EMPTY SUITCASES
A FILM BY Bette Gordon

Bette Gordon described her compact feature Empty Suitcases as "a narrative derived from film's own material and my concern for exploring issues of representation and identification in cinema." One of the most radical and raw films of the 1980s and a key piece of the NoWave Movement, Empty Suitcases presents a stark look at a strong photographer living life on the edge. Set within the milieu of the Downtown art world (with a cameo by Nan Goldin), the artist embraces anarchy and terrorism as ways to address the sexual, economic, social, and professional struggles she faces.

Bette Gordon is a pioneering figure in American independent cinema known for her provocative exploration of desire, identity, and urban life. Emerging from New York's No Wave cinema scene in the 1970s and 80s, she gained recognition with her feature film Variety (1983). Gordon's work often challenges traditional narratives and portrays complex female perspectives, blending experimental techniques with narrative storytelling.

1980, 16mm, color, sound, 48.75 min

On the Move by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer

A breathless rhythm defines the early films of Bette Gordon. Not surprising, as Gordon belongs to that select group of independent filmmakers whose early encounter with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) not only inspired them to make films, but to routinely think about how to make a film and how to reinvent filmmaking in the process of doing so. Drawn by this French verve, she even spent some time in Paris as a college student, but—as the film critic Saffron Maeve recounts in her excellent profile of the filmmaker—Gordon found Parisian society stifling. 

According to Maeve, Gordon was taken aback by the fact that “you had to pay to sit on a chair at the Jardin de Luxembourg rather than sprawl on the grass.” She faced a problem of movement, of the right to freely move, and thus reflected many of her generation’s frustrations with the status quo—a counter-cultural standstill that worsened as the ‘60s gave way to the ‘70s and the subsequent Reagan ‘80s. Perhaps, for this reason, Gordon’s films emphasize movement—in the cross-country travels of a couple across the United States; in her characters’ indecision about where to live and how to live; in their representation of radicalization. Her films, reflecting the hard-fought freedom of thought that prevailed in her artistic circles, foreground people on the move; in turn, tracing out and positing that the United States could still grow in new directions, even when barriers to progress appeared ubiquitous. 

The United States of America, a 27-minute short film co-directed between Gordon and her then-partner James Benning, presents viewers with a view of the United States from the back-seat of a VW station wagon. The duo made the film on the occasion of the nation’s bicentennial, hoping to document the socio-political shifts defining their country as it celebrated a momentous anniversary. Their footage of roads and vistas is complemented with radio excerpts that include popular music from the era, advertisement, and commentary on the Vietnam War’s waning days. The film features a lot of Minnie Riperton, and with its uniform gathering of landscapes, seems to advance the notion that the United States is no more than a lot of the same. 

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Gordon and Benning’s surroundings are constantly changing; it might not be noticeable from their car’s window, but it is apparent in their own reactions to the world around them—some stretches of road call for a slouch, others for the placement of feet on the dashboard; similarly, the duo’s constant need to adjust their eyesight to avoid the sun reflects a changing landscape. Although their surroundings look the same, their reactions say otherwise. For all the sameness on view, Gordon and Benning make sure to remind viewers that life—and all its idiosyncratic gestures—persists amid humdrum environments, both enhancing and changing them.

The interplay between controlled, static framing and the changes they capture over time has become more synonymous with Benning and his experiments in subject-specific durational filmmaking. 10 Skies (2004) and 13 Lakes (2004), for example, are films premised on the idea that nothing is static, and that even shooting the most tranquil scene involves making peace with disruption. Both films also trade on the excitement of their sudden disruptions; clouds drifting away in the former and water rippling in the latter. But a different relationship to movement is at work in Gordon’s still sequences, less contingent on visual backdrops changing as it is on shifts in lighting that correspond with shifts in mood, and with body movement that often gestures at psychological change. This is seen early on in her film Empty Suitcases, as a woman is seen packing and then unpacking the same suitcase. 

Discussing her films with filmmaker and writer Karyn Kay in Bomb Magazine, Gordon said the following about Empty Suitcases: “I think the film deals with the dislocation of self inside and behavior outside.” There’s a clear psychoanalytic streak in her work, as there is in the films of Yvonne Rainer and many of Gordon’s contemporaries. Perhaps, Gordon achieves with people what Benning has accomplished with landscapes. It’s not that they treat either as characters, but that they frame both people and landscapes in such a way that their slightest movements emphasize indexical relationships to larger narratives—whether sociological, as in the connections Benning makes between American landscapes and the nation’s murderers in Landscape Suicide (1987); or, personal, as in the relationship Gordon sets up between her characters’ pitter-patter and both their professional and political agonies in Empty Suitcases. Gordon never locks the viewer into a frame, or onto a character; instead, she invites viewers to think outside both—to move elsewhere. Her cinema does not ask for identification, insomuch as distanced observation—a close eye that, observing the fret of a woman, can understand the anxiety of a generation; and, seeing one nondescript parking lot, understands an issue of uniformity extends across the United States. 

If Breathless embodied the spirit of a generation in revolt with its iconic jump cuts, films like The United States of America and Empty Suitcases embodied their generation’s subsequent waywardness with their relaxed footage of stressed-out individuals and their distressed environs. At first glance, the breathless quality of the latter relates more to suffocation than freedom, but further time with films of this sort indicate their breathless characteristics correspond to a subtle stirring—a challenge the movement of bodies and leisure of time posits against a status quo that trades on mechanical movement and quickness in all aspects of life, from workspace efficiency to bite-sized entertainment. Gordon’s The United States of America and Empty Suitcases, as her other works, are wayward films of an instinctual bent. Their composition is intuitive, darting in different directions, not asking, but enticing a viewer to follow travels from coast-to-coast or between cities—their aim is not to take the viewer anywhere, but to lose them along the way, to make them follow their own stirrings until breathlessness sets in and new whims kick in.

 

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The online platform aims to share what we find inspiring with a global audience while highlighting one work at a time, paying detailed attention to the world created around the work, and storytelling.
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Bette Gordon, EMPTY SUITCASES

March 25, 2025 - April 8, 2025

On the Move by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer

A breathless rhythm defines the early films of Bette Gordon. Not surprising, as Gordon belongs to that select group of independent filmmakers whose early encounter with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) not only inspired them to make films, but to routinely think about how to make a film and how to reinvent filmmaking in the process of doing so. Drawn by this French verve, she even spent some time in Paris as a college student, but—as the film critic Saffron Maeve recounts in her excellent profile of the filmmaker—Gordon found Parisian society stifling. 

According to Maeve, Gordon was taken aback by the fact that “you had to pay to sit on a chair at the Jardin de Luxembourg rather than sprawl on the grass.” She faced a problem of movement, of the right to freely move, and thus reflected many of her generation’s frustrations with the status quo—a counter-cultural standstill that worsened as the ‘60s gave way to the ‘70s and the subsequent Reagan ‘80s. Perhaps, for this reason, Gordon’s films emphasize movement—in the cross-country travels of a couple across the United States; in her characters’ indecision about where to live and how to live; in their representation of radicalization. Her films, reflecting the hard-fought freedom of thought that prevailed in her artistic circles, foreground people on the move; in turn, tracing out and positing that the United States could still grow in new directions, even when barriers to progress appeared ubiquitous. 

The United States of America, a 27-minute short film co-directed between Gordon and her then-partner James Benning, presents viewers with a view of the United States from the back-seat of a VW station wagon. The duo made the film on the occasion of the nation’s bicentennial, hoping to document the socio-political shifts defining their country as it celebrated a momentous anniversary. Their footage of roads and vistas is complemented with radio excerpts that include popular music from the era, advertisement, and commentary on the Vietnam War’s waning days. The film features a lot of Minnie Riperton, and with its uniform gathering of landscapes, seems to advance the notion that the United States is no more than a lot of the same. 

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Gordon and Benning’s surroundings are constantly changing; it might not be noticeable from their car’s window, but it is apparent in their own reactions to the world around them—some stretches of road call for a slouch, others for the placement of feet on the dashboard; similarly, the duo’s constant need to adjust their eyesight to avoid the sun reflects a changing landscape. Although their surroundings look the same, their reactions say otherwise. For all the sameness on view, Gordon and Benning make sure to remind viewers that life—and all its idiosyncratic gestures—persists amid humdrum environments, both enhancing and changing them.

The interplay between controlled, static framing and the changes they capture over time has become more synonymous with Benning and his experiments in subject-specific durational filmmaking. 10 Skies (2004) and 13 Lakes (2004), for example, are films premised on the idea that nothing is static, and that even shooting the most tranquil scene involves making peace with disruption. Both films also trade on the excitement of their sudden disruptions; clouds drifting away in the former and water rippling in the latter. But a different relationship to movement is at work in Gordon’s still sequences, less contingent on visual backdrops changing as it is on shifts in lighting that correspond with shifts in mood, and with body movement that often gestures at psychological change. This is seen early on in her film Empty Suitcases, as a woman is seen packing and then unpacking the same suitcase. 

Discussing her films with filmmaker and writer Karyn Kay in Bomb Magazine, Gordon said the following about Empty Suitcases: “I think the film deals with the dislocation of self inside and behavior outside.” There’s a clear psychoanalytic streak in her work, as there is in the films of Yvonne Rainer and many of Gordon’s contemporaries. Perhaps, Gordon achieves with people what Benning has accomplished with landscapes. It’s not that they treat either as characters, but that they frame both people and landscapes in such a way that their slightest movements emphasize indexical relationships to larger narratives—whether sociological, as in the connections Benning makes between American landscapes and the nation’s murderers in Landscape Suicide (1987); or, personal, as in the relationship Gordon sets up between her characters’ pitter-patter and both their professional and political agonies in Empty Suitcases. Gordon never locks the viewer into a frame, or onto a character; instead, she invites viewers to think outside both—to move elsewhere. Her cinema does not ask for identification, insomuch as distanced observation—a close eye that, observing the fret of a woman, can understand the anxiety of a generation; and, seeing one nondescript parking lot, understands an issue of uniformity extends across the United States. 

If Breathless embodied the spirit of a generation in revolt with its iconic jump cuts, films like The United States of America and Empty Suitcases embodied their generation’s subsequent waywardness with their relaxed footage of stressed-out individuals and their distressed environs. At first glance, the breathless quality of the latter relates more to suffocation than freedom, but further time with films of this sort indicate their breathless characteristics correspond to a subtle stirring—a challenge the movement of bodies and leisure of time posits against a status quo that trades on mechanical movement and quickness in all aspects of life, from workspace efficiency to bite-sized entertainment. Gordon’s The United States of America and Empty Suitcases, as her other works, are wayward films of an instinctual bent. Their composition is intuitive, darting in different directions, not asking, but enticing a viewer to follow travels from coast-to-coast or between cities—their aim is not to take the viewer anywhere, but to lose them along the way, to make them follow their own stirrings until breathlessness sets in and new whims kick in.

