⏺ Edito

The beast is mutating. Just when we thought it stable on its feet and more or less defined, there it goes putting its nose where it wasn’t expected. Not to worry, it’s still roaming its usual territory that’s been marked over time thanks to the dexterity of its back leg, still as flexible as ever. There we find bedridden graybeards of the experimental musical scene, such as Phill Niblock, or the survivors of the punk pseudo-scene, like Martin Rev; while on our screens we alternate between the genre cinema that smells like an old closet, see our homage to Michael Armstrong, and audacious visual experimentations. Personified by Austrian artist Billy Roisz and American filmmaker M. Woods, the latter have the good taste for once to be concerned with contemporary authors.
So yes, we laugh at this eternal lame joke that LUFF’s program is constantly looking to the past. Be that as it may, plenty of young faces will brighten up the screens and the evenings. There will be the punk of Cuntroaches, the video artist Khavn, the colorful Bonnie Jones who loses her pedals, the philosophers of Infecticide always looking for a fight... Anyhow, cinema/music, in the end it’s the same old tune. And we do love that tune. While on the side of L’OFF, something much more strange is afoot. There, the wet snout is following the scent to new territories as we are going to examine the alternative economics of culture. Conferences, discussions, films, all serious stuff and all that in Oblò cinema, will make it possible to fuel the reflection around this subject which — at first sight — would appear “alien” at the heart of a festival subsidized by the City, the Canton and the Loterie Romande.
Let’s turn now to LUFF.FM, our radio with a fleeting existence on the waves and the wibes, which will don socio-political finery as it excludes the visibly predominant species: the white heterosexual male. For a festival founded by one of those, let’s own up to the fact that it is ironic, or even audacious. This is part of putting into place the unstable strategies of toppling the positions of stability in morality and essentialism in things and persons. Playing with the ambivalence pursues the goal of emancipation. There is play, there is friction, and to tickle what’s wobbling in the stabilized mechanisms will allow to clear out a new space where we should all meet on equal terms, without any distinction.
—Julien Bodivit, artistic director –Film