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This is Exile: Diaries of Child Refugees, 2015

20160225-exili_600This is Exile Diaries of Child Refugees
This is Exile Diaries of Child Refugees

Mani Yassir Benchelah, This is Exile: Diaries of Child Refugees, Film stills, 2015

Over the course of a year, Emmy-award-winning director Mani Yassir Benchelah made this intimate portrait of Syrian refugee children forced to flee from the violence of civil war to neighboring Lebanon. The documentary allows the children to tell their stories in their own words capturing the truth of how they deal with loss, hardship and a political consciousness beyond their age.

This Is Exile is an extraordinary intimate portrait of child refugees forced to flee from the violence of Syria’s civil war to neighbouring Lebanon. The documentary tells the stories of the children’s lives in their own words and captures the moving truth of how they deal with loss, hardship and the poignancy of dashed hopes. Their testimony in this film is a beautifully crafted microcosm of the human cost of the ongoing civil war in Syria that has forced over 4 million people to flee; half of whom are children. There is still no end to the war in sight.

While her younger brother fetches water, Aya talks about how a soldier pressured her to provide information about her father. Little Nouredine lived through the siege of Homs and, stuttering, explains how he believes that President Assad’s soldiers are following him everywhere. Thirteen-year-old Layim harbors feelings of vengeance, although he actually likes nothing better than to help people, for example by handing out rations. Nearly all the children look forward to returning home one day, but Fatima, who is disabled, is thriving in Switzerland where she feels fully acknowledged for the first time. Mustafa desperately wants to study, but he has to work for the money his family needs so badly.

Through the prism of their testimony, we gain perspective on the fate of millions of Syrian refugees, half of whom are children.

Source: Arab Film Days Oslo.
Text: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.
All images belongs to the respective artist and managment.

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Nordeste, 2005 by Juan Diego Solanas

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Nordeste film is a 2005 Argentina-French drama-thriller film directed by Juan Diego Solanas. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. Felix Monti’s widescreen cinematography shows drop-dead views of the misty green countryside that seems to stretch out endlessly.

This is a story about a childless Frenchwoman who travels to a remote region of Argentina in search of a baby to adopt, Nordeste film convincingly brings together the harsh reality themes from new Argentine cinema and a Western style of dramatic storytelling. On his feature directing bow, award-winning short filmmaker Juan Solanas shows a talent for compelling female characters, aided by an impassioned Carole Bouquet in the lead role.

Helene (Bouquet) leads a sales meeting for her pharmaceutical company before traveling to Argentina to adopt a child. Her journey is intercut with the tribulations of Juana (Aymara Rovero), a young single mother living in the Argentine countryside, who ekes out a precarious living for herself and her 13-year-old son Martin (Ignacio Ramon Jimenez).

When Helene’s adoption arrangements fall through in Buenos Aires, she hears about the possibility of finding a child in the country’s poverty-stricken Northeast. Young lawyer Gustavo (Juan Pablo Domench) warns her, however, it will be necessary to cut an illegal deal with child traffickers there.In her desperation, Helene is ready for anything: Much later, however, she will learn this area is infamous for its traffic in children: selling them for adoption, child prostitution or even organ traffic.

Meanwhile, Juana is pregnant again and is being evicted from her hovel. She struggles with the option of giving Martin up for adoption abroad, but she loves him too much to let him go.Inevitably, Helene and Juana meet. Juana has tried to abort her baby and comes to Helene for help. At the same time, Helene is given an opportunity to buy a newborn infant for $45,000. The film shows how cheap children’s lives are to men who have no qualms about what happens to them and has a lot of points to make.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398664/

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Rosetta, 1999 by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

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Rosetta is a 1999 French-Belgian film written and directed by the Dardenne brothers. It is about a seventeen-year-old girl (played by Émilie Dequenne) who lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother. Trying to survive and to escape her situation, she makes numerous attempts towards securing a job allowing her to move away from the caravan and her dysfunctional mother in order to reach a stable life.