 

Agustina Comedi, SILENCE IS A FALLING BODY

August 18, 2023 - August 28, 2023

Silence is a Falling Body

“I was one of the lucky ones, I spent lockdown watching a film a day. I also started writing to my first penpal, Cecilia Estalles, a young queer woman in Buenos Aires who works for the Archivo de la Memoria Trans, an amazing archive of decades of photos of and by trans women in Argentina. Cecilia introduced me to the films of Agustina Comedi. Silence is a Falling Body is a tender, vulnerable homage of a film. Deceptively simple in form, it is first of all a home movie, but it transcends the normal description. It explores the notions of family, of love, of desire, and of activism. When her father died, suddenly Agustina discovered that he’d had an entire other life, that of a gay man. With Silence, she pays tribute to her beloved father and to his capacity to live out his range of desires. But it’s also a film about repression, about the persecution of the queer community in Argentina by the government and by the political leftist parties, who operated with their own form of homophobia. This film is a jewel in the canon of queer cinema.”
-Nan Goldin

Valentin Noujaïm, THE BLUE STAR / النجم الأزرق

July 27, 2023 - August 7, 2023

SILENCE

During our Zoom interview, Valentin dials in from Villa Medici in Rome, where a peacock passes and lingers behind him. Asli is in apocalyptic NY, where the sky turned orange, and Perwana is based in sunny LA, where she encountered a small animal in her apartment. 

 

Asli Baykal:

In my notes, I wrote “revolutionary love or love of revolution”. It’s from your synopsis.

 

Valentin Noujaïm:

It’s actually inspired by Houria Bouteldja, and she talks about the love of revolution of the revolution of love, which I always found very beautiful. It’s a formula that I always use. I would say.

 

Perwana Nazif:

I guess maybe we can start off with the title of the film, The Blue Star. You also don’t have to answer any of the questions I say because I do understand if you want to keep certain things maybe more opaque, not so transparent. I was looking up what a blue star is, the blue star sort of eats its own interior. So, it’s both sort of expanding and contracting.

 

Valentin:

And contracting. 

 

Perwana:

And I love the sort of inhabiting of negative space here. There’s a lot of Black feminist scholarship on this, which I think is distinct from what you’re doing, but it’s in conversation with it. So I’ve been reading, and I’ve been writing a lot about, actually, Evelyn Hammonds’s work. She’s a Black feminist science historian, she writes about this reference to a black hole as a physics metaphor for Black female sexualities. I’m just walking you through, and she’s talking about black female sexualities as a perceived void. So, it’s both absent and present and she refigures it as black (w)hole and she writes through the dependency of a normative sex/gender order on this space/non-space. So, it’s this negative space you’re talking about. There’s both a presence and an absence.

And the way that she talks about it is that it’s a way to measure against the visible and what’s affected by the visible. So, this supposed void is invisible, but it affects what is visible, as in white female sexuality. She is writing about how Black female sexuality is seen not just voided but seen as aberrant or not normal or typical. And people like Spillers talk about the radicality of this, of this queering, but it’s also done in a really violent way.

 

Valentin:

Yeah.

 

Perwana:

This black hole metaphor in physics is talking about invisibility, talking about contesting evidence, physical material evidence. She’s bringing in psychoanalysis and talking about differences. And of course, Fanon and psychoanalysis come to mind. And I’m just rambling right now, but I was thinking about this void that I think is also present with the blue star that you are addressing, with psychoanalysis too, but also maybe beyond it, as well. And you’re talking about sadness or maybe allegorizing it. But at the same time, the blue star isn’t a metaphor to me. It’s an actual site. It’s like a place, maybe a site of being and maybe a site of being that you don’t actually reach but you’re striving to reach.

Anyways, these are my thoughts on the title, and I was just curious about what you thought, and I’m so not trying to do that thing that people do in Q&As where they talk for 10 minutes about something.

 

Valentin:

No, I love

 

Perwana:

[laughs] This is what I was getting from the title.

 

Valentin:

At first, I chose the title more for poetic reasons than for anything else because I thought that blue stars were not real. I didn’t know that there were blue stars. I thought there were only red stars like ours, our sun. But then, I suddenly realized that on other satellites and other planets, even in our own solar system, the sky is not necessarily blue. The sky can be red, can be yellow, can be a different color depending on the atmosphere. And I called it The Blue Star at first because blue is a color that is very recurrent in all of my films. And for me, it was kind of this goal to reach because, so in a very basic way, blue sky, watching the sky, definitely this horizon that is unreachable.

Also, the fact that the sky is blue, but if you go closer to the sky, the blueness disappears, and it just becomes dark. So, you never reach the blue sky. Actually, it’s an illusion. So, that was more my first thought of it. But then, when I started to research that blue stars actually exist, which I felt very stupid when I realized this, I also found out this negative and positive conception, one that is appearing and one that is disappearing, the fact that it’s eating from itself. And I loved it. Actually, there’s a lot missing in the film. Actually, I think it’s one of my films that has the most dialogue in a way. It’s the most talkative film that I made. But at the same time, it’s the film that talks a lot about actual voids and silence and even different terms of communication because at the end, we have a shout, we have some whispering, we have different levels of voices. We have a narrator, which is also the only time I use kind of a narrator figure.

So, yeah, the blue came out of this. And there was also this concept of, I don’t know if you know, the concept of Fata Morgana, which is this concept also called shadow Islands. It’s when you’re watching the horizon, especially if you’re looking at the sea, you can almost feel like you see an island or sometimes a ship, and it’s just floating. 

 

Asli:

It’s just like when you look in the distance and you see the ship floating. It’s like an illusion.

 

Valentin:

Exactly. Exactly. This illusion it’s called Fata Morgana, but it’s also Shadow Island, which I love; Shadow Island, also this name… It’s something that is very recurrent in my work, this idea of the shadow island, something that you don’t see. I recently read about Jacques Derrida in Mal d’Archives, talking about archives and about material archives, and immaterial archives. The material archives are what we see, like pictures, photography, voices, whatever, all the materials we have. But the immaterial archives are more a feeling or something missing. So, it’s again, maybe a bit like this blue star, positive and negative, what you can and can’t see. I feel like The Blue Star is exactly using material archives to actually try to talk about more immaterial archives for my family and from this period of time also in Lebanon.

 

Asli:

I feel like it’s such an immigrant mindset to have a Shadow Island where you fantasize about reaching a distant location or some utopic land. And also, I feel like many immigrant families lose their archives over generations. Even untrackable sometimes.

 

Valentin:

When I discovered my grandfather’s archives, I made the film. I’ve never seen all of this footage before because my dad never thought I was going to be interested in it, so it was kept. And then, I realized how lucky I was also to get to have all this material. It’s quite luxurious and privileged to have that amount of material. I realized that we got it just because he was working in the army, and it’s just unlimited films that he got. But I actually don’t even know how the 8mms arrived in France. I’m not even sure if it’s my dad who took it. It was a lot of 8mms back then, with money from production, digitalized. It was maybe five hours, four hours of 8mm, which is really, really-

 

Perwana:

That’s amazing.

 

Valentin:

Yeah. And it was a big suitcase. So, I don’t even know how they transported this from Lebanon to France. I should ask. In the blue star, there is also this concept that I really wanted to work with, the destruction aspect. There is a death aspect also to it. Of course, there is this horizon, but it doesn’t work. And maybe it’s a very pessimistic film, but I really wanted to think about this shadow island that we have as immigrants. I mean, especially in France, I see a lot of conversation, a bit like dreaming about what’s behind the Mediterranean Sea. And I really wanted to work on that because I’ve been part of this dream. Sometimes I was like, “Wow. What if my parents stayed, or what if I grew up in Lebanon?

I wanted to reflect on this speech that I had when I was younger. I’m not critical about it because I think it’s useful. I think I needed to go through this, but I also think I need to destroy this blue star that was staying here a bit. 

 

Perwana:

I love that you brought up destruction because one of my questions for you was around the subject of martyrdom. Because obviously, I think martyrdom, especially when thinking of brown men specifically, is very tinged with fanaticism.  I was also thinking about what I was saying with the site of the blue star as the site of being and not what is not actually reachable. It’s as if the only way to achieve this sight of being is to actually destroy the self or something like that, potentially. I’m not sure. Or that it’s this sort of ultimate origin. It’s sort of fantasized. It might not even actually exist. So, even what we’re thinking about with archives, with what Asli was talking about, there’s intense material destruction of archives with diasporic travel, right?

 

Valentin:

Mm-Hmm.

 

Perwana:

But there are also archives that just aren’t actually possible. I mean, obviously, you can’t have a totalizing narrative of history. But I was thinking about it, and I know we’ve talked a lot about archives before because of when we first met. We were talking about Etel [Adnan] and The Arab Apocalypse, and I was really interested in fictional archives and Walid Raad’s work. I feel like this film’s also very much in dialogue with Walid Raad’s work and sort of those maybe contested fictional or actual legitimate archives with The Atlas Group. 

So, his work in The Atlas group with sort of these potentially fictional archives sort of because of, I don’t know, the destruction and trauma of war and the different possible and impossible narratives. I’m rambling again, but basically, I’m thinking about this idea of an ultimate origin that actually isn’t impossible.

 

Asli:

Right.

 

Valentin:

Yeah.

 

Perwana:

And that you’re using actual archives in the film. But then, there’s also a sort of narrative that’s going on that I wouldn’t say is fictional, but again, this sort of existence of the blue star. Yeah, it’s like-

 

Perwana:

… Sort of existence of the Blue Star. Yeah. It’s this ultimate origin, or this side of being that is only possible through martyrdom. You spoke about destruction, but I guess I wonder if that was part of it because I was like, “Oh, wow, this is really powerful.”

 

Valentin:

I just want to first answer with one anecdote. Did you say anecdote in English? I forgot.

 

Valentin:

Yeah. When I first showed the film in France, an old lady came to talk to me, and she asked me if the ending, when the brown man dies, was about Jihad.

 

Perwana:

Yeah. See? Exactly. Exactly.

 

Valentin:

She was like, “Yeah, he committed suicide, so he destroyed the blue star. So he is kind of a jihad.” I was like, “No, not really.” Okay. Yeah. Anyway, I thought it was odd, and I was with the director of the festival that was very like, “No, no, it’s not.” It was a very funny situation anyway, and very racist in a way. Destruction was definitely very important because I think the film is also quite autobiographic in a way, more than just about my family. It’s also about me. I think it came at a time when I wanted to stop doing films about my origin. It’s kind of the end of two films, and I think I really wanted to destroy it. I was like, “It’s time to move forward and maybe question other people and not just yourself.” And I realized I really wanted to talk about myself, my family, and my dad especially.

In the end, when the person goes on the blue star, the brown man, I still wonder if he killed himself or if he actually destroyed the Blue Star by doing so. It’s a question that I don’t have an answer. I think it could be interpreted like this also, that he actually destroyed it so his son not to follow it and not continue the same kind of mistake. And in destruction, there is also an aspect of transmission that I think is very crucial in the film for me. Because the dad still gave his language to his son, and he’s giving him a voice actually because no one talks in the film except this family. And in the end, he’s giving him a big treasure, which is this language, and through this language, he manages to free other people. So transmission and destruction were definitely very important. And the transmission of destruction too. 

 

Perwana:

That’s powerful. I’m still thinking about The Arab Apocalypse here. I think with all the destruction that she writes or even symbols. Talking about-

 

Valentin:

There are even explosion symbols sometimes. It’s true. I remember when I was editing the film, I really wanted a big boom. It was a big debate with my editor because she said, “It’s a bit intense, this moment of explosion.” Really for me, it was very important that we have this almost Star Wars moment of ship explosion. Yeah, I think it was very important to express this chaos and destruction through an explosion also.

