00:00 My name is Laurence Desarzans, I'm Swiss, French and I live in Zurich.
00:05 I'm the producer with Monica Pozzi of Rassfest Switzerland.
00:10 I come a little bit from the music, like you would say, actual music side and the internet side also.
00:18 And since two years we produce Rassfest in Zurich.
00:21 It's the second year now we do it here at the Refroph cinema.
00:26 I read your biography, that's quite impressive.
00:30 You made a lot of things, certainly a lot of people remember, like Skimcom here in Switzerland
00:36 and other really important things, Wipa for example, it's also known in Switzerland.
00:42 It's really impressive.
00:45 Thank you very much.
00:47 I had the chance that I was invited into different projects, like you mentioned Swisscom.
00:54 I was invited with my partner at the time to make the whole new media site,
01:00 it's been the website and at the time we did this teasing newsletter for example,
01:05 so I was always involved into let's say new media.
01:09 I'm also producer of Boombox.net, we started in '96 to do a webcast
01:15 and we experimented with this webcast from hip-hop to electronics.
01:20 We have a kind of media archive of all these webcasts and we experimented with the media.
01:26 My background is really in music from hip-hop to electronics and new media.
01:32 So it's quite logic somewhere that I end up with these guys here in Switzerland.
01:39 Was it easy to install Rassfest in Switzerland?
01:45 Did you have sponsors?
01:50 What was the challenge to introduce Rassfest in Switzerland?
01:55 I think the challenge is, Switzerland is a very lively film festival scene,
02:02 there is a lot of film festivals, so maybe the question is why another one?
02:09 On the other hand I think it's a very specific aesthetic
02:13 and a very specific language which for me comes straight from pop culture, club culture
02:19 and I don't see any festival like this in Switzerland.
02:23 So the difficulty was to try to explain to people from the film side.
02:32 Yes, it's a film festival but it's different and then to define it precisely towards the media
02:39 for example or towards a potential sponsor and explain why is it different.
02:43 And still today I think it's not so difficult.
02:46 Also Rassfest is really an experience, it's not only the films or the short films, the program,
02:53 it's also a lot of side things with workshops.
02:56 And this is not so easy to explain why you are so different unless the people have seen it.
03:02 I would say the people who have decision power.
03:04 So it's not easy but we are very motivated and when I see the success,
03:10 like now you came, it's sold out, for By Design we had also yesterday almost everything sold out,
03:16 so I think there is an interest from younger people but also people coming from advertising
03:22 or from maybe more traditional films to see these aesthetics and these different things
03:26 that you don't see in traditional media.
03:28 First the challenge is of course to explain what is it
03:33 and we don't really have a very simple definition, we have to do it and that's our work.
03:40 So as you already mentioned it's really a great success, also I saw,
03:46 because it's sold out and people are very interested in it.
03:50 Could you perhaps tell me some highlights of what you showed this year?
03:57 Sure, I think one highlight is definitely the Retrospective series from Rastfest last year,
04:03 we had Jonathan Glaser and this year it's Traktor, this collective from Scandinavia who live in LA,
04:08 who I think works in different areas, people know probably better the advertising or the Yuka Brother from MTV
04:15 but I think this is for me a highlight because it really shows the visions of somebody going through the years
04:23 and how they can develop their vision to advertising short films or music videos
04:29 and that's a very interesting series and it has had a big success here.
04:34 The shorts are also very short ones, for example I think it's a very highlight with a very excellent film,
04:41 I mean of course Gaël Denis is a beautiful, poetic short movie with animated
04:48 and my favorite, Pic Pic André, The Big Sleep, which is hilarious,
04:53 which is in a way more traditional animation, that was really good.
04:57 And the documentary, I really liked the documentary in Rastfest because they show documentaries,
05:03 specifically in Switzerland you have no chance to see this documentary anywhere.
05:08 So Infamy we showed here, this documentary from Doug Praybott-Grafty, which is great, really fantastic,
05:16 superbly edited, also for people who really are not interested in graffiti, I would recommend to go for it.
05:23 And we're going to show in January Just For Kicks, about sneaker culture,
05:29 and Ginga, the Soul of Brazilian Football from Fernando Meirelles,
05:34 producing a production house with three young directors, which is also beautifully edited,
05:40 even if you're not a football fan, so it's a big theme, we're going to show it again next year also.
05:46 Oh that's great, because in Germany it's also the World Championship, so a lot of people will certainly come here.
05:53 I think you can see it, they will show it in Berlin, in Ginga.
05:57 Ah, ok, perfect.
05:59 You have a website, so anyone who is interested in the Rastfest can go there and have a look, get some information.
06:12 Yeah, you can definitely go on a local website, which is rastfest.ch, that's a Swiss Rastfest website,
06:22 and definitely go also on rastfest.com, because there you have the whole view about the whole city,
06:29 the festival is going to 35 cities this year, and it goes from everywhere in the world,
06:34 from Seoul to Istanbul, from Zurich to Sao Paulo, New York, so next week for example,
06:40 end of early December it's Vienna, so I would really recommend to go on the website,
06:46 you also have an overview of the whole programs we show here on your part of it, this second year,
06:52 and so you really see that it's very various.
06:55 And I would also recommend for the big Rastfest fan to go to rast.com, r-e-s-t-o-m,
07:04 because there you have information about the magazine, because Rast, it's also a magazine, it's DVDs,
07:09 and there you see the whole activities of the people who work behind RAS,
07:16 and for the people who like it, it's pretty rich.
07:19 On the DVD you have a selection of works, you show it here and the other one?
07:25 Yeah, on the DVD you have the best of RAS 2000, I think 1, 2, 3 are out, and the 4th is on the way,
07:33 so that's the best of each year program, and that's pretty good.
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