When her probationary employment ends, Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne) causes a violent struggle against her manager and the policemen when she refuses to leave the premises. She returns home to “The Grand Canyon”, the trailer park shared with her alcoholic mother who mends worn clothes for her to sell. Rosetta is also seen laying out traps to catch trout for food. Unable to receive unemployment pay and desperate for work, Rosetta goes around to ask about vacancies until she happens upon a waffle stand. She befriends the worker, Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione), after an inquiry. Rosetta questionably treats her unexplained stomach pains with pain relievers and a hairdryer massaging the area.

Riquet makes an unexpected visit to the trailer park, startling Rosetta. He informs her a coworker was fired and thus she will be able to have a job. Her mother’s promiscuity resulting from alcoholism prompts Rosetta to encourage her to seek a rehabilitation clinic so they can finally have a better life. However, her persistent denial causes her mother to run away. Rosetta decides to stay with Riquet for the night. During the awkward evening, she discovers a waffle iron in his possession. As she lies in bed, she tries to convince herself that her life has started to function normally.

At work, she is replaced after three days by the owner (Olivier Gourmet) because his son failed school, leading to another violent confrontation. Rosetta is moderately pacified when he tells her she will be contacted if an opportunity arises. She begins a new search for employment while keeping Riquet company during work. Riquet falls into the water when he helps Rosetta with her traps. She watches him thrashing in the muddy water and hesitates before helping him out. Later she discovers Riquet has been selling his own waffles during business hours from his offer of an under the table job helping him mix the batter. After some contemplation, she tells the owner. Rosetta looks on as Riquet is thrown out of the stand and is handed his apron. Betrayed and hurt, Riquet chases Rosetta on his moped as she attempts to evade him. Eventually he catches up to her and demands her motive. She states she wanted a job and had no intention of saving him.

Rosetta encounters Riquet as a customer when she begins her first day in his stead. She returns home to find her mother barely conscious and inebriated in front, dragging her inside and putting her to bed. She calls her boss and tells him she will not be at work the next day. She then turn on the gas, and goes to bed, in an attempt to slowly kill herself and her mother. The gas runs out. She goes to the landlord to ask for another one. As she hauls the canister of gas with great difficulty, Riquet on his moped appears to circle around her. Rosetta walks a short distance before collapsing to the ground and cries. Riquet grabs her by the arm to pick her up. She turns around to gaze at him as she slowly regains her composure.

In Belgium the film inspired a new law prohibiting employers from paying teen workers less than the minimum wage and other labor reforms for youth.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0200071/

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Offside, 2006 by Jafar Panahi

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Offside (Persian: آفساید ‎‎) is a 2006 Iranian film directed by Jafar Panahi, about girls who try to watch a World Cup qualifying match but are forbidden by law because of their sex. Female fans are not allowed to enter football stadiums in Iran on the grounds that there will be a high risk of violence or verbal abuse against them.

A girl disguises herself as a boy to go attend the 2006 World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain. She travels by bus with a group of male fans, some of whom notice her gender, but do not tell anyone. At the stadium, she persuades a reluctant ticket tout to sell her a ticket; he only agrees to do so at an inflated price. The girl tries to slip through security, but she is spotted and arrested. She is put in a holding pen on the stadium roof with several other women who have also been caught; the pen is frustratingly close to a window onto the match, but the women are at the wrong angle to see it.

The women are guarded by several soldiers, all of whom are just doing their national service; one in particular is a country boy from Tabriz who just wants to return to his farm. The soldiers are bored and do not particularly care whether women should be allowed to attend football matches; however, they guard the women carefully for fear of their “chief”, who could come by at any moment. They occasionally give commentary on the match to the women.

One of the younger girls needs to go to the toilet, but of course there is no women’s toilet in the stadium. A soldier is deputed to escort her to the men’s toilet, which he does by an increasingly farcical process: first disguising her face with a poster of a football star, then throwing a number of angry men out of the toilet and blockading any more from entering. During the chaos, the girl escapes into the stadium, although she returns to the holding pen shortly after as she is worried about the soldier from Tabriz getting into trouble.

