• Fri 27 09 2024 / 6 pm •
Undoing Images II
Mentors: MADHUSREE DUTTA, MOHAMED GAWAD, ALA YOUNIS
The pilot project NEW CURATORS, which takes place in collaboration with Filmhaus Köln, presents its public film program Undoing Images at Filmhaus, curated by the mentors of the program.
Ala Younis - the current Artistic Director of the Academy of the Arts of the World, artist, and architect who works in research, curation and collaboration, Madhusree Dutta – filmmaker, author and former Artistic Director of the ADKDQ, and Mohamed A. Gawad – editor and filmmaker – will present a curated selection of films, dealing on the deconstruction and reconstruction of images.
The program focuses on the question of locations, the search for materials and its reappropriation as well as the effects of colonial imagery, providing an in-depth and multi-layered lens on stories, which are often forgotten in common narratives.
With this selection of films, the mentors want to express resistance against the supposed infallibility of cinema - especially against the narratives shaped by the magic of moving images. Undoing Images invites the audience to question and reinterpret the power and possibilities of images.
Program:
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM + 20 minutes insights of selected films/curations by Madhusree Dutta (120 min)
Dark Room (2010), Renu Savant
This film is an experiment in non-narrative to travel through the industrial history of the city of Mumbai and the cinema that grew in this city. The film image and the people in this industrial city, both caught up in a dialectic of agitations and development, seemed to me to be an outcome of a continuous alchemical march towards the illusory dreams of development, which were the hallmark of the modern nation state. This film constructs a narrative, as seen through the changing images of the city, to narrate a history of the film image and the people of the industrial city, seen as eternally travelling towards some unidentified goal, and both, as emerging from this urbanity, industriality, at the same time struggling with and against it.
Darkroom journeys through the chemical history of the film image while looking at the Mumbai city as a dialectic of agitation and devlopment. It works on the industrial-urban nature of both the city and its cinema. In the city as a darkroom, the water coming into the beach becomes the water in the trough of the developing laboratory and the film emulsion becomes the force of the public eternally marching to its many destinations in the city. The slow alchemy between the city and its development is reflected in the changes of the film image through the decades. The chemical city and the industriality of images churn slowly, being consumed by images.
In the Name of Scheherazade or the First Beergarden in Tehran (2019), Narges Shahid Kalhory
A homosexual teenager from Syria, an artist with Afghan roots and an Iranian-born beer brewer »in a mixture of socially relevant narrative and the very first story from the Middle East«. Political, oriental, exotic – everything you could wish for from an Iranian filmmaker?
In a cheerfully anarchic blend of documentary, fiction and animated frame narrative about the ›world’s first storyteller‹, Narges Kalhor and her protagonists confront unfamiliar expectations and their own insecurities. Eli wants to apply for asylum but is reluctant to speak about her traumatic experiences in Syria. Sarah was born in Germany but is repeatedly asked at her exhibitions about her Afghan ›home‹. Mahnaz plans to open Teheran’s first beer garden but faces resistance from the Iranian authorities. And documentary film-maker Narges is frustrated with her tutor who urges her to make a film about her own escape story as they review film material together. Just as Sheherazade once needed storytelling as a strategy of survival, Narges and her actors today struggle to find their voice and tell their story. But how can you say anything if someone is constantly interrupting you? Seen only in terms of her cultural background, the film-maker’s scope for creativity seems small, and the risk of being consumed by anger and grief big. In the end it is the tried-and-tested weapons of comedy – humour, chaos, slapstick – that help Narges and her film break through rigid structures and demonstrate resistance in the form of collective laughter. Three cheers for storytelling in difficult times!
Fri 27 09 | 6 - 8 pm
Location: Filmhaus Köln
Address: Maybachstraße 111, 50670 Cologne
In English language
Tickets are available via Filmhaus Köln
The room is step-free accessible