 

Perwana:

I really love that description. Thank you. That’s also really funny, the Jihad thing. I’m telling you, that’s what I was like, “This will definitely be read like this by certain people.” Funny.

 

Valentin:

Talking about distractions. Do you want to see the Vatican?

 

Perwana:

Yes. Oh my God.

 

Valentin:

Do you see it?

 

Asli:

[Inaudible 00:28:45]

 

Valentin:

That’s the villa over there that I’m staying at. Apparently, this little tower that I’m on, the Cardinal Medici that was living here. He was bringing opponents or lovers that he wanted to get rid of, and he was pushing them from the stairs.

 

Perwana:

Are you kidding me?

 

Valentin:

No. So have you watched the La Reine Margot, Perwana?

 

Perwana:

Yeah. I wanted to talk about it with you. Yeah.

 

Valentin:

Well, La Reine Margot, the mother is Catherine of de’ Medici. She’s from this family, the crazy Italian family.

 

Valentin:

Yeah. I love Catherine of de’ Medici. She’s an insane woman. 

 

Perwana:

The massacre scene, I was like, “Oh my god.”

 

Valentin:

And she killed all her sons. She’s such an Italian character, in a way.

 

Perwana:

That’s amazing. Before I forget to ask this because it’s more of a logistical question about the film. I want to know more about the voice actors and why you chose them because there are some very prominent voices in the film.

 

Valentin:

I’m sorry. It’s a bit disappointing, but it’s a bit random. So the narrator was not supposed to be in the film’s script, and at first, there was only the voice of the man and the son. Then through the editing, quite late in the editing, we decided to add a narrator. For the man, I was very sure that I wanted Ali Cherri, because Ali Cherri, first of all, has a beautiful voice, and he’s someone that I love. He has a tradition of Lebanese cinema that he played in Akraam Zatari’s films. So I was very excited to have him in the film. For me, it made sense. For the woman and the son, it was actually a friend and her son. I wanted her son to play, too, because he was half-Arab. 

Now he got older, but he’s a very interesting boy that was a bit confused about Arabic. I really wanted to have them play, and he spoke Arabic, but very badly. So I was like, “Perfect. This is exactly what I want.” And then for Denis Lavant, that’s the most random of the film. We were editing in La Femis, in my school, and there’s one teacher from La Femis that I love. Her name is Nicole Brenez. She’s actually a writer. Maybe you’ve read her stuff. But she’s really amazing. She was very close to Godard. She wrote a lot about experimental cinema also, and she’s a teacher. She saw the film, and I said, “Yeah, I need a narrator.” And she was like, “Well, you can just ask Denis Lavant.” I went, “He’s never going to be okay with it.” She was like, “You should try. He’s very okay.” Also. I pointed out that “I don’t have a budget.” She was like, “It’s fine.”

So I sent him the film and a script, and he called me. I saved the voice note because I was obsessed, and he said, “Yes, it’s Denis Lavant. I really like the film. Let’s do it tomorrow at nine. I’ll come. Thank you, bye.” Yeah. It was crazy because he is such an amazing actor. He came and stayed only 40 minutes. First of all, he knew the text already perfectly in just one night. I think he just read it, and it was perfect. I was very stressed, and it was perfect. It was amazing. And I really wanted to film him because when we were doing the narrator, he was moving a lot.

 

Valentin:

It was very funny. He was doing things like this and moving on his chair, and I was so impressed. He is an amazing actor. It’s crazy. So, that’s the story of Denis Lavant. It’s really my teacher was like, “Why not Denis.” I never thought of him because I was like, “He’s out of reach. Why would he do a small project from a student?” It was really not written for him, in a way.

 

Perwana:

But it’s also interesting because the narration came so much later, and I’m also wondering why there is a narrator in the film too, so it feels like the thought process makes sense.

 

Valentin:

Yeah, the fairytale aspect came, fairytale, not the tale aspect came a bit later. I think the main problem that I had with the film was that it was too talkative, and the thing that was very complicated to edit was the mix of languages. That, on paper, worked very well. The script was longer, and it was really easy to read because you were just reading a translation, but then having to focus on different languages, reading was a bit chaotic during the first versions. I also found out that this narrator aspect could really help focus less on understanding everything because then suddenly you’re very passive as a spectator because someone is just telling you what you have to understand. And it worked. I think it saved the film because suddenly you are asking fewer questions because you have this person telling you what’s happening. I liked it. I think it’s something that I don’t often consider for my films, not naturally to have a narrator, but I think about films that I love with narrators and I don’t know why I’ve never used it more.

I think about All About Eve, and the narrator is a masterpiece in this film. It really made the film, even if it’s actually not often in the film. It’s just at the beginning bit, in the middle, and at the end. I think it was a big reference for me because in All About Eve, even if it’s super different. There the narrator helps you to actually not to really dive into the story and be a spectator of the show because you’re literally watching a show. And I think for The Blue Star, I wanted a bit of the same concept of being a very passive spectator and just receiving images and music also because music is quite important without questioning too many things. 

 

Asli:

Also, there’s a layer of you interpreting the archival footage that you got. So it’s like passing that on, adding another layer of language.

 

Valentin:

Now when I’m watching it, sometimes I’m like, “Wow, it’s so intense. There are so many different formats.” It’s an intense film. My next film is going to be way more simple, which is a bigger challenge for me. I’m trying to reduce and do a film, way more simple narratively, also not many characters.

 

Asli:

When you say simple, though, do you spend the same amount of research getting it into a simpler version? Is there a background-

 

Valentin:

Yes. But the new film that I’m doing, and I’m shooting in October, I was really like, “This is what I want to tell. How do I do it the simplest way?” And without forcing poetry or whatever, let’s just try to… Because when I think about films that I love, sometimes they’re so simple, and I really wanted to try to do this, but it’s hard for me, so I’m going to try.

 

Asli:

I think it’s a challenge, but it’s a good exercise to edit before the editing starts…Because of the decisions, you have to need to be more intentional.

 

Valentin:

I agree. I feel more mature in a way to do this. I know more that I can achieve the same amount of emotion sometimes with maybe a bit less, not for all the films, but for the next one, this is what I want to try. And I actually cast this amazing team. I’m very excited to shoot with him. He’s an angel.

 

Perwana:

I remember I told you in our last session that I wanted to ask you for the bibliography of The Blue Star, like what films you would include, art, texts, literature, and music.

 

Valentin:

I’m going to give you a list now, but maybe some of that will come after because I thought of it, but then forgot.

 

Valentin:

But I think it’s better like this that I don’t overthink it. For music, I would definitely think that I was, at that time, I was obsessed with one album from Space Afrika that I used after in my new film, but that the album is called “Somewhere Decent to Live”. I discovered it on YouTube at that time, and I was listening to it nonstop. Of course, also their name, Space Afrika. The fact that there was a place to live as there’s something that I was very inspired by it. I think John Akomfrah, The Last Angel of History, was also definitely an inspiration. I mean, Etel Adnan, definitely. I’m trying to think, do you want things that I was thinking at that time or today because it’s different, maybe?

 

Perwana:

There’s like no parameters. It could even be literal or not, or things you think of now.

 

Valentin:

There is a film; it’s called The White Blue Yonder. Wait. It’s a film where he pretends that he goes on another planet, and he interviews people talking about actually a water crisis on this planet. Through the fake interviews, there’s a whole story of the water crisis in the US at that time. It’s by Herzog.

 

Perwana:

This list is pretty substantial.

 

Valentin:

I mean, Sun Ra was more later, so I don’t know if it really had an influence when I was… I didn’t know about the film before. I discovered it after.

 

Perwana:

The speculative thread is so strong in your bibliography, I mean in the film as well.

Futuristic. I mean, it makes me think about transmission. There’s some sort of intense investment in generational transmission, I believe, literally in your films, right? It’s like, yeah, we, as the audience, are also speaking to your new film that’s coming up, right? You’re saying it’s not a familial transmission, it’s not related. 

 

Valentin:

I mean, even Pacific Club is about transmission. Definitely, Azedine is transmitting something to me. Actually, I wrote the new film thinking of Azedine. Because the thing that shook me, that I was very sad about when I filmed Azedine for Pacific Club is that it was very sad. He always mentioned that it’s the first time that someone asked him questions about my life. It was like, no one knows about this kind of story because no one ask us any questions. Never. And I thought about also my grandmother, who was dying. If no one asks questions to those people, all of these stories will never exist again.

 

Asli:

That’s very melancholic. I always think about it. You live this life and it’s gone.

Who’s going to remember you? And sometimes, I think the reason we’re doing this storytelling is to keep someone, something or ourselves alive. Otherwise, there’s no… We don’t matter. We vanish.

 

Valentin:

I totally agree with you Asli, and I think what you were saying was that at the beginning with this Blue Star, the idea of what’s visible and invisible, what’s positive and negative, I think for me, it was very important. I think it’s something that I will always fight against, and I’m thinking also about AbdouMaliq Simone, that you made me discover Perwana, and the name improvised lives, which I found so beautiful as a title. It’s a book actually that Perwana made me read when I was in LA that it’s minimizing.

 

Perwana:

I’ll send you the book.

 

Asli:

Yes, send me.

 

Valentin:

I think a lot about this book and the name because I think it’s this idea that some lives are improvised, most of the life is improvised actually, and there are improvised lives that never matter, like never enter history. In France, that’s something that I’m very aware of because I live in a country where the idea of unity and the idea of national history, national language, and national everything is very centralized. It’s very fascist also, in a way. There’s one French, one language, one history. This idea of unity is actually a major problem in France.  When I filmed Azedine, I was really thinking of all this improvised life that never entered the one French chapter. And when I wrote the new film Océania, it’s again the story of lives that end and no one asks any questions. This little thing is going to be the one that inherits the story of that old man.

I really wanted to work on non-familial heritage because, with Pacific Club, I felt like Azedine gave me some stuff as if I was part of his family because he has a daughter, and I asked, “Have you ever told your daughter everything you told me?” He said, “No, and I won’t,” Because “I’m too ashamed that it’s too complicated.” I felt it was crazy that he was giving himself so much to me because he really needed to talk, and, for him, it was so important to talk about it. He was obsessed. He insisted, “You film me saying this.” He was literally, I want you to film me saying this, for example, which I found amazing because he was using me. That’s the best thing ever that can happen in a documentary, I think, instead of… Because you use people when you do a documentary, so the way around is so nice.

 

Asli:

It’s so right.

 

Valentin:

I loved it when he told me what to put the film, that’s exactly what I’m for. I want him to tell me. This transmission is also very part of all of my films. The Blue Star, the first one about my grandmother, is also definitely about that but also a missed transmission. Sometimes, it doesn’t work. In my family, for example, it didn’t work. We lost the language. We lost a lot of part of the culture on purpose, actually. So that’s the whole destruction, actually. The destruction is this.

 

Perwana:

I think the transmission of the mistransmissions, equally.

 

Valentin:

Yeah, definitely.

 

Asli:

That’s beautiful.

 

Asli:

Transmission of mistransmissions.