Part of the way through the second half of the game, the women are bundled into a bus, along with a boy arrested for carrying fireworks, and the soldiers ordered to drive them to the Vice Squad headquarters. As the bus travels through Tehran, the soldier from Tabriz plays the radio commentary on the match as it concludes. Iran defeats Bahrain 1-0 with a goal from Nosrati just after half time and wild celebrations erupt within the bus as the women and the soldiers cheer and sing with joy. The girl whose story began the film is the only one not happy. When asked why, she explains that she is not really interested in football; she wanted to attend the match because a friend of hers was one of seven people killed in a scuffle during the recent Iran-Japan match, and she wanted to see the match in his memory.

The city of Tehran explodes with festivity, and the bus becomes caught in a traffic jam as a spontaneous street party begins. Borrowing seven sparklers from the boy with the fireworks, the women and the soldiers leave the bus and join the party, holding the sparklers above them.

The film was filmed at an actual stadium during a qualifying match for the Iranian National team. Panahi had two separate outcomes to the film depending on the turnout of the match.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499537/

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Osama, 2003 by Siddiq Barmak

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Osama (Persian: اسامه‎‎) is a 2003 drama film made in Afghanistan by Siddiq Barmak. The film follows a pre-teen girl living in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime who disguises herself as a boy, Osama, to support her family. It was the first film to be shot entirely in Afghanistan since 1996, when the Taliban régime banned the creation of all films. The film is an international co-production between companies in Afghanistan, the Netherlands, Japan, Ireland, and Iran.
In the film, the Taliban are ruling Afghanistan. Their regime is especially repressive for women, who, among other things, are not allowed to work. This situation becomes difficult for one family consisting solely of three women, representing three successive generations: a young girl, her mother, and her grandmother. With the mother’s husband and uncle dead, having been killed in battle during the Soviet invasion and their civil wars, there are no men left to support the family. The mother had been working as a nurse in a hospital, but the Taliban cut off funding to the hospital, leaving it completely dysfunctional with no medicines and very little equipment. One foreign woman working as a nurse in the hospital is arrested by the Taliban. The mother does some nursing outside the hospital and receives payment from the caretaker of a patient, but after the patient dies the mother cannot find any more work.

The mother and grandmother then make what they feel is the only decision they can to survive: they will have their preteen daughter disguise herself as a boy so that she can get a job to support the family. Osama’s grandmother tells a story to Osama about a boy who changed to a girl when he went under a rainbow, in order to help persuade her to accept the plan. The daughter, feeling powerless, agrees despite being afraid that the Taliban will kill her if they discover her masquerade. Partly as a symbolic measure, the daughter plants a lock of her now cut hair in a flowerpot. The only people outside the family who know of the ruse are the milk vendor who employs the daughter – he who was a friend of her deceased father – and a local boy named Espandi, who recognizes her despite her outward change in appearance. Espandi is the one who renames her Osama. The masquerade becomes more difficult when the Taliban recruit all the local boys for school, which includes military training. At the training school, they are taught how to fight and conduct ablutions, and an ablution is taught to boys that should be done when they experience nocturnal emission or come in contact with their wife when they grow older. Osama attempts to avoid joining the ablution session, and the master grows suspicious of Osama’s gender. Osama realizes it can only be so long before she is found out. Several of the boys begin to pick on her, and although Espandi is at first able to protect her, her secret is eventually discovered when she menstruates.

Osama is arrested and put on trial, along with a Western journalist, and the foreign woman who was arrested in the hospital. The journalist and the nurse are both condemned and put to death, but, as Osama is destitute and helpless, her life is spared; she is instead given in marriage to a much older man. Osama’s new husband already has three wives, all of whom hate him and say he has destroyed their lives. They take pity on Osama, but are powerless to help her. The husband shows Osama the padlocks he uses on his wives’ rooms, reserving the largest for Osama. The film ends with the new husband conducting an ablution in an outdoor bath, which the boys were earlier taught to conduct after coming in contact with their wives.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368913/

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The White Ribbon (2009), About the Roots of Evil.

