9 November 2011, 21:00. Beursschouwburg, Brussels.
A Courtisane event, in the context of the S.H.O.W. (Shit Happens on Wednesdays) series.
What happens when the conventional angle of vision is displaced, the prevailing forms of identification challenged, the certainties of time and place undone? What is awoken is the capability in each of us to become a foreigner in the arrangement of places and paths we generally call “reality”. What opens up is a space where all speech is understood as voice, where every expression counts as an utterance.
With film works by Mati Diop, Pedro Costa, Thomas Ochoa & Andriana Meyer, Neil Beloufa.
“How can one be sure that the human animal mouthing a noise in front of you is actually voicing an utterance rather than merely expressing a state of being? If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths.”
– Jacques Rancière
Mati Diop Atlantiques
SN/FR, video, colour, stereo, Wolof spoken with English subtitles, 2009, 15′
“To start with Moonfleet and Jamaica Inn, we all remember the tales of ships being lured by shipwreckers to break on the rocks. The close-up of the rotating lighthouse lenses, which is the closing shot of Atlantiques, immediately calls this to mind. There is no port behind this lighthouse, only the night and the icy waters of death, the mirage of a Europe where life seems easier but inaccessible, the gaunt shadow of an Eldorado that is not so, even if, like all Western powers it feeds off the exhaustion of the world’s poorer regions. ‘Good bye, I am leaving to die, this is not to be said’, Seligne confides to his friends on the beach. As the survivor of a shipwreck that haunts him, he is nonetheless determined to set out again, as surviving in Senegal has become impossible. The night engulfs everything, the adieu to his friends and the tale of his first crossing. Light is no longer part of his world. It has been left in the village on the women’s tearful faces and the graves.” (Yann Lardeau)
Pedro Costa O nosso homem
PT, 2010, video, colour, stereo, Portugese spoken with Engish subtitles, 23′
“O Nosso Homem (Notre Homme) est une variation brève dans le droit fil de la trilogie consacrée aux habitants du quartier aujour’hui détruit de Fontainhas; et plus précisement une sorte d’appendice à un troisième volet, En avant Jeunesse! Dont le héros, Ventura, réapparait, devenu ici un des quatre personages de ces dialogues de désespérance. Ils se poursuivent, de décor en décor, du plus sombre au plus éclatant, portés par cette somptuosité de cadres et de tons de lumière et d’ombres qui faisait dire ç Jacques Rancière, à propos d’En avant Jeunesse! “La foi dans l’art qui atteste le grandeur du pauvre – la grandeur de l’homme quelconque – brille ici plus que jamais. Mais non plus celle qui l’assimile à l’affirmation d’un salut.” Une figure court à travers O Nosso Homem pour en exprimer la violence mythique: “ce bonhomme qui emmène les gens dans un vie meilleure”, leur glissant furtivement un papier qu’il leur redemande si fort à l’avis d’expulsion qui frappe en fin de parcours José Albert, un des quatre Cap-Verdiens poursuivant à Lisbonne ces échanges sur ‘improbable dignité de vivre.” (Raymond Bellour)
Tomas Ochoa & Andriana Meyer Five Dots
AR, 2005, video, colour & b/w, stereo, Castellano spoken with English subtitles, 11′
“Five dots examines the relationship between exercising punishment based on control over the body of the convicted subject and his resistance to power by virtue of his capacity to produce symbols. After a photography workshop in the reformatory for juveniles in Mendoza, Argentina, in which the authors of the present project intervened as mediators, the inmates were given the opportunity to draw a self-referential record based on their own symbolism and imaginary world—songs, phrases picked up in the street, invented by them, dreamed about, altered by remembrance. Finally, they were requested to recite, in front of the camera, excerpts of the “punishment technology” studies conducted by Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.” (Tomas Ochoa & Andriana Meyer). Courtesy the artist and KATZ CONTEMPORARY, Zürich
Neil Beloufa Kempinski
FR/ML, 2007, video, colour, stereo, French spoken with Engish subtitles, 15′
“Video or films shot in Africa are in most cases paternalist documentaries, or focus on exotic political issues, but rarely actual fiction and even less science-fiction. Kempinski respects the official documentary rules as nothing is scripted. Everything is improvised with a subtle “real” game rule shifting, and it’s the stereotypical sci-fi frames and music that make the piece mutate into a blurry fake fiction. Does faking a fiction, which is naturally fake, make it “real”? Interviewees simply had to talk about the future using the present tense, which undermines our expectations of Africa, while still being ” for real”. The interesting thing about the project, is that even though science fiction’s global culture is known there, most of what they said correlated to a more animistic universe, which surpasses my own understanding. Though I’m no expert on Mali, it seemed to highlight the two distinctive layers of a kind of their reality and society.“ (Neil Beloufa)
