting and Production Colombia: Elkin Calderón Guevara & Diego Piñeros García

Locations: Pfaueninsel, Berlin Wannsee, Germany
Puerto Triunfo, Antioquia. Colombia

Supported by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and Neustart Kultur
Berlinale Talents Short Form Station 2023

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Julian Charrière, 2025
4K color film, 16:09 aspect ratio
4-5-1 ambisonics soundscape
43 minutes, continuous video loop

Shot in the icy water of the Arctic Ocean, Albedo flips our perspective on the imaginaries that have formed around the deep sea and deep space. The central motif of the video is the world of melting glaciers and icebergs, ontologically complex objects that hold strong socio ecological symbolism in our collective consciousness. Albedo inverts our view on this submerged realm, which, projected onto the ceiling, questions our sense of orientation and stability. Here the very notion of landscape is destabilized, rendered towering above a sea of sunken stars. In the video, these frozen mountains act as both subject and structure, their underbellies and melting borders becoming territories unto themselves, like celestial bodies cast adrift in a liquified cosmos.

Albedo reaches down into the Arctic Ocean, contrasting the white vistas of dazzling snow and bright daylight. In doing so, it sheds light on the trope of climate catastrophe, questioning our orientation and our ancestral patterns of looking and perceiving by casting our eyes both into the iridescent biomes of planetary waters, where many believe life first emerged, and upward, beyond our exosphere, to where nonhuman forms may await.

Foregrounding the importance of listening to both human and nonhuman languages, the score is composed using hydrophone recordings. Structured around a chorus of marine vocalizations, it brings together the calls and echolocation clicks from orcas, sperm whales, bowhead whales, and humpback whales, forming a submerged lexicon of species unseen. A meditation on perception, disorientation, and planetary change, Albedo dissolves the boundaries between sea and space, ascent and descent, the known and the unknowable.

Film
Editor: Johannes Förster
Score: Jana Irmert
Spatial Sound Designer: Felix Deufel
Post Production: Studio Johannes Förster
Editing Assistant: Leoni Faschian
Compositing Artist: Sean Sams, Neil Reynolds, Tom Freeman, Felix Geen
Colorist: Nadia Khairat Gómez, Johannes Förster
Post production assistance: Hannah Weidner, Valentina Gimenez
Technical Supervisor: Finn Jäger

Expedition
Expedition Coordinator: Morten Rasch
Field Recording Artist: Felix Deufel
Camera, ROV Operator & Director of Photography (DoP): Antoine Drancey
Lighting, ROV Operator & Freediver: Runar Jarle Stray Wiik
Underwater Lighting Development & Technical Supervision: Christophe LeClercq
Production Assistant: Mikael Rasch

All images are © Julian Charrière / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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Julian Charrière, 2022
4K color film, 16:9 aspect ratio,
4-5-1 ambisonics soundscape
32 minutes

Controlled Burn invites the viewer on a cosmic journey through deep time, soaring through an aerial landscape of imploding fireworks. Shot with a first-person drone, this disorienting voyage takes in open pit coal mines, decommissioned oil rigs, and rusting cooling towers. Throughout, amid whirling smoke and fire, implosions are intercut by flashing images of primordial unfurling ferns and fluttering moths – beings that evolved during the carboniferous geological period. Appearing at subliminal speed, Charrière offers these organisms as both spirit guides and living tokens for the vitality of fossil fuels. Additionally, as markers for how the agency of coal, oil, and tar has come to haunt our contemporary imagination – taking root in our dreamlife; infesting visions of the world to come. Linking celebratory pyrotechnics with extraction architectures, explosive momentum and technological obsolescence, Controlled Burn stages the fantasy of a dramatic return to sources of energy via implosion: a time before smoke.

Co-Director: Johannes Förster
Sound Composition and Design: Felix Deufel
Drone Operator: Per Jacob Blut
FPV Drone Pilots: Benno Knarr, Leon Knarr, Clemens Wronski
Pyrotechnicians: Felix Rausch, Felix Münch
Assistants to Pyrotechnicians: Vincent Schaack, Christian Kuhlmann
Camera Assistants: Aurel Salzer, Maxim Pechersky
Digital Imaging Technician: Phil Jungschlaeger
Production Assistants: Yasmin Balai, Carl Maria Kemper, Simon Mellnich, Alexander Paul Probst, Y-ul Suh, Cleo Wächter

