Programme summary:
A programme of short works traversing hallucinatory dreamscapes, contested landscapes, and the precarious movements of bodies through time and space. Argentinian auteur Lucrecia Martel screens alongside contemporary artists, Basim Magdy, Marwa Arsanios and Fox Maxy.
Maid – Celebrated Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel explores themes of class, labour and gender violence through the story of a woman who applies for a job as a maid, haunted by an unspecified family trauma. Inspired by forms of contemporary dance, the film probes a kind of audio-visual choreography, focusing on the continuous movement of the body in space and the disruptions that occur offscreen and in the interplay between linear and nonlinear time.
FEARDEATHLOVEDEATH – Egyptian artist Basim Magdy crafts an immersive, hallucinatory audio-visual dreamscape reminiscing on the absurdity of death without trying to understand it. His associative universe of sounds and signifiers imagines a present moment suspended between traces of the mythic past and spectres of uncertain futures. Harnessing the live, organic qualities of super 16mm, the film builds a singular, dissonant energy that stalks the outer boundaries of science fiction, horror, and nature documentary.
Reverse Shot – This fourth chapter of Arsanios’ Who is Afraid of Ideology? series continues a collaborative investigation of anti-capitalist ideas around property and land ownership in Lebanon. The film’s figurative reverse shot reflects land as an autonomous, living object that inherently resists notions of property. Instead, matter and land become witness to the interconnectedness of the geological, the historical, the legal and the agricultural – generating an ecology of thought centred around land as a site of communalisation and rehabilitation.
F1ghting Looks Different 2 Me Now – Fox Maxy’s vertiginous montage documents the artist’s homecoming to Mesa Grande, California, ancestral lands of the Mesa Grande Band of Iipay/Kumeyaay/Diegueño Mission Indians in what is now called San Diego County. An exuberant mixtape of songs; portraits of friends, family, animals, and landscapes; and documents of confrontations with tribal cops, F1ghting Looks Different 2 Me Now is an exhilarating, joyful, and relentless disruption. No more drama.