 

Perwana:

I think also what you’re both saying about asking questions, it’s also how you’re asking those questions. In that way where you’re talking about this power dynamic with filmmaker and subject, and I think it’s not even just an idea of asking questions, but how and the sort of environment. what you’re both talking about right now is making me also wonder what your family thought of The Blue Star too. Did they see it?

 

Valentin:

I mean, not my grandmother. My dad, who is usually quite a silent person, was very moved, especially of the re-use of the archives and the narration around him and his dad. 

 

Asli:

What other questions do you have?

 

Perwana:

There are so many. It’s interesting because you’ve already sort of touched upon them. I had questions about death, silence, language. I don’t know. Casting. Let’s see. Maybe because we sort of talked about the speculative thread, I can ask you a bit more about the otherworldly here, right? So I keep referring to the blue star as a site or a site of being. I’m wondering if you could talk about it more in terms of space because it’s both space and non-space. Again, I’m thinking about how the blue star eats itself or contracts. So maybe just a simple question of why does it need to be otherworldly?

 

Valentin:

There is definitely a question of space in the film, and also different materials. There is the question of the sea. There’s the question of the sky. There’s the question of the land because there is also the question of crossing all those pieces of space, going from one land to another, crossing the sea, crossing the sky, going to another star, going back. It’s really like an Odyssey. There’s definitely also this idea of Odyssey. And at the end, the fact that the blue star explodes, or doesn’t exist, or just disappears. Going back to the sea. The end of the film is about the sea.

It’s also kind of an answer to this, that there is, if we want to talk about utopia that was also kind of my answer, that I don’t think utopia exists. I think it’s a very used word now, and I think it’s sometimes a bit like a mirage. You know what I mean? If we have to have utopia, it should be on our land itself, in our lives instead, instead of dreaming of somewhere else. The space at the end of the film is more about inside the character because he yells and shouts. This shout is definitely the space for me. Space, but it creates a wave. This wave, for me, creates the space in the film.

 

Perwana:

That’s actually a really great point because I feel like I’m remembering watching the film and my thoughts as I was sort of jotting them down. And even with this question, it’s like this film’s so much about interiority, and I guess that’s why I was thinking about psychoanalysis. I brought it up earlier, because space here is very much also related to time, right?

 

Perwana:

Interiority and time here with that. And I’m not going to ask you about time and movement, because I feel like my Cinema 2 book is just forever. Asli, last summer when I went to visit Valentin in Marseille, I was carrying [Gilles Deleuze’s]Cinema 2 book for my exams, and I just never… I read like five pages of it there, but I was carrying it around with me everywhere.

 

Valentin:

I have so many pictures of Perwana. I have a lot of pictures of Perwana sleeping with the book on her face.

 

Perwana:

And when you came to LA I was actually reading.

 

Valentin:

Yeah, that’s funny.

 

Perwana:

I was thinking about time and movement here, both in terms of concepts but also in terms of what you’re addressing in the film. But I’m going to leave it at that.

 

Valentin:

No, we can… I mean, as you want.

 

Perwana:

No, I was saying I think we’ve talked about the archive, whether it’s speculative, embodied, at length. But I do want to say that I do think it’s also… And the aspect of transmission. But I’m just thinking about it, there’s a lot of writing about film and photography as embalmed images and sort of immortality. Even [Hervé] Guibert talks a lot about it in his writings on photography. There’s that story about the people on an island, but they’re supposed to be dead, and then you find out that they’re projections or photographs. Have you…

 

Valentin:

No, I don’t remember. Isn’t it in the Ghost Image book?

 

Perwana:

Yes. Well, I love that because you’re confused, and then you find out later that they’re projections. But anyways, I’m just talking about examples of immortalizing and embalming, which I think is part of… as your film is an archive. It’s history. It’s, again, that transmission, which we’ve already talked about. But I think it’s also what we were saying about the transmission of missed transmissions. You’re talking about a death of a specific type of language as in a specific type of communication and transmission. You’re talking about silence. And this is what I meant about it’s not just the question of asking a question. It’s like, how to do that in the midst of silence, whether it’s enforced or a way to live your day-to-day.

I don’t know what my question is here. I guess I’m interested in the silence because I don’t think in this film you’re trying to voice people that are unvoiced or a history that’s unvoiced. Do you know what I mean? It’s a little more complicated than that. You’re almost voicing the silence.

 

Valentin:

Wow. I like that, Perwana. I want you to write about my films more often. I’m going to steal this sentence.

 

Perwana:

I have it written down right here. I guess, maybe if you wanted to speak more about that, or we could leave it at that, but I think you’re doing something really interesting with silence here.

 

Valentin:

I think there was something definitely that I wanted to do because when I wrote The Blue Star, also, it was really a moment in France of total paranoia with the Arabic language in general, and of, people were freaking out when they were seeing a tote bag with Arabic on it. It was literally a paranoia, a national paranoia, which I found so interesting. I don’t know if any language in history had so much hate in France. It’s an alphabet, just an alphabet that is doomed, that people don’t even understand, but they’re just scared by letters. That’s so scary. That’s so crazy that people are scared of letters that they can’t even pronounce, that they can’t even read, but they just see a symbol, and then they freak out. I thought that it was so interesting in a way because it’s also kind of, at the same time, kind of futuristic that a nation is scared of a symbol. It’s weird… You could tell you’re almost in a Blade Runner film, but at the same time, almost like a period film of people discovering alien languages and being like, “Oh my God, we’re going to all die because they’re…” Again, I thought about Arrival by Denis Villeneuve.

 

Perwana:

I haven’t seen it.

 

Valentin:

No? It’s quite an interesting science fiction film, I think. The story is about aliens arriving on Earth at different places. There are maybe six major spaceships. And so I think there’s one in the US, one in Europe, almost one on each continent.

 

Perwana:

The film, Contact?

 

Valentin:

So the alien comes, and they’re octopuses, actually, they kind of look like octopuses, and they just send rounds. That’s the only thing that they send to humans is a round with a different symbol on it. And the whole story is about, at first, they send the Army and everything, and then they start bringing a linguist to try to understand what they’re trying to say. And of course, there’s a whole paranoia about this language that they’re trying to give to the human, and people get freaked out, and of course, there are some countries that tried to kill them. And the linguist, she’s like, “No, they’re trying to say something else.”

I thought about it actually with Arabic because it is literally the same thing. People do not understand a word, but they are just freaking out of seeing it, the symbol. And when I wrote the film which is also very inspired by this. I really wanted to talk about this aspect of a language in a specific continent at a specific moment. But I don’t think I was trying to give voice yet to some people. I was just trying to talk about the silence of a language. That’s more what I was trying to do.

 

Perwana:

Exactly. No, that’s great. I think what you’re talking about, this dystopic fear of a system of signs, is so intense, but it’s reality.

 

Valentin:

You should see the film. It’s actually quite interesting. There are really some bad moments of a really romantic story, but the concept of the film is very interesting how linguists could save us actually more than weapons.

 

Perwana:

I should watch it. I mean, I’ve actually, I’ve been meaning to. I’ve been trying to watch more sci-fi.

 

Valentin:

I love sci-fi, though. 

 

Perwana:

I didn’t know that Hal Hartley made a bunch of sci-fi films, so I’m going to try to watch those too.

 

Asli:

I recently watched Amateur.

 

Perwana:

So Good.

 

Valentin:

What’s Amateur?

 

Perwana:

Hal Hartley. It”s good. You should watch it. I love his films, and I love his music so much. 

 

Asli:

I didn’t know he made music.

 

Perwana:

He does the score for most of his films.

 

Perwana:

It’s pretty good. He’s funny. I found, he has a website. I’ve never been on his website until last week, and bell hooks wrote about his films and Bérénice [Reynaud]. You should check out his website.

 

Asli:

I’m going to check out the writings.

 

Perwana:

I was like, wow, I didn’t know bell hooks had written about his work. She writes about Amateur, actually.

 

Asli:

What happens now?

 

Perwana:

Yeah, no, this is lovely. I don’t know what to do. I feel like every day I’ve been able to be like, oh, I’m really looking forward to talking to you both. The delaying of it was so great for me because I was like, oh, I can still be in anticipation. But now I don’t…

 

Asli:

It’s funny because I never keep a calendar, and this is one thing that’s on my calendar that’s been moving around. Should we do this monthly? Should we start a podcast? No?

 

Valentin:

I’m very excited Asli. When do you want to show the film?

 

Alan Arkin, PEOPLE SOUP

July 13, 2023 - July 21, 2023

... And that was that

Hello Asli; 

I’m touched that you have some affection for PEOPLE SOUP.  I’m happy to give you permission to show the film, but I’m not sure I have the rights to it.  I’m pretty sure I sold it to Columbia Pictures about a century ago.  In any case I cant imagine they would have any objection to your showing it if they even remember that they own it.  But if it’s my permission that you want,  you’ve got it. 

Best

Alan Arkin

Sent from my iPad

PEOPLE SOUP first existed as a story I wrote when I was in a hospital for a few days, and had nothing else to do.  I’d never written anything before, and didnt think I was a writer, particularly, but sent it out anyway, and it was bought by Galaxy Magazine. A friend of mine, who was a producer, read it and said it would make a film.  I’d never directed a film before, but thought if I financed it myself, I could learn something about film directing without costing anyone anything other than myself.  I had written the story with my younger brother and sister in mind, but it easily translated into my sons Adam and Matthew, who happily agreed to do it.  We commandeered a friends house in New Jersey, hired a really good cinematographer and a chicken wrangler, and that was that.  It was bought by Columbia Pictures and shown around the country to go along with a feature, and were lucky enough to get an Oscar nomination for best short.  .. And that was that.  

Sent from my iPad

Jack Wedge, THE STAR TREE OF ARM JOUTH

June 7, 2023 - June 18, 2023

WIP of STAR TREE

Sarah Khan & Nadia Tehran, SIREN SONG

May 4, 2023 - May 11, 2023

ECHOES

Bette Gordon, EMPTY SUITCASES

March 25, 2025 - April 8, 2025

Bette Gordon, EMPTY SUITCASES

March 25, 2025 - April 8, 2025

Bette Gordon described her compact feature Empty Suitcases as "a narrative derived from film's own material and my concern for exploring issues of representation and identification in cinema." One of the most radical and raw films of the 1980s and a key piece of the NoWave Movement, Empty Suitcases presents a stark look at a strong photographer living life on the edge. Set within the milieu of the Downtown art world (with a cameo by Nan Goldin), the artist embraces anarchy and terrorism as ways to address the sexual, economic, social, and professional struggles she faces.

Bette Gordon is a pioneering figure in American independent cinema known for her provocative exploration of desire, identity, and urban life. Emerging from New York's No Wave cinema scene in the 1970s and 80s, she gained recognition with her feature film Variety (1983). Gordon's work often challenges traditional narratives and portrays complex female perspectives, blending experimental techniques with narrative storytelling.

1980, 16mm, color, sound, 48.75 min

Bette Gordon and James Benning, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

March 6, 2025 - March 20, 2025

Bette Gordon and James Benning, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

March 6, 2025 - March 20, 2025

United States of America (1975) follows its directors, Bette Gordon and James Benning, on a drive from New York to Los Angeles. Filmed through the windshield of a car, the short captures the dynamics between the travelers, their vehicle, and the evolving geographic, political, and social landscapes along the way. Though devoid of dialogue, the journey is not silent, as various radio stations alternate between music and news reports. Widely regarded as one of the major works of the structuralist film movement of the 1970s, the film's minimalist approach emphasizes the passage of time and space.