In a time when YouTube videos compete for the longest duration, digital technologies have erased all restrictions in regards to the length of filming and the term “slow cinema” has gradually gained acceptance in film jargon, traditional film exhibitors remain obstinately attached to conventional formats. There is no mercy for film works that exceed the three-hour limit: they are doomed to a straight-to-video career (or rather, straight-to-internet). That is, if they don’t find a place as a series on a generous television channel. And yet film history is full of examples of epic cinematographic works that have dared to take all the time they need. Take Jacques Rivette’s 12-hour-long Out 1 (1971), for a long time considered the most “invisible” (because “unscreenable”) masterpiece of contemporary cinema. Or Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s acclaimed Hitler – ein Film aus Deutschland (1977, 430’), which the late Susan Sontag once described as one of the biggest art works of the 20th century; or yet another example: Patricio Guzmán’s chronicle of the socialist revolution in Chile, La Batalla de Chile (1979, 270’), without a doubt a monument of political cinema. The list is endless; just recently the eXtra Long works of Lav Diaz, Wang Bing and Olivier Assayas have left an indelible impression. Courtisane and KASKcinema have decided to join forces in order to offer a unique opportunity to see these and many other works as they should be seen, on the big screen, in their full length. Every first Wednesday of the month. Bring a snack, we will provide the coffee!
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————- WED 5 October 2011, 18:00. KASKcinema, Gent
Alexander Sokurov Spiritual Voices (From the war diaries)
RU, 1995, colour, stereo, 328’
“The border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan , 1994: at the very moment when the Russian campaign in Chechnya was in full swing and was shown every day on state television, Alexander Sokurov joined a border patrol in the newly independent Tajikistan . The war with Afghanistan was officially over, but the Taliban regularly carry out provocative actions against the Russian border post. This marginal war provides the material for a journal, not in the sense of an up-to-date news report, but rather a timeless diary containing the personal impressions of one of Russia ‘s greatest filmmakers. Dream images from a no man’s land far from home”. (Pieter van Bogaert)
“…We began to make our film in summer, then came again in winter. We worked in the places, where war is daily routine, where the state of war is not a sudden attack, but the normal life itself. Namely — fighting operations on the border between Tadjikistan and Afghanistan. Sometimes it were many days of troubled waiting. Sometimes battle: assault or repulse of it. But always there were victims, and always there was parting from the relatives and friends. And always anguish and abandonment. Proceeding from the idea of my home country, which I have formed, Russia is a land permanently waging war, and people here are formed always ready to go to war. Our national heroes are peoples who took part in war — not those who created something unusual, sitting and working peacefully. Russia is hardly HGH imaginable for me without those convulsions of war, without this military trembling.”
— Alexander Sokurov
Olivier Assayas Carlos (full version)
FR, 2010, colour, stereo, 338’
“The film tracks the rise and fall of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as ‘Carlos the Jackal,’ a terrorist active during the 1970s and 1980s. Venezuelan-born, educated in Moscow, an instrumental figure in a number of militant leftist causes and later a mercenary-for-hire working from behind the Iron Curtain, Carlos, as Edgar Ramírez portrays him, is a dizzying, media-savvy, shape-shifting blur, as much a product of the Cold War politics as one of its most visible agents. (…) While the film ostensibly focuses on the exploits of the enigmatic man at its center, it’s arguably more concerned with the dramatically shifting world around him, and more broadly the reorganization of European leftism after the heady days of May 1968, the disintegration of unified international struggle, and the way that generation, which is also Assayas’s, grappled with the revolution that never came.” (Genevieve Yue)
“I know the general audiences would prefer a shorter cut. The thing is that a five-and-a-half hour film is located within a very specific cinematic space. In terms of style and narration, it allows me to go into areas that are completely new for me. It’s a much more satisfying reflection on cinema and the power of cinema. It shows how you can deal simultaneously with small and big issues – small issues being the fate of one man and big issues being the geopolitics of a period. This kind of scope isn’t really possible in a shorter version.”