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The White Ribbon is a 2009 black-and-white German-language drama film written and directed by Michael Haneke Das weiße Band, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte, “The White Ribbon, a German Children’s Story”, darkly depicts society and family in a northern German village just before World War I and, according to Haneke, “is about the roots of evil. Whether it’s religious or political terrorism, it’s the same thing.”

The film premiered at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival in May 2009 where it won the Palme d’Or, followed by positive reviews and several other major awards, including the 2010 Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film also received two nominations at the 82nd Academy Awards in 2009: Best Foreign Language Film (representing Germany) and Best Cinematography (Christian Berger).

In Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, Julia Evers called the film “an oppressive and impressive moral painting, in which neither the audience nor the people in the village find an escape valve from the web of authority, hierarchy and violence. […] Everything in The White Ribbon is true. And that is why it is so difficult to bear.”

Markus Keuschnigg of Die Presse praised the “sober cinematography” along with the pacing of the narrative. Keuschnigg opposed any claims about the director being cold and cynical, instead hailing him as uncompromising and sincerely humanistic. Die Welt’s Peter Zander compared The White Ribbon to Haneke’s previous films Benny’s Video and Funny Games, both centering around the theme of violence. Zander concluded that while the violence in the previous films had seemed distant and constructed, The White Ribbon demonstrates how it is a part of our reality. Zander also applauded the “perfectly cast children”, whom he held as “the real stars of this film”.

“Mighty, monolithic and fearsome it stands in the cinema landscape. A horror drama, free from horror images”, Christian Buß wrote in Der Spiegel, and expressed delight in how the film deviates from the conventions of contemporary German cinema: “Director Michael Haneke forces us to learn how to see again”.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1149362/

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Lauren Greenfield, The Queen of Versailles

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Lauren Greenfield, The Queen of Versailles, 2012, digital video, 100 minutes and the Versailles Property, 2014

The Queen of Versailles is a character-driven documentary about a billionaire family and their financial challenges in the wake of the economic crisis. With epic proportions of Shakespearean tragedy, the film follows two unique characters, whose rags-to-riches success stories reveal the innate virtues and flaws of the American Dream. The film begins with the family triumphantly constructing the largest privately-owned house in America, a 90,000 sq. ft. palace. Over the next two years, their sprawling empire, fueled by the real estate bubble and cheap money, falters due to the economic crisis. Major changes in lifestyle and character ensue within the cross-cultural household of family members and domestic staff.

David Siegel is the wealthy owner of Westgate Resorts, a timeshare company in Florida. His wife Jackie Siegel, thirty years his junior, is a former Miss Florida contestant with a computer science degree. They begin construction on the Versailles house, a mansion modeled on the Palace of Versailles. Located on the outskirts of Orlando, it would be the largest single-family detached home in the United States if completed.

However, Siegel’s company is badly affected by the Great Recession in 2008 and his family struggle to cope with their reduced income. Construction on the new house is halted, most of their servants are laid off and their pets are neglected. David retreats into his office, determined to save his property venture in Las Vegas. Jackie struggles to rein in her compulsive shopping habits. The children and their nanny are also interviewed. The film ends with none of their issues resolved.

The New York Times’ A. O. Scott called the film “A gaudy guilty pleasure that is also a piece of trenchant social criticism,” and said, “the movie starts out in the mode of reality television, resembling the pilot for a new “Real Housewives” franchise or a reboot of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” Before long, though, it takes on the coloration of a Theodore Dreiser novel — not quite an American tragedy but a sprawling, richly detailed study of ambition, desire and the wild swings of fortune that are included in the price of the capitalist ticket.”

The Economist called it “an uncomfortably intimate glimpse of a couple’s struggle with a harsh new reality,” concluding that “the film’s great achievement is that it invites both compassion and Schadenfreude. What could have been merely a silly send-up manages to be a meditation on marriage and a metaphor for the fragility of fortunes, big and small.”