Bette Gordon is a pioneering figure in American independent cinema known for her provocative exploration of desire, identity, and urban life. Emerging from New York's No Wave cinema scene in the 1970s and 80s, she gained recognition with her feature film Variety (1983). Gordon's work often challenges traditional narratives and portrays complex female perspectives, blending experimental techniques with narrative storytelling.

25-minute, 16mm Film

Violet Cheverez , Collages 1-5

January 29, 2025 - February 12, 2025

Violet Cheverez , Collages 1-5

January 29, 2025 - February 12, 2025

Violet Cheverez is a New York-based experimental animator. Collages 1-5 (2022–2024) is a short series of animated videos blending photos, video stills, drawings, and found imagery. Using both analog and digital techniques, Violet creates diaristic, moving collages that merge into fluid animated sequences.

Captured with toy cameras and iPhones, her photos are printed on malfunctioning printers, then layered together with tape, glue, and stitching. Her work explores themes of girlhood, artistic process, and the concept of time.
Violet deconstructs these videos, isolating still images that reflect her hands-on, analog approach—imbued with movement and time. Using collage, drawing, and print, she cleverly transforms three-dimensional life into two-dimensional compositions.

ANIMATIONS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE

COLLAGE 1: HALFLIGHT, 2022
COLLAGE 2: SLOT ANGEL, 2022
COLLAGE 3: TOURIST, 2023
COLLAGE 4: DIARY, 2023
COLLAGE 5: LUCKY27, 2024

Jorge Jácome, FLORES

December 12, 2024 - December 26, 2024

Jorge Jácome, FLORES

December 12, 2024 - December 26, 2024

In a natural crisis scenario, the entire population of Azores is forced to evict due to an uncontrolled plague of hydrangeas, a common flower in these islands. Two young soldiers, bound to the beauty of the landscape, guide us to the stories of sadness of those forced to leave and the inherent desire to resist by inhabiting the islands. The filmic wandering becomes a nostalgic and political reflection on territorial belonging and identity, and the roles we assume in the places we came from.

Jorge Jácome (b. 1988) is a filmmaker, graduated in
ESTC, in Lisbon, and in Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains, in
Tourcoing. In his works he investigates relations between utopias, melancholy,
disappearance and desire. His films have been shown in several festivals
(IndieLisboa, Curtas – Vila do Conde, Premiers Plans d'Angers, Côté Court,
EMAF - Osnabrück, BIEFF, among others) and in exhibition contexts in Palais de
Tokyo and in La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris. In 2017 he won
the "York University Award for Best Student Work on Screen" with "Fiesta
Forever" at Images Festival, Toronto and the "New Talent" award with "Flores"
at IndieLisboa. In 2015 he won the “Studio Collector” prize with "A GUEST + A
HOST = A GHOST”. Parallel to his work as a filmmaker he regularly colaborates
in performing arts projects.

Cast André Andrade, Gabriel Desplanque, Jorge Jácome & Pedro Rosa
Written by David Cabecinha & Jorge Jácome
Produced by João Figueiras
Cinematography Marta Simões
Sound Marco Leão music Terry Riley
Editing Jorge Jácome

2017 / Portugal / 27 min
Thank you to Portugal Film

SALOME OGGENFUSS, ROLE MODELS

November 8, 2024 - November 29, 2024

SALOME OGGENFUSS, ROLE MODELS

November 8, 2024 - November 29, 2024

Fotos, So Delicate!

A feature documentary about everyday photo habitués who traverse the streets of New York and Paris in pursuit of models to snap pictures of outside fashion shows. They are frequenters of an outside, birdwatchers of female beauty, gleaners - picking up images at the margins, at the gates of patronized culture.

Driven by adoration and loneliness, the men in the film aren't in it for the money, but are spurred on by the prospect of capturing transient interactions with the models to collect, in a hunt for images to take back home to their off-season hibernacula. In this image-coded world, they exist in ways that are equally social, para-social, and anti-social.

The film is about Longing in a culture of distantiating transparency and the mediated image, about the desire that got misplaced along the road somewhere. It’s a phenomenology of the outside: about those who don’t get to (and perhaps don’t even want to) exist on the inside—who don’t wear the badge of officialdom or the wristband of admittance.

Operationally, it is a verité documentary that is turning itself upside down; a patchwork of characters; about men who look at women, men looking at women. It would not pass a reverse Bechtel Test. Retired after 30 years, one of the characters assesses his current passion like this: ‘They ask John Dillinger why do you rob banks? And he told them, ‘because that’s where the money is. And why do you photograph female models? Well, that’s where the beauty is.’

Text by Salome Oggenfuss

Salome Oggenfuss, born in Switzerland, is an artist working in filmmaking and performance. Her practice draws on years of experience working as a casting director specializing in discovering first-time performers for film, TV, and the stage. Recent performances include collaborations with the Kitchen, the Dia Foundation and Montez Press Radio, and her documentary film Role Models premiered at SARA’S this year, all in New York. Oggenfuss has a BFA from the Glasgow School of Art, and lives and works in Brooklyn.

2024 I 80m

Pier Paolo Pasolini, COMIZI D’AMORE

October 8, 2024 - November 8, 2024

Pier Paolo Pasolini, COMIZI D’AMORE

October 8, 2024 - November 8, 2024

Pier Paolo Pasolini travels throughout Italy, from the factories to the beaches, and interviews passersby about their attitudes toward sex. He questions them, mic in hand, on a wide range of topics: the importance of sex in everyday life, prostitution, homosexuality, and the legalization of divorce.

Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
With Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Musatti.
Italy, 1964, 35mm, black & white, 92 min.
Italian with English subtitles.

Klein and Taylor Thoroski, SEASON TWO

July 25, 2024 - August 14, 2024

Klein and Taylor Thoroski, SEASON TWO

July 25, 2024 - August 14, 2024

Season two is a Catfish-inspired documentary masked as a music video directed by Klein and Taylor Thoroski.

Pulling from the famous ‘Nella Rose’ style grwm format, they poke fun at conspiracy theories and underlying traditional values whilst utilizing techniques such as remote sensing blended with organized staged performance, poignant iconography and the repurposing of sound to transform this film into a true MTV moment. The video acts as a link to the past and present, highlighting the real dance heroes of Los Angeles and the physical and digital land black folks fight to preserve.

June 2024, Color, 47.04 min, Los Angeles

Klein is an artist and composer living and working in London whose work often blurs the lines between fact and fiction. Her music releases, films, and performances are often informed by urban mapping, surveillance, humor, hip-hop, noise, identity, and beyond.

Her work has been shown and/or performed at Galerie Buchholz, Gladstone Gallery, Kunstverein München, HKW, Barbican, Bourse de Commerce, yards, squats, and pubs, including the infamous The Old Blue Last and the New Cross Inn. In 2011, she was nominated for a digital Emmy for her uncredited contribution as a youth consultant to the Channel 4 TV show Battlefront.

Yet her bank balance is still crickets lol.

Taylor Thoroski is a Paris-based stylist and artist originally from Toronto, Canada. She has collaborated with photographers Lengua, Luca Khouri, Marili Andre, Thue Norgaard and Marc Asehkhame and artists Klein and LA Timpa. Thoroski’s work has been published in Re-Edition Magazine, The Face Magazine, ALL-IN Magazine and Gagosian Quarterly; and she has collaborated with art institutions including The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design Oslo and Grand Theatre Geneva. Her commercial clients include CDLM, ALL-IN, Celine, Mugler and MCM.

Yuri Ancarani, DA VINCI

May 15, 2024 - May 22, 2024

Yuri Ancarani, DA VINCI

May 15, 2024 - May 22, 2024

Department of Robotic Surgery. Using a joystick, a medical surgeon performs an entire operation by controlling the arms of a robot.

"When I entered the operating room, I realized how complex and heavy the role of a surgeon was, then I started filming and that's when I wondered if I should show what I was seeing."

"Da Vinci" is the title of the concluding chapter of the trilogy “The malady of Iron” made by Yuri Ancarani and focused on the theme of work.
Conceived and made as artist's documentaries, the first two chapters, in addition to boasting among other important names, that of Maurizio Cattelan as producer, were presented at the 67th and 68th Venice Film Festivals. The three chapters, finally brought together, will become an episodic feature film that will be presented as a special event special event in 2013.
Da Vinci is a film set entirely inside an operating room, an imaginative journey within of a microcosm in which the hope and expectation perceived from the outside mingle with the lucid and rational lucidity and rationality of the machine and the surgeons operating there.
An unintentional theatricality is triggered by the work process with the timing punctuated by anticipation, moments of pathos, and a familiarity that leads us viewers to be captivated by such serenity and professionalism of the operating room staff.
Ancarani researched and grasped the innovation of the Da Vinci system, which consists of this: the patient's body will never be touched directly by the doctor's hands, but only by the arms of the robot, the Da Vinci precisely. During the course of the entire surgery, it will be the extraordinary images captured by the robot that will guide, in addition to our own, the expert eyes of the surgeon.
The film was presented as a World Premiere on November 15, 2012 at the Rome Film Festival, in the new section titled "21st Century Cinema," in collaboration with MAXXI, National Museum of 21st Century Arts.

Italy, 25 min colors
No dialogues

Tegen Williams, A HUNDRED CAMELS IN THE COURTYARD

April 24, 2024 - May 13, 2024

Tegen Williams, A HUNDRED CAMELS IN THE COURTYARD

April 24, 2024 - May 13, 2024

Following the original map hand drawn by composer and writer Paul Bowles in the 1950s, a group returns to sites in Morocco where the first audio recordings of Berber music were made.

This film is told through the intercutting of collage, stills, and video captured on the journey - as well as archival footage.

It is a meditation on documentary as a form and the power and fragility of cultural knowledge passed down through generations

"...one belongs to the whole world and not just one part of it" quote by Paul Bowles.

Director Tegen Williams
Director of Photography Raf Fellner
Producer Andrew S. Karsch
Co Producer Karim Debbagh, Mustafa Istaite, Ayad Fadel & Ben Irving
Additional Photography Hoagy Pollen & Jack Irving
Executive Producer Richard Horowitz
Musical Score by Jamie Travis
Many Thanks to Centre Cinematographique Marocain

Duration: 50 min

Hal Ashby, SOLO TRANS

April 9, 2024 - April 16, 2024

Hal Ashby, SOLO TRANS

April 9, 2024 - April 16, 2024

Hal Ashby’s 1984 concert film Solo Trans, which spans some of Young’s earliest recorded music (“Ohio,” “Helpless”) to then-new masterpiece Trans.

An edition to the on going series NO CONTACT.

Pelin Esmer , THE PLAY

March 6, 2024 - April 3, 2024

Pelin Esmer , THE PLAY

March 6, 2024 - April 3, 2024

Ummuye, Behiye, Ummu, Fatma K., Cennet, Saniye, Fatma F., Zeynep and Nesime are nine peasant women living in Arslankoy, a mountain village in southern Turkey. They spend their days working hard in the fields, on the construction site and at home. To lighten the burden of life, these women come together for a wholly different reason. They intend to write and perform a play based on their own life stories.
They gather at the local high school, which they were shy of even stepping into until that day and they work with the principal, Mr. Huseyin. They reveal their life stories that they were even afraid to tell themselves and confront. For days on end, under the curious gazes of the village men, they work tirelessly, discuss and create with much fun a play,

“The Outcry of Women!”

