The Buharov Brothers - Slow Mirror

The anarchic, fractured and extremely surreal films by Ivan and Igor Buharov (Kornél Szilágyi and Nándor Hevesi) might seem like a perfect fit for this “outsider” paradigm. Darkly playful hallucinations that share the aura of having been discovered in a granny’s attic like a book of now troubling childhood drawings, they reveal in precise terms a world perhaps subconsciously suspected but hitherto indescribable. They have in common an improvised quality and a sense of the homemade. This not only stems from their beautifully rough-hewn visual textures but often from the people, objects and spaces that appear before the camera. The casts are composed of extraordinary ordinary people rather than film star types: lived-in faces bringing their own stories to the films. The props, which sometimes conspicuously reappear in different films, can likewise seem to have a real-world existence of their own carried over into the picture. This helps lend the films the weird intimacy of children’s games, in which familiar people and places are made alien and the weirdly alien becomes immanent to the everyday. The feverish and disorienting experience of watching a Buharov film was probably best described in the 2008 Offscreen Film Festival catalogue as “getting lost in someone else’s dream".

-Maximilian Le Cain

Includes a 20 page booklet with a text by Maximilian Le Cain