NEW SIGNS JURY – LFF2021
Cheng-Hsu Chung is a Taiwanese animation director and animator based in Berlin. Chungʼs artistic practice focuses on using surreal images and character performances to articulate the changing nature of emotion, modern love relationships and the queer community. He uses characters and environments to transform normality into abnormality, deconstructs peopleʼs concepts about how things should perform, and allow them to construct their own perspectives of the world.
Chung has worked on various commercial projects with international clients, such as BBC, Warp Records, Adidas, John Grant, among others. Chengʼs films have also been screened and awarded in international film festivals, including bronze at Berlin Music Video Awards 2020, Jury mention at London International Animation Festival.
Leyla Rodriguez
Leyla Rodriguez comes from a family of musicians and grew up in Argentina in the years 1976-1983. In 1984 she immigrated to Europe with her mother and lived in the cities of Frankfurt, Madrid, Berlin, Leipzig and Hamburg.
The journey, loss of both identity and home country have a recurring central role in this respect and as substitutes, family members, music and animals become the starting point of complex characters.
In linking art and life, which includes, among other things, a long-standing curatorial practice or the production of artists’ books, Rodriguez installations and experimental films create the character of a total work of art, both in their media diversity and in their conceptual and practical implementation.
In 2011 Leyla Rodriguez was the recipient of the Kraft New Media Prize. In recent years, her works have been internationally recognized and exhibited at such venues as The 65th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, (2019), MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, (2018), State Hermitage Museum St. Petersburg, (2017).
Olivier Cheval
Born in 1988, Olivier Cheval graduated in 2015 from the Beaux-Arts de Paris, where he began to conceive video installations, sometimes contemplative and melancholic, around travels and urban drifts, sometimes critical and disturbing, around video surveillance, war imagery and the imaginary of terror. His plastic work has been shown in major contemporary art events such as the European Art Media Festival in Osnabrück, the Biennale of Young Creators of Europe and the Mediterranean in Tirana or the Nuit Blanche in Paris. He directed his first two fiction films at Le Fresnoy, Lady Hamilton’s Dream (CPH:Dox 2019) and Rose Minitel (Lago film fest 2020). Olivier Cheval regularly writes about art, literature, cinema and politics for various magazines (Trafic, Débordements, Lundi matin).