This documentary is about the development process of this play and the change the women went through during this period.

"This theatre never ends. We have suffered it. This will not happen to our children," is the positive statement by nine Turkish countrywomen at the end of the play "The Outcry of Woman". The performance is the result of intensive preparations, transforming their personal tragic stories into a play under the local schoolmaster's supervision. This is the first time they share these stories. One of the women tells how she was taken out of school and given away to make amends for her brother's eloping with a 13-year-old. In , director Pelin Esmer shows with contagious joy how the women find support in each other thanks to the play, overcome their fears and develop confidence. The rehearsals alternate with scenes from everyday life, in which drama and humour fight for priority. And there is a lot of chatting and bickering. On the eve of the performance, for example, a quarrel about who will give the opening speech and who can claim direction credit threatens to throw a wrench in the works after all.

Pelin Esmer, writer & director of both fiction and documentary films, studied sociology in Istanbul, afterwards moved on to cinema. She established her film company Sinefilm and since 2001 she has made her independent films The Collector, The Play, 10 to 11, Watchtower, Something Useful and Queen Lear.

A feature documentary, The Play made its international premiere in San Sebastian Film Festival. It has been screened over 50 festivals around the world and received many awards including “The Best New Documentary Filmmaker Award” in Tribeca Film Festival. Her first fiction 10 to 11 was one of the six projects chosen by Cinéfondation- Résidence du Festival de Cannes in Paris where she worked on the script.

An official selection of San Sebastian Film Festival, her first fiction 10 to 11 received many awards in various festivals around the world and was released in cinemas in Turkey, France and Germany, afterwards broadcasted on TV Arte France. Her second fiction Watchtower which premiered in Toronto and Rotterdam Film Festival has been screened in many countries and five different states of USA as part of the Caravanserai Program.

Something Useful received the best screenplay award in Tallinn International Film Festival, FIPRESCI awards in Istanbul Film Festival followed by the best director, best screenplay and best actress awards in Turkey. After the festival tour, the film was released in Turkey and Netherlands.

In 2018, Esmer was invited to Berlin by DAAD Artists-in-Residence Program where she developed her lastdocumentary film Queen Lear, a follow-up to her film “The Play” which was broadcasted on TV in Netherlands.Having premiered in Sarajevo Film Festival, Queen Lear received Yılmaz Güney Jury Award and SİYAD Cüneyt Cebenoyan Critics Award at Adana Golden Boll Film Festival in Turkey. The film also returned with grand prizes from many festivals such as CMCA PriMed Mediterranean Documentary Film Festival and Tetouan International Film Festival. The film continues its festival journey.

In 2020 MUBI Turkey and MUBI International presented all of Esmer’s films in Turkey and abroad with the retrospective titled “Journey to the Heart with Pelin Esmer”. At the same year, Istanbul Modern Museum Cinema launched a retrospective of Esmer’s films as the part of their “Meeting with the Directors” series.

Esmer was invited by the Camargo Foundation to the artist’s residence in Cassis-France, in the fall of 2019, where she started to write the script for her new fiction film. Recently, she continues working on the development of the project.

https://pelinesmer.com/

original title: oyun
english title: the play
production company: sinefilm
year: 2005
country: turkey
color: color
running time: 70′
original film language: turkish
subtitles: english, french, spanish
shooting format: dv
projecting format: digibeta, 35 mm, dvd, DCP
sound: stereo

Kima Hibbert, AFRICANS WITH MAINFRAMES

February 1, 2024 - February 15, 2024

Kima Hibbert, AFRICANS WITH MAINFRAMES

February 1, 2024 - February 15, 2024

LaJoye Watkins, a reclusive black woman living in Brooklyn, is determined to tell a secret she has harbored all her life: electronic music was actually started by black southerners in the 1920s.

Kima Hibbert is a 24 year old filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. Originally from London, raised by Jamaican parents, she moved to South Carolina when she was 9 and to NYC when she was 18. She used to be a classical flutist, then an aspiring architect, and now a film editor. She is interested in all forms of communication—musically, spatially, and cinematically. She likes to play tricks on people and make people cry (in a good way).

USA / 2023 / 15mins / English

Sedat Pakay, JAMES BALDWIN: FROM ANOTHER PLACE

January 18, 2024 - January 29, 2024

Sedat Pakay, JAMES BALDWIN: FROM ANOTHER PLACE

January 18, 2024 - January 29, 2024

Between 1961 and 1971, James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. Shot in Istanbul, Turkey, this portrait of the writer and thinker finds him discussing his work, sexuality, and complex feelings about the United States.

“Pakay’s little-known cinematic gem records the writer’s movements through the city of Istanbul over a three-day period in May 1970 and frames Baldwin’s assertion with seductive photography of private interiors, city streets, and a boat ride on the Bosporus. Like no other existing documentary, the black-and-white film captures the profound paradox of Baldwin’s transatlantic vantage point by showing how he both belongs and remains an outsider in the teeming half-European, half-Asian Turkish metropolis,” wrote film scholar Magdalena Zaborowska in her 2009 book, James Baldwin′s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile.

Pakay, a photographer and filmmaker, was born in Istanbul in 1945. In 1967, he began shooting portraits of well-known artists in a project that would eventually include such subjects as Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, Gordon Parks, and Josef Albers. James Baldwin: From Another Place was his second film, following one made earlier that year about his Yale School of Art and Architecture instructor entitled Walker Evans: His Time - His Presence - His Silence.

Produced and directed by Sedat Pakay
Camera work by Cengiz Tacer
Filmed in Istanbul, Turkey during May 1970
Music composed and performed by Linda and Sonny Sharrock
1973 | Black & White | 11 min, 30 sec
© Hudson Film Works II
Distributed by Cinema Conservancy

Andy Amenechi, SYMPATHY

January 2, 2024 - January 15, 2024

Andy Amenechi, SYMPATHY

January 2, 2024 - January 15, 2024

They came to the world for a purpose. To injure & destroy...

The ‘OGBANJE’ is a well-known phenomenon in some African societies, a situation where evil spirits plague families with children that would come, stay a short while and then die. It brings pain and anguish to families. This is the situation David household finds itself, until the latest child came. His wife so determined to keep the child, will do whatever it takes to placate the child and make her stay.

Starring: Liz Benson, Shola Fashodu, Genevieve Nnaji, Nkiru Sylvanus

"Sympathy" is a selection from Nolly Babes, founded by Tochi and Ebele Anueyiagu, which is an encyclopedic ode to Nollywood’s biggest female stars. “Their Instagram account began highlighting wayward women in Nigerian films in 2017, creating an archive that expressed the fire inside of Nigerian women in cinema and asserting these women’s agency. With a vocal following, Nolly Babes celebrates its subjects with striking screen grabs, paired with transcriptions of excerpted dialogue, to evoke the dark feminine in all of us.”
-Alfreda Cinema

@nolly.babes

VHS Transfer
Sympathy released Date: 12/31/2003

Barbier, Causse & L'helgoualc'h, MARLOWE DRIVE

December 1, 2023 - December 11, 2023

Barbier, Causse & L'helgoualc'h, MARLOWE DRIVE

December 1, 2023 - December 11, 2023

Marlowe Drive is an experimental film that explores the terrain of video games as a context for documentary filmmaking. A director, Adam Kesher, fresh from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, lands in another fictional Los Angeles. It's in this Hollywood movie landscape recreated by Rockstar Games that this director sets out to find someone to talk to. He's looking for a bridge between the real and imaginary worlds. The film takes place on the game's multiplayer platform to meet "real" characters. It gathers information on the individuals who inhabit this space and reinserts the process of documentary filming into a virtual world. Moving back and forth between staging and raw footage, the protagonist allows himself to be swept along by the current of a chaotic world that fascinates him but gradually overtakes him. Through his character and his encounters, we ourselves discover a virtual world. An autonomous world is strangely close to a form of reality.

Ekiem Barbier :

Born in Toulouse in 1993, Ekiem Barbier is an author, video artist and musician. In
2012 he directed several short films, fiction and animation, for which
for which he composed the music. He then entered the fine arts school in Montpellier, where he
joined the Collectif In Extremis in 2015, with whom he participated in several
exhibitions. Ekiem obtained his DNSEP in 2017, the year in which he became
interested in documentaries, where he directed Anent (doc 42min, shot in the
in the high Amazon of Ecuador), and Marlowe Drive (34 min) with two
co-writers Quentin and Guilhem. He continues his video research with a
a particular interest in the sensitive dimension of anthropology and experimentation
experimentation through a poetic and digital prism. Ekiem lives and
works in Marseille.

Guilhem Causse :
Born in 1993 in Narbonne, Guilhem Causse entered the Beaux-Arts de
Montpellier in 2012. There, he developed a body of work centered on the
between image and sound, in the form of installations and video
and video projections, halfway between cinema, performance and
art. Fascinated by collapsology, he is interested in capturing
natural and meteorological phenomena, which he then mixes
virtual images in timeless spaces where the viewer is invited
viewer is invited to settle in. After obtaining his DNSEP in 2017, he is
developed a research project around the work Solaris, which he turned into
a series of video and sound works, in the form of hypnotic and immersive
immersive installations.

Quentin L'helgoualc'h :
Born in Lyon in 1992, Quentin L'helgoualc'h obtained the diplôme national
d'expression plastique at the Beaux-Arts de Montpellier in 2017,
then joined the post-graduate program in 2018. He is developing a body of work
mixing several media, such as sculpture, video and drawing. In
2017, he directed Marlowe Drive, a documentary immersed in the virtual
virtual world, in collaboration with Ekiem Barbier and Guilhem Causse. In 2019 and
and 2020, he will produce two video works: Between Empty Things and
Cristaux Liquides (Liquid Crystals), which combine live action and 3D animation
sensitive relationship with digital spaces. In 2021, he joins
Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains, where he directed the film
fiction film Les Neiges électriques.

Diane Goodrich, NEW FRIENDS

November 22, 2023 - November 30, 2023

Diane Goodrich, NEW FRIENDS

November 22, 2023 - November 30, 2023

A 1981 animated film about Howard, a mallard duck, who finds that he must depend on an unlikely coalition of animals when he misses his southbound flock and is forced to winter in New York City.

Based on the book Howard by James Stevenson

Animation designed and directed by Diane Goodrich
produced by Dirk Wales
music by Bobby Christian

Tewfik Saleh, THE DUPES

November 2, 2023 - November 19, 2023

Tewfik Saleh, THE DUPES

November 2, 2023 - November 19, 2023

The Dupes by Tewfik Saleh tells the story of three Palestinian men of different generations who attempt to cross illegally from Iraq into Kuwait in a desperate search for employment. Adapted from the novella “Men in the Sun” by Palestinian writer and PFLP spokesperson Ghassan Kanafani, the film was released in 1972, the same year Kanafani was murdered by Israeli Mossad in a car bombing alongside his niece. Banned for decades due to its uncompromising portrayal of the treatment of Palestinian refugees in neighboring Arab countries, and newly restored, it is a staggering and unfortunately enduring adaptation of a timeless text - encapsulating the dangers of political inertia and suspension of time against an urgent struggle… and the trial by fire of migration in exile.

