2022 | Poland | Documentary

Obsada

  • Polish Japanese 34 mins
  • Director | Wendelien van Oldenborgh
  • Writer | -
  • Producer | Wendelien van Oldenborgh

STATUS: Released

This film is currently not available.   

"Obsada" means "film crew" in Polish, but can also mean "working group." The team in question here is twofold. First, the film crew, in front of and behind the camera, is entirely female, art and film students gathered for the occasion at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz. The community is busy unfolding and questioning, in reverse, an action carried out in 1973 by another team, this one entirely male. The goal of this action, initiated by the famous Lodz film school, was, over 23 days, to question the collective dimension of the making of cinema. From one factory and one group to another, Wendelien van Oldenborgh continues with Obsada his lively investigation for a feminist counter-History – after that of architectural modernism in Two Stones (FID 2020), then of the invisibility of women artists from a decolonial perspective in Yesterday. (FID 2021). Here, this first involves the visibility of what is off-screen. Operating through reframing and reverse shots, both tools and objects of this investigation, Wendelien van Oldenborgh highlights her own filming conditions, thus reversing invisibilities. While the black and white archives of the event are summoned and set in motion to be questioned and become a new material, color is exposed as another issue for this group of women. A sign of Polish (masculine) modernism, here it is reappropriated: colored gels that they manipulate, monochrome clothes that they wear, tape, walls. Superimpositions, drawings, so many gestures that provoke and accompany the deployment of speech. But Obsada is not content to revisit the past. The decisive issue, from yesterday to today, is to remind us that the work remains open, Poland being, as we know, at the forefront of the liberticidal and reactionary measures introduced against women.

Collaboration Feminism Reflection Resistance Space
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