— Olivier Assayas
John Gianvito Vapor Trail (Clark)
US, 2010, colour, stereo, 264’
“Vapor Trail (Clark) examines the tragic legacy of environmental disaster left by the United States at the site of the Clark Air Base in the Philippines. The length of Gianvito’s film (four and a half hours, nearly) enables him to characterise the Clark disaster as a direct consequence, and an inseparable part, of the history of US imperialism – without reducing it to a mere example (since the film explores, very fully, the personal tragedies of the victims and the passion and the dedication of the activists fighting for the clean-up of the Clark site). (…) To explore the disaster at such length and in such detail is to overcome two typical effects of documentaries on the sufferings of the powerless: on the one hand, a wallowing-in-misery syndrome that arouses predictable feelings without leading to any insight; on the other, a quickly dissipated rush of outrage that serves as quick gratification for the politically liberal viewer.” (Chris Fujiwara). Gianvito is currently editing a companion work, Vapor Trail (Subic), which examines the effects of the Subic Naval Base, also located in the Philippines.
“There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land”.
—Mark Twain
“For me, film criticism is not a way of explaining or classifying things, it’s a way of prolonging them, making them resonate differently”
– Jacques Rancière
How to write about cinema today? “For whom? Against whom?” wondered French critic Serge Daney in a fervent 1974 plea for the rethinking of the critical function of Cahiers du Cinéma at the time. For the late Daney, beyond all possible aesthetic criteria and related ways of assessment, film criticism always implied an intervention in the political or ideological arena. From this point of view, it is not enough to simply explain what is being told in a film – a tendency in most contemporary film criticism – it is at least as important to lay bare where, how and by whom it is told. With his emphasis on the ethical dimension of cinema, Daney was explicitly following the footprints of the cinephilic tradition, based on the idea that each cinematographic work represents a voice and a standpoint, a vision of the world that at the same time legitimises and organises the work. This is the critical guideline that Daney, self-proclaimed “ciné-fils”, would follow his whole life, from the glorious days of the “Cahiers Jaunes” in the 1960’s, through the political and social deadlocks of the 1970’s, to the confrontation with the expansion of television and information in the 1980-90’s. Today, almost two decades after his death, a question resonates unrelentingly: where to find the “critical function” Serge Daney devoted his life and work to ? What is left of the cinephilic thought, now that the way we understand and experience cinema has undergone such fundamental transformations? In other words, what does the contemporary cinephile stand and fight for in the post-cinematographic era?
Following the publication of the first Dutch translation of the writings of the influential French film critic Serge Daney (published by Octavo), BAM organises a series of events on the state of cinephilia and film critical thinking today in collaboration with Sint-Lukas, KASK and RITS and with the support of Bozar, ERG and Courtisane (curated by Stoffel Debuysere). During the months of October and November, and in conjunction with three masterclasses by Adrian Martin (20.10), Jonathan Rosenbaum (27-28.10) and Jacques Rancière (18.11), eight participants will be initiated into the problematics of film criticism in the course of a workshop led by Dana Linssen and Pieter Van Bogaert. At the occasion, Courtisane has launched the website www.cinefilie.be, where all the information on the project will be regularly published.
For the opening of the new film season at KASK Cinema, Courtisane is proud to present two evenings of recent films and videos by five young Belgium-based artists whose previous work has been screened at the Courtisane Festival in recent years, including the avant-premiere of Viva Paradise by the twice Courtisane winner (in 2008 and 2010) Isabelle Tollenaere and the Flemish premiere of Sung-A Yoon’s first feature-length documentary film Full of Missing Links. Looking ‘outwards’, the four films transport us to Tunisia, Cyprus, Israel and Korea, proposing personal variations on the form of the audiovisual essay.
The filmmakers will all be present at the screenings.
Viva Paradis captures a moment in a land, Tunisia, in the midst of transformation: an abandoned luxurious hotel, the ruins of Carthage, the traces of the recent revolution. The fight has been fought, but how to proceed further now? Focusing on the tourism industry, the film portrays this transitional phase in a series of long sequence shots. Everything seems to stand still. The result is a succession of troubling tableaux which suggest conflicting emotions, evoking the complexity of the situation. Banal entertainment and revolution, or how they can blend into one another.