It tells the excruciating story of three Palestinian refugees from different generations who attempt to cross into Kuwait in a water tank in search of employment to alleviate the conditions of their lives and support their families. Saleh’s portrayal of the Palestinians’ harrowing journey illuminates the myriad effects of the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 on the livelihoods of Palestinians and its obstructions of their fundamental human rights and desires. The film was released in 1972; that same year, Kanafani was murdered with his niece by Mossad in a car bombing in Lebanon. The film itself was banned in Syria due to its criticism of various Arab regimes, which spelled the fate of the three characters as many Palestinians after them.

Today, the carousel of history remains in motion- aside from the blatant brutality by Israel, sanctioned by the US and other countries in the West, we are witnessing a similar inertia on behalf of Arab states. Protestors head to the Egyptian consulate to demand Egypt open the Rafah border and allow aid into Gaza amid fears of yet another mass displacement into Egypt.

Saleh’s The Dupes hardly deviates from Kanafani’s text, except for one crucial distinction at the end. In the novel, the final lines consist of the lorry driver shouting into the desert: why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? only to be answered by his own echo in the silence of the desert. Whether or not the refugees attempted to make a sound to alert the lorry driver is implicit. Saleh instead chose to show the three men banging on the door, their sounds drowned out by the drone of the AC. Saleh has said that he changed the ending as he wanted to depict the refugees resisting, counter to what he deemed Kanafani’s fatalism, or perhaps to remain more in line with the resistance movements of the 70’s..

On October 27, Israel cut off Internet and telecommunications in Gaza; videos and voice notes came out from people in Gaza asking - can they hear us? Does anyone see us? Despite feelings of helplessness, the most important thing to do is to listen and stay attuned to what is happening as Palestinians continue to resist despite the seemingly impassive silence of the desert around. The film negates the echo of the desert, imploring us to use our voices to respond and continue telling this story.

Text by Laila Qaddumi

Egyptian Saleh’s film was funded by Syria’s National Film Organization, shot in both Syria and Iraq. Saleh updated Kanafani’s story to reflect an increasingly politically vocal Palestinian leadership. In Arabic, with English subtitles. 35mm. Approx. 107 min.

In Arabic, with English subtitles. 35mm. Approx. 107 min.

Andrew Norman Wilson, IN THE AIR TONIGHT

September 28, 2023 - October 18, 2023

Andrew Norman Wilson, IN THE AIR TONIGHT

September 28, 2023 - October 18, 2023

Airtime is pleased to bring you IN THE AIR TONIGHT in partnership with LE CINÉMA CLUB as an encore to our screening event which took place September 20th, 2023.

Not the legendary fax story about Phil Collins, but another one. This urban legend teleports us to a night in '80s LA.

“An atmospheric standout of the Sundance and the New York Film Festival shorts programs, Andrew Norman Wilson’s IN THE AIR TONIGHT unfurls a ghost story beneath the night skies of Michael Mann’s Los Angeles. The film recounts the apocryphal tale behind Phil Collins’ 1980 superhit “In the Air Tonight,” which, legend has it, should be told aloud as the song builds to its climactic drum break.

Wry narrator Slipperman (voice actor David George) sets the scene: he’s accompanied Collins to Los Angeles for a jaunt through its cocaine-fueled nightlife. Slipperman’s hypnotic British baritone—which he admits is prone to mythmaking—gives a second life to Wilson’s assemblage of transitional shots from ’80s movies, including American Gigolo, 8 Million Ways to Die, and One from the Heart. A full moon rising, a fax machine, a notebook with “Not Hallucinating” scrawled in pen: all of these images lead Slipperman, and Collins, to a fateful swim in Malibu.”

-Excerpt text from Le Cinéma Club written by Chloe Lizotte

Andrew Norman WILSON (1983, USA) is a visual artist, filmmaker, curator and lecturer who works in video, sculpture, photography and performance. The aesthetics of corporate America, the economics of production and the mysteries of technology are recurring themes in his work, which engages the audience at a pre-cognitive level. Wilson obtained an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011, following his dismissal as a videographer by a Google subcontractor because he filmed employees working on the Google Books archive. The footage became Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011) and went viral. His work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Fluxia, the New York Film Festival, the San Francisco IFF and the Images Festival.

Here is the CV: http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/CV.html

11m ● HD Video ● Colour ● Sound ● 2020

Mohammed Shebl, ANYAB

September 8, 2023 - September 25, 2023

Mohammed Shebl, ANYAB

September 8, 2023 - September 25, 2023

Anyab (Fangs) is Mohammed Shebl’s 1981 adaptation of Rocky Horror Picture Show.

A girl and her fiancé are on their way to a party on New Year’s Eve, but they get into an accident. Looking for help, they find nowhere to go except a strange castle. Their host for the evening is count Dracula, who instantly falls in love with the girl, wanting her for himself. The two lovers discover that Dracula is in Egypt in many forms. Anyab was the passion project of director Mohammed Shebl, and also a socio-economic commentary of the times in his country.

1981 / Arabic with English Subtitles

Cinematography: Mohsen Nasr
Screenplay: Mohammed Shebl, Tarek Sharara, Hassn Abd Raboo
Music composed by: Hussein al-Imam, Moody El Imam

Agustina Comedi, SILENCE IS A FALLING BODY

August 18, 2023 - August 28, 2023

Agustina Comedi, SILENCE IS A FALLING BODY

August 18, 2023 - August 28, 2023

After my father died, the details of his life get lost in silence. My need to get to know him, uncovers a story marked by sexuality and political activism.

Jaime recorded everything, even his own death. From him, her daughter received more than one hundred hours of home videos and many uncertainties. Because as many people of his generation, Jaime was a clandestine person. But in his case, probably two times clandestine. The images recorded by Jaime, resignify to give place to questions around desire, sexuality, family and freedom. "Silence is a Falling Body" is the trip to a intimate and filial past, but also to a political one.

"For many years making this movie was for me a dilemma. How to tell your own story when it ́s also the story of others? Why to tell secrets,when for a long time there was so much effort in keeping them as they were and not precisely with guilt or pity? Why try to make others tell that that makes them so uncomfortable?
A few years ago when Argentina sanctioned a law allowing gay marriage, an activist said that that triumph was not only ours, because we walked over footsteps. Everyone in my movie, in my story, left a print . Together we built an net of affection and activism that i hope after watching "Silence is a Falling Body" keep printing out more footsteps to keep walking over." Agustina Comedi

"I was one of the lucky ones, I spent lockdown watching a film a day. I also started writing to my first penpal, Cecilia Estalles, a young queer woman in Buenos Aires who works for the Archivo de la Memoria Trans, an amazing archive of decades of photos of and by trans women in Argentina. Cecilia introduced me to the films of Agustina Comedi. Silence is a Falling Body is a tender, vulnerable homage of a film. Deceptively simple in form, it is first of all a home movie, but it transcends the normal description. It explores the notions of family, of love, of desire, and of activism. When her father died, suddenly Agustina discovered that he’d had an entire other life, that of a gay man. With Silence, she pays tribute to her beloved father and to his capacity to live out his range of desires. But it’s also a film about repression, about the persecution of the queer community in Argentina by the government and by the political leftist parties, who operated with their own form of homophobia. This film is a jewel in the canon of queer cinema."

-Nan Goldin

Agustina Comedi, (Córdoba, Argentina), 1986. Screenwriter and director. She has a degree in Modern Literature and then studied dramaturgy with Maruicio Kartun, and screenwriting with Pablo Solarz. In 2017, she premiered her first documentary feature "Silence is a Falling Body" at IDFA (Netherlands). Nowadays, she works as a teacher of the Audiovisual Workshop at the Popular Bachelor Raymundo Gleyzer, consulting audiovisual projects and she is writing her next film.

Guion y Dirección/ Script and Direction
AGUSTINA COMEDI
FICHA TÉCNICA
TECHNICAL SHEET

Duración/ Lenght
75 min.

Casa productora/ Producer Company
EL CALEFÓN

Productor ejecutivo/ Executive producer
JUAN C. MARISTANY

Valentin Noujaïm, THE BLUE STAR / النجم الأزرق

July 27, 2023 - August 7, 2023

Valentin Noujaïm, THE BLUE STAR / النجم الأزرق

July 27, 2023 - August 7, 2023

It all happened on a dark night. The Man was too tired to be a stranger, too tired to be insulted by others simply because he spoke Arabic with a wife who spoke French with their beloved mixed race son.
He looked at the sky and shouted. But that night, far in the cosmos, a voice answered. The Blue Star promised them a new world; safe and without fear. He starts to dream about escaping forever there...

«A night like this one, a man screamed, the man couldn’t stand being different, being the outsider. Far out in the universe, someone heard his call.» The film opens with the story of this desperate cry, as are, perhaps, all the cries of exile. The story of a «brown man» who dared to love a white woman. He speaks Arabic, his wife French, their distant voices intermingle, like a whisper, to tell us about their banished love. Valentin Noujaïm dives into his family’s archives to question the history of immigration in France, a country where his family has never been able to truly find its place. The film begins with images of a seemingly happy past - the birth of a forbidden love, a vacation by the sea... - but this happiness will soon turn to despair. The Lebanese man, exhausted by the rejection of his new country, implores the sky to show him a parallel universe. A promised land for those who do not find their place on earth. The family film thus becomes a fantastic story and a political tale of an unexpected color. A blue star.
Elena López Riera - Visions du Réel

17minutes
Experimental documentary - 8mm, DV, 3D
Recipient of a grant from the Doha Film Institute
Recipient of a production grant - Arab Fund for Arts & Culture Lebanon, Qatar, France
With
Denis Lavant,
Ali Cherri,
Annie Melza Tiburce

Born in France in 1991 to Lebanese and Egyptian parents, Valentin Noujaïm studied political science at the IEP in Lille. During his studies, he completed a year-long internship in an art house cinema in Los Angeles and wrote a research paper on the representation of women in Italian cinema from 1944 to 1960.
After graduating in 2015, he moved to Berlin, where he worked alongside director Karim Aïnouz; most notably, he was co-author and assistant on the documentary THF Central Airport (Berlinale Panorama 2018) and the film Mariner of the mountains (Cannes, official selection, 2021). In 2016, he joined la Fémis (Paris film school), in the screenwriting department, from which he graduated in July 2020. Between 2018 and 2019, Valentin directed two self-produced films. Before she forgets Heliopolis, a documentary, premiered at Punto de Vista festival (Spain, 2020). The second film, The Blue Star, is an experimental sci-fi film, supported by the Doha Film Institute and AFAC. It was presented at the Visions du Réel International Festival in Nyon (2020) in international competition, as well as at the Saatchi Gallery in London and at DocLisboa.
His first short fiction film, Daughters of destiny (produced by Kometa Films and Iliade et Films) is in distribution. The film has received the support of the CNC and the Normandy region. Valentin is also writing his first feature film The night of queens, a French-Italian co-production. He is currently in residency at Artagon in Marseille, developing a couple of videos projects and an installation.
In 2022 he is part of the Montrouge Salon. In 2022/23 he will be in residency at Ateliers Medicis in Clichy-Sous-Bois to develop a dystopian Tv show around the revolt of french suburbs in 2005. He will also be attending Städelschule for three semesters, following the class of Gerard Byrne. In June 2023 in will be at Villa Medicis in Rome for a month residency. Valentin Noujaïm’s work focuses on three axes: anti-racist movements, spatial utopia and the disappearance of social group or individuals.
In all of his work, whether through his films or his video projects, the artist brings to life marginal and strange characters, in fantasized universes that are close to the tale, while relying on a research of format by mixing DV, 8mm, digital and special effects. His work is marked by social and post-colonial issues, questioning the relationships of power and domination that function in French society, through the prism of a strong ideal: revolutionary love or the love of revolution.