The documentary won the U.S. Directing Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize from the Brisbane International Film Festival, and a Best Director Award from the RiverRun Film Festival. The Queen of Versailles was also nominated for Best Documentary Film, 2012, by the International Documentary Association (IDA).

Lauren Greenfield graduated from Harvard in 1987 and started her career as an intern for the National Geographic Magazine. She lectures on her photography, youth culture, popular culture, and body image at museums and universities around the world.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125666/

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Richard Kern and Nick Zedd, The Manhattan Love Suicides: Thrust in Me, 1985

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Richard Kern and Nick Zedd, The Manhattan Love Suicides: Thrust in Me, 1985, 35 mm, black-and-white, 35 minutes.

The Manhattan Love Suicides are a series of short films by Richard Kern: Stray Dogs, Woman At The Wheel, Thrust In Me and I Hate You Now.

“Stray Dogs” concerns an artist being followed thru the streets by an obsessive young man (a terrific David Wojnarowicz) who tries to gain his attention. He follows the artist back to his apartment and begins literally tearing himself apart in frustration – at this point the artist laughs at him and begins to sketch his dying body.

“Woman At The Wheel” follows a woman who takes her boyfriends (1 at a time) for a drive – but they only spark arguments and insist on taking the wheel. She eventually beats one of them senseless, and wrecks the car.

“Thrust In Me”, stars Nick Zedd as both the suicidal girl and her thrusting boyfriend. Includes a great cameratrick orgasm of monumental proportions.

“I Hate You Now” features Tommy Turner as a facially deformed drug dealer and Amy Turner as his girlfriend. The film repeatedly taunts the notion of “deformity and ugliness” before ending in a serious iron-burn and a barbell suicide.

Richard Kern (born 1954 in North Carolina) is a New York underground filmmaker, writer and photographer. He first came to underground prominence as part of the underground cultural explosion in the East Village of New York City in the 1980s, with erotic and experimental films featuring underground personalities of the time such as Lydia Lunch, David Wojnarowicz, Sonic Youth, Kembra Pfahler, Karen Finley and Henry Rollins in movies like The Right Side of My Brain and Fingered. Like many of the musicians around him, Kern had a deep interest in the aesthetics of extreme sex, violence, and perversion and was one of the leading lights of the movement which Nick Zedd coined the Cinema of Transgression.

Kern’s first dabbling in the arts was a series of self-produced underground magazines featured art, poetry, photography, and fiction by Kern and several friends. These hand-stapled and photocopied zines expressed the bleakness of New York City’s East Village in the early 1980s. Kern’s first zine was the bi-monthly “The Heroin Addict,” which was later renamed to “The Valium Addict.” About 12 issues of these two zines were produced, along with the occasional special issue. This phase of Kern’s career lasted from late 1979 to around 1983.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0273777/

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Documentary: Diana Vreeland, The eye has to travel

Documentary: Diana Vreeland The eye has to travel

Still from the Documentary, Diana Vreeland, The Eye Has To Travel, 2012

Diana Vreeland, The Eye Has To Travel, Documentary, 2012
Directed By: Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt, Frédéric Tcheng and Lisa Immordino Vreeland
86 min. Biography, Documentary.

“There’s only one very good life, and that’s the life you know you want and you make it yourself”.

During Diana Vreeland’s fifty year reign as the “Empress of Fashion,” she launched Twiggy, advised Jackie Onassis, and established countless trends that have withstood the test of time. She was the fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar where she worked for twenty-five years before becoming editor-in-chief of Vogue, followed by a remarkable stint at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, where she helped popularize its historical collections. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel is an intimate portrait and a vibrant celebration of one of the most influential women of the twentieth century, an enduring icon who has had a strong influence on the course of fashion, beauty, publishing and culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP3wsNdANhM

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Online Resource: http://www.ubu.com/