Postproduktion: Studio Förster
Editor: Johannes Förster
Editing Assistant: Paloma Schnitzer
Sound Design: Matthias Schubert
VFX Editors: Sean Sams, Seb Caudron, Moritz Freudenberg, Neil Reynolds Motion Graphics: Anika Spereiter
Colorist: Julien von Schultzendorff
Post-Production Management: Yasmin Balai

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Julian Charrière, 2024
4K color film, 16:10 aspect ratio
4-5-1 ambisonics soundscape
52 minutes, continuous video loop

In Midnight Zone, a Fresnel lighthouse lens—a tool to aid navigation—guides the film downward, metre by metre, through teeming schools of fish and sharks: their whirling figures glinting like a thousand fluid mirrors around the light source; so many aquatic moths to a flame. As its powerful light beam spins through the deep, slicing through darkness, the surrounding gyre of swimming creatures becomes a living kaleidoscope. Following the falling lamp’s initial submersion, it attracts more biomass with every passing fathom, until a point of crescendo, after which the giddy swarm slowly thins out. This decrease in the registers of the great depths was achieved by the probe. By the end of the filmic sequence, captured by an underwater drone piloted by the artist, the lamp has arrived at the beginning of an aquatic threshold: a domain otherwise impervious to light, too deep for photons from the sun to penetrate—the so-called ‘midnight zone’.

As Midnight Zone attests, we humans can now enter the extreme subaquatic realm with the help of our tools. In turn, this space becomes subject to our trans-atmospheric agency. In fact, deep-sea mining companies have set their sights on mineral deposits on and below the seafloor—a prospect with catastrophic implications for marine ecology. With all sea layers linked by food chains, energy flows, and currents, any disturbance can disrupt the balance. Charriere’s work dives into this issue. Midnight Zone was filmed in the waters above the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture, an area whose seabed is a potential mining ground, rich in polymetallic nodules. In this light, the presence of the Fresnel illuminates the extractive optic that views any region of the planet as a potential site for exploitation.

Text by Nadim Samman.

Film
Editor: Johannes Förster
Score: Laurel Halo
Spatial Sound Designer: Felix Deufel
Sound Design Assistant: Nino Theys
Post-Production Supervisor: Johannes Förster
Lead Compositing Artist: Sean Sams
Compositing Artists: Kalle Max Hoffmann, Neil Reynolds
Editing Assistant: Leoni Faschian
Colorist: Julien von Schultzendorff, Johannes Förster
Post-Production Coordination Assistant: Hannah Weidner

Expedition
ROV Operator & Director of Photography (DoP): Antoine Drancey
ROV Operator Assistant: Brieg Dufée
Marine Engineer: Christophe LeClercq
Underwater Camera Operator: Adil Schindler
Production Support (Above and Beneath the Waves): Runar Jarle Stray Wiik
Underwater Guide & Safety Diver: Sten Johansson
Production Management Assistant: Hannah Weidner
Onsite Production & Coordination: Tanya Johansson, Sten Johansson
Vessel Operators: Dora Sierra, Susan Long, Pablo, Noberto, Manuel, Cinco, Manolo, Everardo, Leonardo

Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the many scientists and guides who contributed invaluable knowledge and support along the way, as well as project contributors: Pedro Alonzo, Benjamin Coppel, The Coppel Foundation, Haley Ha, Allison Miller, Logan Mock, Hannah Nolan, Carlie Wiener (Schmidt Ocean Institute), The Shifting Foundation

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Julian Charrière, 2019
4K color film, 32:10 aspect ratio,
14.2 Ambisonics soundscape
104 minutes 30 seconds

Glacial landscapes have never before had such a strong visual presence in popular culture, where they serve
as prominent symbols of anthropogenic climate disturbance. Although few people have visited their remote
geographies, glacial regions loom large in the collective imagination, as a last stronghold and melting ideal
of a fantasized reality. Towards No Earthly Pole was conceived in 2017, when Julian Charrière was invited
aboard a Russian research ship as part of the first Antarctic Biennale, inspiring subsequent research and
expeditions to equally remote and hostile glacial regions.