Alan Arkin, PEOPLE SOUP

July 13, 2023 - July 21, 2023

Alan Arkin, PEOPLE SOUP

July 13, 2023 - July 21, 2023

It is an adaptation of Arkin's own short story, and stars his sons, Adam and Matthew. Matthew comes into the kitchen one afternoon and finds Adam hard at work creating some sort of frightening concoction. After waiting ten minutes for the potion to sit, Adam gets Matthew to be his test subject, and gets a surprising result.

People Soup (1969) was nominated for an Academy Award for live action short film in 1970.

The late Alan Arkin, a legendary actor who passed away in June at the age of 88, excelled in various fields such as acting, directing, writing, and improvisation. He was recognized with numerous accolades for his acting craft, including an Academy Award and multiple Tony awards. His notable directorial work in the 70s, particularly the film Little Murders, explores the absurdity of reality and is unmatched in its satirical brilliance.

Hello Asli; 

I’m touched that you have some affection for PEOPLE SOUP.  I’m happy to give you permission to show the film, but I’m not sure I have the rights to it.  I’m pretty sure I sold it to Columbia Pictures about a century ago.  In any case I cant imagine they would have any objection to your showing it if they even remember that they own it.  But if it’s my permission that you want,  you’ve got it. 

Best

Alan Arkin

Sent from my iPad

PEOPLE SOUP first existed as a story I wrote when I was in a hospital for a few days, and had nothing else to do.  I’d never written anything before, and didnt think I was a writer, particularly, but sent it out anyway, and it was bought by Galaxy Magazine. A friend of mine, who was a producer, read it and said it would make a film.  I’d never directed a film before, but thought if I financed it myself, I could learn something about film directing without costing anyone anything other than myself.  I had written the story with my younger brother and sister in mind, but it easily translated into my sons Adam and Matthew, who happily agreed to do it.  We commandeered a friends house in New Jersey, hired a really good cinematographer and a chicken wrangler, and that was that.  It was bought by Columbia Pictures and shown around the country to go along with a feature, and were lucky enough to get an Oscar nomination for best short.  .. And that was that.  

Sent from my iPad

Director & Writer Alan Arkin
Cast Matthew Arkin, Adam Arkin

Jack Wedge, THE STAR TREE OF ARM JOUTH

June 7, 2023 - June 18, 2023

Jack Wedge, THE STAR TREE OF ARM JOUTH

June 7, 2023 - June 18, 2023

Rough day for Beads Kew

Jack Wedge is a filmmaker and animator from NY. Jack's work focuses on storytelling and world building. He has been making movies since a young age. Recently he has created films, music videos, commercial videos, butterfly faces, characters. He seeks to portray environments as not just a setting, but a living character. Jack is currently working as a director and animator at laserdays.studio.

Starring
Emily Grant
Damon Zucconi
Jeanne Markel
Sam Fishman
Chris Wedge
Will Freudenheim
Carol Markel
Ben Shirken
Gwen Freudenheim
Tere Gross
Maya Charles

Stretching Star Special Effects Animation by Alex Futtersak

Music & Sound by Dasychira, Ben Shirken, Pudding Club, Christina Vantzou

Neïl Beloufa, UNTITLED

May 24, 2023 - May 31, 2023

Neïl Beloufa, UNTITLED

May 24, 2023 - May 31, 2023

Untitled is an investigation into an anecdote the artist heard about a house near Algiers: that it was abandoned by its wealthy owners during the political unrest in the 1990s and occupied by a terrorist group. The idyllic landscape we are shown is in fact a series of full-scale inkjet prints, which the artist photographed and used to wallpaper a life-size model of the house for his film set. Actors playing the landlord of the house, the gardener and the neighbors give conflicting accounts of what the terrorists had done there, how they lived, how they ate. More importantly, they question why the group chose to live in a house with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on all sides. This re-imagined scene is typical of Beloufa’s exploration of the hazy shades of narrative, make-believe and truth that underpin the representations of real-world events.

Neïl Beloufa (born in 1985 in Paris, France) is a Franco-Algerian artist who lives and works in Paris. The French-Algerian artist has spent the better part of the last decade thinking about what is at stake when one apprehends reality and its representation. His practice spans film, sculpture, and installation, and draws on his interest in what actually exists and how it is interpreted, a subject he explores without moral judgment, cultural cynicism or any kind of irony - though sometimes with humour.
Nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2015, the Artes Mundi (Cardiff, United Kingdom) and Nam June Paik (Essen, Germany) prizes in 2016. He was awarded the Meurice Prize for Contemporary Art 2013, Audi Talent Awards 2011 and the Agnès B. Studio Collector Award 2010.
His work is present in numerous prestigious collections, including the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Collection Museum of Modern Art, MoMA New York, Sammlung Goetz collection and Julia Stoschek.

Director: Neil Beloufa
Cast: Alex Pelle, Maurice Berland, François Bouzigues, Coralie Lequain, Michel Baudemont
Screenplay: Neil Beloufa
Producer: Natalia Trebik
Cinematography: Guillaume Legrontec
Editors: Neil Beloufa, Ermano Corrado

Video, 15’, HDCAM, 2010

Sarah Khan & Nadia Tehran, SIREN SONG

May 4, 2023 - May 11, 2023

Sarah Khan & Nadia Tehran, SIREN SONG

May 4, 2023 - May 11, 2023

Inspired by the Ancient Greek mythical, half-bird, half-woman creatures who were depicted as luring sailors to their demise with the sound of their music, Siren Song (2021) by artists Sarah Khan and Nadia Tehran is an audio-visual narrative that explores lineage, cultural assimilation, and embodied forms of resistance. Drawing on their family histories of displacement, including through the Islamic Revolution and the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, Siren Song critiques the echoes of colonial legacies, refusing the call of the siren to embrace dominant cultural forms by reclaiming selfhood, agency, and spatial expansiveness. The video combines a text monologue, trancelike wedding footage, and an atmospheric sound piece which features a recording of Nadia’s parents watching and reacting to their own wedding film. Together, these elements signify the to-and-fro between distraction and commitment, revisiting and unlearning, destruction and rebuilding.

Sarah Khan is an artist-filmmaker and writer. Drawing on her lived experience and collective memory, she explores themes of cross-cultural identity, embodied resistance, and the boundless potential of worldmaking when exclusion is confronted by the ‘othered’. In both her daily life and practice, she is committed to undoing Western constructs of binary logic and relearning through a decolonial praxis. Sarah is a co-founder of the London-based collective Baesianz which centres artists of Asian heritage.

Nadia Kardar Tehran was born in Jönköping, Sweden and is currently based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Nadia is a performance artist, using music, text, sculpture, video and photography to explore themes of identity and migration in relation to her own personal history. Notions of separation, longing, rage and escape are recurring themes in her oeuvre. In 2019, she released her debut album Dozakh: All Lovers Hell which was nominated for album of the year at the Nordic Music Prize.

Dir. Sarah Khan & Nadia Tehran, 12:12 min., 2021

Photography courtesy the artists, personal archival images, 2021.

Gordon Matta-Clark, FOOD

April 12, 2023 - April 19, 2023

Gordon Matta-Clark, FOOD

April 12, 2023 - April 19, 2023

This film documents the legendary SoHo restaurant and artists' cooperative Food, which opened in 1971. Owned and operated by Caroline Goodden, Food was designed and built largely by Matta-Clark, who also organized art events and performances there. As a social space, meeting ground and ongoing art project for the emergent downtown artists' community, Food was a landmark that still resonates in the history and mythology of SoHo in the 1970s.

1972, 43 min, B&W, Sound, 16 mm Film on HD Video

Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Camera and Sound: Robert Frank, Suzanne Harris, Gordon Matta-Clark, Danny Seymour
Editing: Roger Welch

Anaïs-Tohé Commaret, Eso que nos lleva

March 15, 2023 - March 23, 2023

Anaïs-Tohé Commaret, Eso que nos lleva

March 15, 2023 - March 23, 2023

Branco lives on a high, windy hill in Valparaíso. It links his childhood to the adult world into which he’s thrown despite himself, as well as the dreams and nightmares of the Chilean people’s painful past. The fog, haunted by the memory of Pinochet’s dictatorship, blends these worlds into a poem where the changing winds blow, at times fanning the flames of the youth’s revolutionary hopes and at others preventing them from escaping traced out destinies.

23min/2022/Produced by Le Fresnoy

"I was born in Vitry in July 1992. I am of French and Chilean origin.
Born into a family of political exiles, I film those who live between multiple temporalities and multiple peripheral spaces in works that borrow the codes of both documentary and experimental cinema. For me, it is about the necessity to make visible those who have disappeared from our age. As ghosts, they resist and disguise reality to seek refuge in ambiguous palaces, hybrid products of their imagination and restraining fictions that society imposes upon them. Thus, for them (who actively participate in the creative process), these stories are a means to draw from their dreams and give them a shape. They take hold of the space of the film to reveal the per- manent battle between chosen and suffered representation, between their desires and their everyday life. Subjectivities, mine and that of the people I film, interlace. A large part of the fiction is written alongside the protagonists.
Raised on South American tales where the ogre’s name is Pinochet, I am interested in the way imagination gives meaning to an often violently absurd or tragic reality. These questions, this to-and-fro between documentary and fiction, implies certain forms and pro- cesses. The switch between film and cellphone footage, between natural backdrops and conspicuously artificial set designs, as well as the use of costumes, all work to create a mosaic of vibrant images where the familiar and shapeless, the usual and the hallucinato- ry, blur together. I attempt to bring about increasingly immersive experiences that, like in a dream, brings the viewer a sense of mea- ning that is their very own."
-Anaïs-Tohé Commaret

Director: Anaïs-Tohé Commaret
Starring: Branco Còrdoba, Yessica Còrdoba, Milena Còrdoba, Nawel Mondaca Mardones, Antilef Quiroz, Elza Godoy, Hilda Zaldivar, Elba Mondaca Cabeza, Jacquelines Pena Caro, Sandra Salinas Fabres
Director of photography: Nicolas Jardin and Branco Còrdoba
Sound-engineer: Léon Favier
Picture editing: Anaïs-Tohé Commaret
Calibration: Nicolas Jardin
Sound editing: Clément Decaudin, Victor Lenoir and Clément Berthou
Sound effects: Victor Lenoir and Méderic Corroyer
Mixing: Clément Decaudin and Clément Berthou
Composer: Alan Marie
English translation: Eugène Favier and Ben Russell
Effects: Marwan Aboustait

Copyright © Anaïs-Tohé Commaret - Le Fresnoy - Studio National - 2021

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