Bruce Nauman, Good Boy Bad Boy,1985 and Video Against AIDS, Curated by John Greyson and Bill Horrigan, produced by Kate Horsefield, 1989

UbuWeb is an independent online resource educational resource for avant-garde material. UbuWeb does not distribute commercially viable works but rather resurrects avant-garde sound art, video and textual works through their translation into a digital art web environment, re-contextualising them with current academic commentary and contemporary practice

All materials on UbuWeb are being made available for noncommercial and educational use and the service is completely free.

http://www.ubu.com/

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Film: Making Chinatown, 2012

making chinatown, 2012

For his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Ming Wong creates a series of videos and scenic backdrops that reconsider the making of Roman Polanski’s seminal 1974 film Chinatown. Shot at Redcat, Wong’s reinterpretation, Making Chinatown, transforms the space into a studio backlot and examines the original film’s construction of language, performance and identity.

The artist plays all the roles originally belonging to Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston and Belinda Palmer, and crucial scenes are reenacted in front of printed backdrops digitally rendered from film stills and kept intact within the video installation. The wall flats adhere to the conventions of theatrical and filmic staging while taking on qualities of large-scale painting.

Wong has been recognized for his ambitious performance and video works that engage with the history of cinema and mass entertainment. Working through the visual styles and tropes of such iconic film directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai and Ingmar Bergman, Wong considers the means through which subjectivity and geographic location are constructed by motion pictures.

Making Chinatown is Wong’s first project focused on the American context of filmmaking and draws upon its use of Los Angeles as a versatile and malleable character. Wong treats the film as a text and medium through which he is able to inhabit and impersonate the qualities that are particular to the place it represents. Making Chinatown mimics and reduces the techniques of mainstream cinema in order to emphasize the theatrical qualities that underlie cinematic artifice. Moreover, it analyzes how canonical works from American cinema are received and reconfigured by global audiences.

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Artist: Wael Shawky

Wael Shawky’s work explores transitional events in society, politics, culture and religion in the Arab World. The films, installations, and performative works of the Egyptian artist explore the ways in which social and political systems have been restructured in Arab countries over the past several decades.

Through restaging historical events with children and marionettes, Shawky turns cultural hybridization into a narrative and aesthetic strategy. Using displacement and alienation in content and form, he creates a transitional space between documentation, fiction, and animation.

Lovingly and meticulously produced settings and costumes, a wealth of literary and historic references, and astutely selected music come together to create extraordinarily multifaceted films that invite us to think about history and the present day in new ways.

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Film: Ben Rivers, Slow Action, 2010

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Still from Ben Rivers, Slow Action, 2010

Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction.

Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography, the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat,  to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies. This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.

The film’s soundtrack, narratives by writer Mark von Schlegell, detail each of the four islands’ evolutions according to their geographical, geological, climatic and botanical conditions.

Slow Action, inspired by novels such as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Bacon’s The New Atlantis, Herbert Read’s The Green Child and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, embodies the spirit of exploration, experiment and active research that has come to characterise Rivers’ practice.

Commissioned by Picture This and Animate Projects in association with Matt’s Gallery, London.

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Film: The Corporation, 2003

The documentary The Corporation, 2003 looks at the concept of the corporation throughout recent history up to its present-day dominance.

‘Drawing the metaphor of the early attempts to fly. The man going off of a very high cliff in his airplane, with the wings flapping, and the guys flapping the wings and the wind is in his face, and this poor fool thinks he’s flying, but, in fact, he’s in free fall, and he just doesn’t know it yet because the ground is so far away, but, of course, the craft is doomed to crash.

That’s the way our civilization is, the very high cliff represents the virtually unlimited resources we seem to have when we began this journey. The craft isn’t flying because it’s not built according to the laws of aerodynamics and it’s subject to the law of gravity. Our civilization is not flying because it’s not built according to the laws of aerodynamics for civilizations that would fly. And, of course, the ground is still a long way away, but some people have seen that ground rushing up sooner than the rest of us have. The visionaries have seen it and have told us it’s coming.