Along with his Berlin-based team, he developed customized technological equipment, including drones
carrying spotlights and cameras. The video footage for the film was recorded at night, contrary to the
romantic image of a dazzling landscape of white snow and bright daylight that we generally see pictured.
The spotlight reveals the massive landscape in snippets, limiting the range of vision and heightening
its drama by the deep shadows the icebergs cast. Eerie sounds of cracking ice and water flowing remind us
that this frozen landscape is very much alive, breathing, moving and constantly evolving.
All of these elements combined underline an otherworldly presence and a scenario in which one begins to lose
all sense of grounding or scale, highlighting that the western man’s limited experience and, at times,
falsely constructed perception of the polar regions is both reinforced and challenged.
-juliancharriere.net

Director: Johannes Förster
Drone Pilots: Per Jacob Blut, Matt Cianfrani,
Anders Berthelsen
Production / Lighting: Carl Kemper
Production Assistance: Till Egen
Photography: Serena Acksel, Philipp Lee Heidrich
Technical engineering / Ground control:
Constantin Engelmann, Roman Kolbert

Editor / Postproduction Supervisior: Johannes Förster
Composer / Sound Designer: Robert Lippok
Spatial Sound Designer: Felix Deufel
Colorist: Jan Schöningh
Senior Compositing Artist: Tom Freeman, Neil Reynolds
Compositing Artist: André Roboredo, Christian Kaupert
Matchmover: Matthias Schiemann, Dragan Vujnic
Additional SFX: Omer Ben David, Karim Arnold Fuad
Postproducer: Julian Brinkmann
Postproduction Assistant: Yasmin Balai
VFX Technical Supervisor: Finn Jäger
Technician: Julian Link

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Documentary film
Ongoing project

Colombia is traumatized by a deadly conflict that has lasted for more than 50 years. Death is omnipresent in social discourse; likewise, corruption, poverty, and exodus continue to shape the daily lives of many Colombians. It is primarily the civilians that suffer from human rights violations. Between 2000 to 2014, there were over 6 million internally displaced people in Colombia, and 26,000 Colombians are still missing to date. Injustice continues even after death: bodies disappear into mass graves, and families are left without any information about their losses.

Artist Edinson Quinones Falla is one of Colombia´s many displaced people. Like most of them, he spent his childhood in a house illegally built by his parents in a "barrio invasion." Because he beat a friend to death with a machete, he is threatened with juvenile detention at the age of 12. Afraid of prison and fearing revenge against himself and his family, he fled from home and spends the following years alternately with friends, his family, and in prison. In prison, he encountered art for the first time. He found in it a medium to express his frustration, pain, and powerlessness. It helped him to redeem himself - to heal his wounds, as he says. In his art, Edinson confronts the crimes and injustice of his country. By chance, in 2008, information fell into his hands - reports, indictments, wanted posters, and interrogations related to the murder of civilians in the Cauca Department. The names and execution sites of countless innocent civilians who were murdered were noted. Among the information, there was an old friend of his who was executed as a 'falso positivo'. His mother had denounced his disappearance. Edinson, who has information about the location of the burial, seeks out the mother. He asks her to allow him to dig her son up, to bring him back. Together they go to dig up the son's bones. In the meantime, he has visited 3 more families and exhumed 3 more dead bodies. His goal is to bring together an entire human skeleton, from the bones of different people.

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Julian Charrière, 2018
4K color film, 2.35:1 aspect ratio,
Ambisonics 3D-soundscape, soundtrack by Inland
76 minutes 44 seconds

An Invitation to Disappear is a filmic expedition into the heart of a lush dystopian landscape symptomatic of the current global derangement of ecological thinking. Entranced by a vague sense of promise, the camera slowly traverses a turbulent haze that gives way to reveal row upon row of oil palms heavily laden with fruit spreading out in every direction. Ambient noises of wind rustling the leaves and insects crying out to one another fall the forest with a tactile energy until eventually the natural cacophony of the forest falls into a system of repetitions and loops ever so subtlety, evoking an eerie mood. As the waning light of dusk penetrates the forest’s thick canopy the grid cast on the ground by sun’s last fickering rays is replaced by fashes of light deep in the distance. A low rhythmic pulse is felt before it is heard, inducing as sense of direction within the nauseating infnity of the grid. Inland (Ed Davenport) has developed the sounds of the grove alongside his signature brand of techno into a soundtrack taking form as an 80-minute continuous loop, in which he captures the essence of the serial rhythm of the monoculture plantation with an architectural precision. Drawn steadily towards a dark mirage by the rising sound, the camera happens upon a moment of jubilant devastation - clouds of smoke and flashes of light entangle the forest in a rave whose center cannot be pinpointed until the camera gradually arrives at a stage of loudspeaker towers and a DJ set. In the conspicuous absence of people, the party rages with mesmerizing intensity as strobe lights blind maniacally. As the night wears on delirium sets in; the base pounds relentlessly upon deaf ears of the monoculture planation, endlessly deferring the implied climax of collective consciousness. The scene oscillates between genuine and artifcial—the face of a synthetic jungle reveals its true self in which nature and culture seem to merge. The dim light of dawn fnally cuts through the palms fronds with a feeling of satisfaction like leaving a club after sunrise or reaching the proverbial light after death.

