Of equal importance to the competitions at the Short Film Festival are the extensive special programs offered. Today, the short film branches into a host of cross-genre forms that are not shown in cinemas, including avantgarde, advertising and scientific films.

The Short Film Festival places these widely divergent short film forms into accessible thematic contexts, thus creating a forum for social discussions which, although originating from the topic of short film, actually go far beyond film-related issues and lead to an all-encompassing dialogue on the ways and workings of image production in the arts, new technologies and sciences.

In 2003, the special program has been "re<local>ization".  

The larger the units become in which we think, live and work, the more our desire seems to grow for orientation and identity, for the local. Films, too, establish and maintain their respective location, geographically, politically,and aesthetically. Each particular delimitation may be radical and emancipatory, or traditional and folkloric. But the more specific its forms and references are, the more one is forced to ask how they are meant to be, and can be, interpreted.

At a time when the discussion about globalization is in full swing, re<local>ization will focus on regionalization, that is, not so much on how specific social, political or aesthetic strategies change or are levelled out in the course of globalization, but more on how they, on the contrary, cut themselves off from this tendency, whether through unconventional forms, a new local orientation, or fundamentalist viewpoints.

This regionalization takes place, among other things, in the 'private sphere' and in movements that take their bearings from 'nature' or 'people': the rejection of genetically-manipulated, anonymous consumer goods, the boom in organic produce whose provenance can be fully traced, etc. On a political level, this development finds expression both in the agendas of the new extraparliamentary left and in the populist demagogy of right-wing and right-wing extremist parties: here, the struggle of the anti-globalization activists on the one side is opposed by its antithesis, xenophobia, on the other.

It is often the works that are the most 'culturally earthed' that seem dissident and unconventional to the outside view. When examined more closely, however, they frequently turn out to be politically conservative or deficient in artistic substance. We should, therefore, ask not only whether the artistic elements are progressive or conservative, radical or folkloric in an artistic and political regard, but also whether the cultural uniqueness is only in the eye of the beholder, where it is felt either as an oasis of authenticity or as a religious or ethnic threat. How and where does art (or film) articulate itself outside of (local) contexts, how is art to be understood at all outside of these contexts, and how is it 'really' understood?When art examines specific social and political or so-called 'cultural' conditions, the question always arises as to the degree of its 'global' readability. This involves art today in new contradictions.

For, in the 21st century, art has become a part of a global enterprise that, on the look-out for new and ever more out-of-the-way products and names, represents less than ever art's specific animus - maintaining its own indivisible location. On the contrary, if art is to be sold today, it increasingly tends to be stripped of its social and historical origins. Its current globalizing presentation threatens to obscure every indication of its provenance. At the same time, a countermovement is discernible, a relocation of art. However, the manifestations of this strongly localized art are often subsumed and globally standardized by the international art business.

These movements appear paradoxical, but only at first glance, for the local can be read as a sort of 'invention' of the global, just asthe global is only defined in contrast to the local. The local is thus a constituent element of the global, but not its opposite. In this respect, the separation of the local from the global is an illusion: the local is infiltrated by the global, just as the global can be defined as a part of localities that delimit themselves from one another. re<local>ization sees itself as a documentation of this dialectic: a collection of works from different 'cultural' territories that simultaneously differentiate and articulate themselves, and that, when presented together in a program, provide a networked picture of localization. re<local>ization is the construction of relationships, the evaluation of differences between various local formations - in other words, the production of a new 'global' context.

re<local>ization will examine, above all, individual strategies of differentiation, 'local' references and systems of signs - whether politically, socially, historically, aesthetically, geographically, etc. -, and the dissolution of borders between artistic and political action. But it will also look at the projection of counter-worlds or of a new cartography, the exploration of one's immediate surroundings or one's own body and history, ironic mutation, the ethnography of what is nearest, the expedition to places that are very close but have not been noticed for a long time.

re<local>ization can mean:
exploring what is close or reflecting what is remote,
re-examining the past and its locations,
testifying to involvement in the local,
showing one's own roots,
looking at an entirety in its constituent fragments,
probing one's own depths and the depths of others,
communicating something that does not want to be communicated.

"re" stands outside the <city walls> of localization. It can also be read as an abbreviation for 'regarding,' or as standing for a process of renewal, of repetition. The aggressively angular parenthesis (instead of the usual round brackets) stands for isolation, visibly delimiting the word <local>. It embodies the city wall that makes a location a location in the first place. Only the border makes this visible, just as a frame makes a picture visible. The parenthesis can, however, also be seen as the wall of a house or as an imaginary place-name sign.

Conception: Lars-Henrik Gass, Bady Minck, Katrin MundtOrganization: Katrin MundtCurators: Bady Minck, Wien/ Luxemburg; Keiko Araki, Tokyo; Claudio Caldini, Buenos Aires; Catherine David, Rotterdam/ Paris; Marina Grzinic, Ljubljana; Mark Nash, London/ Cambridge, Mass.; Viola Shafik, Cairo; Pimpaka Towira, Bangkok; Ian White, London.