Pieter Geenen pulsation
2011, HD video, 16:9, color, stereo, 14’30”
Imprinted on the mountains of Northern Cyprus, the landmark of a Turkish Cypriot flag identifies the landscape. Ever present and visible from almost every part of the island, this flag acts as a provocation to the Greek Cypriots who live on the other side of the UN buffer zone since the military division of Cyprus. pulsation shows a nocturnal view over the city of Nicosia, looking from Greek to Turkish Cyprus, with the flag rising above the city. When the night falls, it starts resonating like a strong heartbeat, both in vision and sound. In pulsation the view of the flag is united with the sound it actually generates right on the spot where it is stretched out on the slopes of the northern mountain range.
Printed Matter displays the conflation of private lives and contemporary geopolitics. The evidence comes from Brutmann’s father, André, who was, up to his untimely death in 2002, a freelance press photographer covering two decades of Middle East news. His collection offers a visual chronicle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that consists of surprisingly familiar images of civil dissent, armed violence, funeral grief and political speeching in both Israel and the Occupied Territories. After becoming a dad in 1983 and finishing a day of work, with a few pictures left on the film role in his camera, this professional media worker would regularly photograph his family. Printed Matter simply shows an exquisite selection of contact sheets including memorable events such as the First and Second Intifada, the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin and the birth of Sirah Foighel Brutmann. Instead of using formatted captions, the filmmakers choose for the impromptu voice comment by the first witness to these histories: Hanne Foighel, André’s partner and freelance journalist, reminisces on the past while browsing through its records and getting her memory triggered. As if it were a fragile time capsule steered by her provident off-screen voice, Printed Matter takes its viewers on a still yet penetrating excursion into the intimacies of political history and the politics of intimate lives.
Sung-A Yoon Full of Missing Links
2011, HD video, 16:9, color, stereo, 68’
Yoon Sung-A travels to South-Korea in search of her father whom she hasn’t seen since the age of eight. While she attempts to understand her parents’ break-up, which would tear her from her land and take her to France (and Belgium later on), the filmmaker unravels the fabric of Korean society through the prism of her own story. First and foremost personal, her quest is a reflection of the preoccupations of a country profoundly marked by separation.
Figures of Dissent : Pasolini 8 – 9 June 2011, KASKcinema, Gent. A Courtisane programme.
“It has been said that I have three heroes: Christ, Marx and Freud. This is reducing everything to formulae. In truth, my only hero is Reality. If I have chosen to be a filmmaker as well as a writer it is because, rather than expressing reality through those symbols that are words, I have preferred the cinema as a means of expression – to express reality through reality…”
— Pier Paolo Pasolini
The death of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), as Serge Daney once suggested, marked the end of an era: a certain history of cinema seemed to tiredly come to a halt. Cinema understood as a communal place where to come together and disagree, as an open space for exploration and confrontation (mise-en-scène as well as mise-en-crise) is no more â or at least no longer with the scope of former days. However, the critical and polemical tone that once indicated the vitality of the seventh art has always continued to resonate in Pasoliniâs work. Today, in the grooves of the 21st century, his voice appears to resound with the same vigor of old, when he sent cold shivers to the world of the 1960âs and 1970âs. The recent wave of retrospectives, restorations, updates and reprises proves how strongly the countertone of Pasolini – filmmaker, poet, author and true dissenter at heart – is to be missed more than ever before in todayâs consensual times. Pasoliniâs self proclaimed role, in the words of art critic Guy Scarpetta âwas to subvert conceptions of the dominant world, to explore all that is not said by conventional representations, to uncover all that is repressed in the social and cultural consensus.â This programme celebrates his outspokenly rebellious character with the screening of two rarely shown and recently restored documentaries by Pasolini, as well as works by two contemporary artists who each in their own way reinvigorate his legacy: Alfredo Jaar and Ayreen Anastas.