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Julian Charrière, 2016
4K color film, 16:9 aspect ratio
sound by Edward Davenport
21 minutes 03 seconds

The film work captures the structures’ of the Bikini Atolls’ atomic-industrial architecture decay, its manner of editing further suggesting morphological overlaps with the monstrous wrecks lying on the bottom of the Bikini Atoll lagoon, assailed by tide and time. Making no use of archival material––its original underwater images captured at depths far below standard dive profiles – Iroojrilik is unquestionably the most unique, and comprehensive, perspective on the maritime ruins of Bikini ever put together. Yet, rather than explicating individual vessels or buildings, the cumulative impression given is that of an Atlantis or lost civilization —architectural features of one ship cut together with those of others, such that it appears as though a submerged mega-structure has been discovered. On a more general note, the film employs another series of elisions and substitutions. Through a series of montages, mixing sunsets and sunrises, it proposes an uncertain distinction between daybreak and night fall––first light of a new day in Pacific history, and the waning of another. Visions of multiple suns and endless dawns stretch across the horizon. Pictorial energies shift and sway, like palm trees and coral ferns growing on cannon mounts, between construction and destruction, transporting the viewer to a “non-place,” or the beginning of a brave new world.

Johannes Förster (*1985) is a freelance filmmaker living and working in Berlin. Förster has been self-employed as a photographer and director since 2009.
Since 2012, he has increasingly focused on the production of art and documentary films.

His works deal with the visible and invisible roles of the individual in society and their engagement with the environment in the Anthropocene. In particular, his documentary works focus on contemporary socio-cultural issues, elaborated through historical juxtapositions. Förster questions the social status quo and invites viewers into imaginary and phantasmagorical spaces that challenge their viewers to reflect. His video works can be read as rhythmic, audiovisual collages that let viewers confront the surrounding realities by deconstructing them. He pursues a collaborative approach and has developed various video installations with artists presented in international museum contexts. In addition to collaborations with Julius von Bismarck, Malte Bartsch, and Andreas Greiner, he has worked for several years as director and editor with the conceptual artist Julian Charrière, such as: Iroojrilik, 2016 (Berlinische Galerie, MAMbo Bologna); An Invitation to Disappear, 2018 (Berghain Berlin, Taipei Biennale); Towards No Earthly Pole, 2019 (MASILugano, Dallas Museum of Art).
https://www.instagram.com/studio.foerster/
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10314686/?ref_=fn_t_1

mail@johannesfoerster.com

https://www.instagram.com/studio.foerster/
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10314686/?ref_=fn_t_1

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Essay Documentary
with Elkin Calderón Guevara

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Editor, Post Supervisior
Video Installation
excerpt, by Julian Charrière

Co-Director and Editor
immersive video installation
excerpt, by Julian Charrière

Lago Algo CDMX, 2024
Installation View
Julian Charrière

Editor, Post Supervisior
Video Installation
excerpt, by Julian Charrière

Editor, Post Supervisior
Film Still
© Julian Charrière

Editor, Post Supervisior
Film Still
© Julian Charrière

Editor, Post Supervisior
Film Still
© Julian Charrière

Film Still
© Julian Charrière

Co-Director and Editor
immersive video installation
excerpt, by Julian Charrière

Co-Director and Editor
Immersive video installation
Excerpt, by Julian Charrière

Aargauer Kunsthaus, 2020
Installation View
© Julian Charrière

Co-Director and Editor
Immersive video installation
Excerpt, by Julian Charrière

Director and DoP
Documentary film trailer

Film still

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Co-Director and Editor
Immersive video installation
Excerpt, by Julian Charrière

Kunsthalle Mainz, 2018
Installation View
© Julian Charrière

Co-Director and Editor
Immersive video installation
Excerpt, by Julian Charrière

Film Still
© Julian Charrière

Editor
Video installation
Excerpt, by Julian Charrière

Film Still
© Julian Charrière

Tidalectics, TBA21
Installation view
Vienna, Austria, 2017