Playlist
<p>An apparition. An attempt to reveal a hidden content. Hands explore a photograph found in the archive of the artist's father. Touching is seeing. A claim for the shadow to recover memory. Only the shadows cast by the hands reveal what is hidden by the light: a crowd gathering on 20 March 1956, Tunisia's independence day.</p>
<p>My family have begun to forget their Egyptian roots and, on asking my grandmother Malo to recount the first part of her life in Cairo, I am confronted by the memories of an exiled Arabic woman, lost in a troubled sea of memories, soon to be erased by the passage of time. I start a tour to trace her steps and understand who she is, and therefore who we are. An Egypt appears where her past, my imaginings and the present Heliopolis mix together as night falls.</p>
<p>Filmed with a Bolex H16 camera and 200ft of film- on location in Aix en provence; in the month of April, 2019. Shot in and around the studio and garden of the painter Paul Cézanne and also on the mountain Saint Victoire; the focus of a long running series of paintings made between 1882 and 1906. Soundtrack by Toshiya Tsunoda.</p>
<p>Mónica Valenciano, winner of the National Dance Award, is a dancer and choreographer who, while preparing her next production, spends her days between the countryside and the rehearsal room. Her meetings with Raquel allow her to explore the possibilities of a dance in which the body has no greater significance than the word, an introspective dance inspired by the grace of spontaneous gesture. No intention, no discourse, nothing to explain. Just attention and present.</p>
<p>The Casa de Campo is one of the largest public parks in the world, a real forest. In the images, its 2019: the green of the earth shining anew for us or the children's unexpected use of bridges and ponds. In the sounds, its 1936, the forest torn in two, the defence of Madrid: "buzzes and explosions, clattering of machine guns, dry crackling of rifles" or the words of those who invented a revolution and a taste for good life in the midst of that turmoil.</p>
<p>Like an Afro-latino beat. "Malembe" is a song and an answer. A song from home, and an answer from very far away.</p>
<p>A film of a sloth, using three-colour separation to show sloth time. A sloth crawls up a branch at its own leisure and takes a nap, hanging on its head and with its long claws firmly planted in the rough bark. Time is suspended as each breath, every movement becomes a theatrical drama unfolding before our eyes.</p>
<p>"Once Removed" is a portrait of the time-travelling life of Bassel Abi Chahine, a thirty-one-year-old writer and historian who managed to obtain an unparalleled inventory of extremely rare objects, photographs and interviews related to the People’s Liberation Army and Progressive Socialist Party during the Lebanese Civil War. Considering himself a reincarnation of a dead soldier, he has the remarkable ability to recall details from the war, which mostly took place before his lifetime. Abi Chahine embodies the suppressed trauma hidden to his generation.</p>
<p>Every year, 200 000 women leave the Philippines to become household service workers. They are sent to rich industrialized countries all over the world. Before going abroad, the women are required to attend a comprehensive training program, validated by a National Certificate. The film focuses on this migration process instituted by the Filipino government.</p>
<p>In "Queen", bodily labour, performance, leisure and domestic work are drawn into comparison via an irreverent musical memoir. A bowling alley, a gallery, a studio, a pregnancy and a pop song. Kathryn Elkin tackles, with her characteristic sense of humour, issues around labour, creation, biography, being an artist and the transforming pregnant body. The film was conceived and shot during the artist’s pregnancy and first months of parenthood.</p>
<p>The wolf no longer inhabits the land that once formed part of its territory, and only through its outlines can we get closer to it; remnants of wolf traps, predator urine imported from the US, a dung-hill used to feed scavenger birds and archers that shoot at replicas of animals. Reserve constructs a story about the fragile balance of a territory after the disappearance of the predator, where the complex co-existence between humans and non-humans presents a distinctly marked anthropogenic ecosystem.</p>
<p>What are we doing together? A recurring question for the students of the film group at Dora Maar middle school, and for Éric Baudelaire who worked with them over four years. Answering this political question—one that involves representations of power, social violence and identity—led them to seek a cinematic form that does justice to the uniqueness of each student, but also to the substance of their group. What are we doing together, if it is neither documentary nor fiction? A dramatic film, perhaps, where time does its work on the students' bodies and discourse, and where we discover the possibility for each one to speak in their own name by filming for others, and to become co-authors of the film and subjects of their own lives.</p>
<p>In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C Scape Duneshack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack images, sounds and writing to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Lynne explores Barbara’s experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces and times. “While editing the film, the words on the screen came to me in a dream. I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her and the film. My text is a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces at once.” — Lynne Sachs Support provided by Wexner Center Film/ Video Studio and Artist Residency Award – Jennifer Lange, Curator. Additional Editing by Paul Hill; with gratitude to Florrie Burke.</p>
<p><em>A Tongue Called Mother</em> depicts the relationship between language, gestures and affiliation. It slowly captures the actions and words of three generations of women in the same family and children learning to read, meditating on words learnt and forgotten through the body.</p>
<p>It addresses the genocide of the Waimiri-Atroari people in 1970s. Illustrations about the period, created by the indigenous population reveal a traumatic history, referring us to the present day.</p>
<p>Aquí y allá is an essay film that studies what being at home means. The filmmaker uses photographs, maps and Google Earth to connect places around the globe; not just from her own past, but also from the complex migratory history of her family that stretches back to Hitler-era Germany and Mao's China. Reality and the virtual prove equally confusing: however much you zoom in, you never get closer to home.</p>
<p>A vivid portrait narrated by its central figure, Barbara Samuels. A polymath, artist, Jamaican immigrant in the United Kingdom, and mother of Morgan Quaintance. Among family albums and drawings from her youth, accounts of the early years of the diasporic experience in an inhospitable London society emerge, and in an intimate tone, stories of personal liberation and artistic self-realization are recalled.</p>
<p>For time immemorial, the indigenous peoples of Latin America have used and venerated the coca plant, affording it the same respect as a person. Jiíbie is the Uitoto word for the powder made from the plant, which is produced here in the domestic setting of a Muiná-Muruí family (in the Colombian Amazon). A spiritual guide, a healer, a teacher and a communicator: these are just some of the roles assigned to this “plant of power”.</p>
<p>This film follows Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier's wanderings through each of their worlds as they wonder through and contemplate the afterlife, rebirth, and the place in-between. Spoken mostly in chinuk wawa, their stories are departures from the Chinookan origin of death myth, with its distant beginning and circular shape.</p>
<p>A sunny afternoon as an exercise in preserving intimate details: my grandmother's garden, her hands, her music, and her healing recipes.</p>
<p>Far from the Argentine capital, in Córdoba, the end of the dictatorship heralds a spring that will be short-lived. "La Delpi" is the only survivor of a group of transvestite and transformist friends who, towards the end of the 1980s, were beginning to die, one after another, of AIDS. In a Catholic provincial city, Grupo Kalas made playbacks and improvised dresses their weapon and their defense. Today, the images from a unique and unpublished archive are a farewell letter, a manifesto of friendship.</p>
<p>In Valdediós, Gualterius built a monastery in the 13th century. In Valdediós, there is a wall, there is a horse, there is a road, there is the entire universe.</p>
<p>Marwa Arsanios’s new film examines the structures of self-governance and knowledge production fostered by the Kurdish autonomous women’s movement. She asks: what kinds of democracies are enabled without a state, and what kind of ecology is produced under the conditions of war? A propositional portrait of guerrilla ethics, Who is afraid of ideology? Part I disassembles the traditional documentary format, not only to show the contradictions inherent in such a portrayal, but also to doubt the regime of transparency.</p>