“There’s not a single scientific, peer-reviewed paper published in the last 25 years that would contradict this scenario: every living system of earth is in decline, every life support system of earth is in decline, and these together constitute the biosphere, the biosphere that supports and nurtures all of life, and not just our life but perhaps 30 million other species that share this planet with us.”

The typical company of the 20th century: extractive, wasteful, abusive, linear in all of its processes, taking from the earth, making, wasting, sending its products back to the biosphere, waste to a landfill.’

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/

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Dance Theatre, 3D Cinema; Pina

Pina, 2011, Dir. Wim Wenders, 104 mins

Philippina “Pina” Bausch (1940 – 2009) was a German performer of modern dance, choreographer, dance teacher and ballet director. With her unique style, a blend of movements, sounds and prominent stage sets, and with her elaborate cooperation with performers during the composition of a piece (a style now known as Tanztheater), she became a leading influence since the 1970s in the world of modern dance.

Wim Wenders’s deeply intelligent 3D tribute to the work of the modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch was conceived as a collaboration with her. Pina Bausch, died in production (2009), just as Wenders, the director of ‘Paris, Texas’, was about to start shooting.

The resulting film achieves a poignant, elegiac quality, shot through with an overwhelming sense of loss, both on the part of the dancers of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, the company she ran for 36 years, whose thoughtful interviews and dance sequences form the film’s backbone, and the director himself. ‘Dance for love,’ one of her colleagues remembers her saying, recalling it as one of the few instructions he received from Bausch in years of working with her.

Bausch was a reticent figure, wary of personalities and insistent on letting her work speak for her. She would undoubtedly have been a distant figure in this film had she lived, but now her absence has a sombre, almost tragic quality.

If its meaning can be summed up – though it is arguably the point of an abstract artform that it can’t be summed up – it is probably in the words of a dancer who asks, “What are we yearning for? Where does all this yearning come from?” We spend our lives yearning, and then, in the shadow of mortality, our yearning is redirected backwards, a yearning to understand our past lives, our youth, and again forwards – a yearning to understand the point of our death. Wenders’s movie uncovers the crucial state of yearning in Bausch’s work.

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1 December; We Were Here

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We Were Here, 2011
Dir: David Weissman, Bill Weber, US, 90 mins

Beginning in San Francisco’s gay Castro Street district, around 1980, We Were Here manages to be both uplifting and powerfully truthful.

A riveting, moving, account of the fear, paranoia and prejudice that accompanied the AIDS epidemic as it ripped through the US West Coast gay community before making its way across the globe.
Combining first-hand testimony and archival material, this is essential viewing, documenting five survivors who chose very different paths to dealing with the epidemic. We Were Here reminds us what a terrifying enigma AIDS was at the outset, dubbed the “gay plague,” with almost half of San Francisco’s gay community testing positive within five years.
We Were Here emphasises the activism that challenged homophobic notions of the so-called “gay lifestyle” placing the spread of HIV in the context of the wider free-love generation.
As AIDS looms large across the world, infecting more people globally than at any time in its history, We Were Here is not only a testament to the courage and compassion of its original survivors but is also a timely reminder that this is something which has not gone away.

1 December is the World AIDS day.

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Documentary: A balloon to Allah

A Balloon to Allah, Nefise Özkal Lorentzen, 52 min, Documentary.

Norwegian-Turkish filmmaker Nefise Özkal Lorentzen wants to send a balloon to change the role of women in the Muslim culture. By following her grandmother’s path as a ‘sufi’, she embarks on a journey to rediscover the Islam of her mother’s mother. The film switches between her actual journey and her dreams.

She experiences the diversity of Cairo, Istanbul and Oslo by drinking tea with the Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi, finding hope and inspiration in the life of the 90-year-old author Gamal al-Banna and meeting a young Salafist. On her journey through the labyrinth, it dawns on Nefise that Islam is not the only place to search, but that there are correlations between the three Abrahamic religion and the oppression of women.

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