Alfredo Jaar Le Ceneri di Pasolini (The Ashes of Pasolini)
IT/CL, 2009, video, b/w & colour, stereo, Italian with English subtitles, 38â
Copy courtesy of the artist
“The Ashes of Pasolini is a modest film about the death of an extraordinary intellectual. It is mostly based on documentary material discovered after 1975, the year of his death, and before. As you know, it is still unclear who killed him. But for me, it has always been clear why: it was because of fear. Fear of his voice, fear of his life style, fear of his ideas, fear of his opinions, fear of his intellect. Pasolini was the complete intellectual: a filmmaker, a poet, a writer, a journalist, a critic, a polemicist. He was totally involved in the cultural and political life of his time. As an artist he took risks, broke the rules, he created his own rules. Pasolini wrote one of the most beautiful poems of the 20th century titled ‘The Ashes of Gramsci’ (1957), a eulogy to another great Italian thinker, Antonio Gramsci. The title of my film is based on this poem by Pasolini but I chose it to write a eulogy to Pasolini himself. In these dark times in which Italy finds itself, Pasoliniâs voice is sorely missed.” (Alfredo Jaar)
“Why a tribute to Pasolini in 2009? … In the middle of the Berlusconi era? The answer is in Pasolini words, in his voice. Itâs such a contemporary voice that we can hardly believe that these words were pronounced almost half-century ago. We are surprised when we realize how his words are directly pertinent, not just to Berlusconiâs Italy but to our current condition. […] My short film The Ashes of Pasolini itâs a montage of excerpts of his films and interviews, as well as RAI news footage. Also, I have included images shot in Casarsa, the small village where he was buried. My main aim was to revive his voice in the XXIst century, where it belongs.” (Alfredo Jaar)
Giuseppe Bertolucci & Pier Paolo Pasolini La Rabbia di Pasolini (The Rage of Pasolini)â¨
IT, 1963/2008, 35mm, b/w and colour, stereo, Italian with English subtitles, 83ââ¨
Print courtesy of Cineteca di Bologna
“In 1962, Pasolini was invited by an Italian newsreel producer to create a feature-length film essay from his companyâs library of footage. Inspired by diverse wealth of imagery, Pasolini set out to make a film as ‘a show of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world.’ Assembling images from the Soviet bloc and various anti-colonial movements as complement and contrast to the newsreel footage, Pasolini crafted a remarkable tour de force of politically trenchant commentary on the modern world, climaxing in a moving meditation on the death of Marilyn Monroe. Fearing controversy and box-office failure, the producer ordered Pasolini to cut the original version to less than an hour and then promptly added a right-wing counterpart by the filmmaker Giovanni Guareschi, packaging the two parts as one film. Disowned by Pasolini, this version was indeed a failure. Although Pasoliniâs original version remains lost, an ambitious reconstruction was recently completed by Giuseppe Bertolucci and the Cineteca di Bologna using the shot list and a dialogue transcript from the first version, as well as Pasoliniâs notes on music for the film.” (Harvard Film Archive)
“A hundred elegiac pages in prose and verses, and a texture of moving images, photographs and painting reproductions: in the laboratory of the film La Rabbia, Pier Paolo Pasolini experimented for the first time with a narrative style different from the traditional and conventional documentaries of the time. His intention was â in his own words â to create a ‘new cinema genre. An ideological and poetical essay through new sequences.’ La Rabbia had to be ‘an act of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world and its consequent historical irresponsibility, to testify to the presence of a world that, unlike that of the bourgeoisie, is deeply rooted in reality. And reality implies a true love for tradition that can only be achieved through revolution.’ (…) The project was born from the proposal of a small producer, Gastone Ferranti, who entrusted Pasolini with the file material of a newsreel called ‘Mondo libero’, which he had directed and produced for a number of years. During an interview with Maurizio Liverani (‘Paese sera’, April 14th, 1963), Pasolini declared: ‘I pulled vision out of that material. It was horrendous, wretched, a depressing portrait of international populism, the triumph of the most trivial reactions. However, in all this terrible squalor, every now and then, beautiful images would grab my attention: the smile of a stranger, two eyes expressing joy and sorrow, and interesting sequences rich with historical significance, visual fascination in black and white’.”(Roberto Chiesi)
Pier Paolo Pasolini Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (Notes for an African Orestes)â¨
IT, 1970, 35mm, colour, stereo, Italian with English subtitles, 63ââ¨
Print courtesy of Cineteca di Bologna
“While shooting Medea, a film about the subjugation of the ancient world to an alienating modernity, Pier Paolo Pasolini developed the idea to make a companion piece about another Greek myth â the story of Orestes. This story would end more happily, with the archaic making way for a different kind of modernity, built not on exploitation but on communalism. Encouraged by emerging socialist governments in post-colonial Africa, Pasolini hoped to shoot his film there, and so he went to Uganda and Tanzania to scout for locations and actors. That footage became the basis for this film, with Pasolini explaining his ideas on the soundtrack. A perfect example of leftist intellectual auto-critique, the film climaxes with Pasolini discussing his plans with a group of African students in Rome. The discussion hovers somewhere between tragedy and farce as one by one, the students calmly and kindly offer numerous reasonable objections to Pasoliniâs idea, all of which he seems to take in stride. The Oresteia project was never made. Little-seen and little-discussed, the film is essential viewing for understanding Pasoliniâs political thinking and his attachment to myth.” (Harvard Film Archive)
“Orestes synthesizes African History over the last hundred years: the sudden and almost divine passing from a ‘savage’ state to a civil and democratic one. The series of kings, who dominated the African lands (and who in their turn were dominated by the dark Erinyes) in the atrocious and century-old stagnation of a tribal and prehistoric culture, have suddenly been swept away. And Reason, almost motu proprio, has established democratic institutions. We must add that now, in the sixties, the years of the ‘Third World’, the years of ‘negritude’, the burning problem and question is the transformation of the Erinyes into Eumenides. Aeschylus’ genius foreshadowed all of this. All advanced people today agree that archaic civilizations – superficially referred to in terms of folklore – must not be forgotten, despised, or betrayed. Rather, they ought to be absorbed within the new civilization, integrating it, making it specific, concrete, historical? The terrifying and fantastic divinities of African prehistory should undergo the same process as the Erinyes, they should become Eumenides.” (Pasolini)
Ayreen Anastas Pasolini Pa* Palestine
US/Palestine, 2005, video, colour, stereo, Arabic with English subtitles, 51â
Copy courtesy of the artist
“Pasolini Pa* Palestine is an attempt to repeat Pasolini’s trip to Palestine in his film, Seeking Locations in Palestine for The Gospel According to Matthew (1963). It adapts his script into a route map superimposed on the current landscape, creating contradictions and breaks between the visual and the audible, the expected and the real. The video explores the question of repetition. For Heidegger Wiederholung ‘repetition, retrieval’ is one of the terms he uses for the appropriate attitude toward the past. “By the repetition of a basic problem we understand the disclosure of its original, so far hidden possibilities.” The project ventures a conversation and a dialogue with Pasolini, especially his ‘Poem for the Third World’. Discutere ‘to smash to pieces’ is the Latin source of dialogue, discussion. The piece does not criticize Pasolini, but reveals unnoticed possibilities in his thought and works back to the ‘experiences’ that inspired it.” (Ayreen Anastas)
“From: Ayreen Anastas
Sent: Dec 2, 2003 4:22 PM
To: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Subject: Sopraluoghi in Palestina per il film “Vangelo Secondo Matteo”
Dear Pier Paolo,
I am writing to ask your permission to repeat your seeking in Palestine film 40 years ago in the film: Sopraluoghi in Palestina per il film ‘Vangelo Secondo Matteo’.*
In this repetition, I would like to find in that landscape what you have not found in your film. Your refusal of the Palestinian landscape makes me sad: a refusal that is a negation and affirmation at the same time: it is a negation because you did not execute ‘The Gospel According to Matthew’ in Palestine, and an affirmation in the sense of the necessity of a repetition of this venture, trip, seeking etc… only in that gap of not finding the location in Palestine in your film 40 years ago, I can start seeking them in the new film today.
So it is not a real sadness if I say: I am sad that you did not decide for this landscape and for locations there. It is rather a symbolic sadness, that will help me find an unnamable (an unknown that actually motivates the project) in that landscape I grew up in. It is a sadness of love, a double love, for you as a director and for this landscape.
(…)
* Seeking Locations in Palestine for ‘The Gospel According to Matthew'”
In the context of the research project “Figures of Dissent (Cinema of Politics, Politics of Cinema)” KASK / School of Arts
