Bambitchell ‘Bugs and Beasts Before the Law’, image still
Image Description: Six overlaid circular images of hands holding wine, people smoking and wearing animal masks, eyes in 60’s make up, people eating meat with their hands.
Second offering presents:
Bugs and Beasts Before The Law dir. Bambitchell, 32’, Canada, 2019
‘Murderous’ pigs, ‘malignant’ termites and ‘violent’ elephants are all part of Bambitchell’s essayistic work that explores a strange world of medieval animal trials, its history and legacy. Through the combination of observational footage, inventive staging and imaginative sound, the film creates the world where past and present, fiction and non-fiction, human and animal fuse. Tracing an often absurd history of colonial law-making Bugs and Beats before the Law explores forged political and sometimes profane relationships between humans and animals.
S. Litvintseva & B. Wagner ‘A Demonstration’, image still
Image Description: Close-up of a taxidermic face in profile, placed on a silk white cloth. The skin from the side of the head is removed, revealing all sort of nervous systems, veins and the inside of the mouth with visible tongue and feet.
A Demonstration dir. Sasha Litvintseva, Beny Wagner, 25’, Germany, Netherlands, UK, 2020
This monster film with no monsters is a sensory, multi-layered, audio-visual composition that returns to the original meaning of the word monster (Latin monstrate), which translates as “to reveal,” “to show,” or “to demonstrate.” Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of early Modern European Science, A Demonstration explores the boundaries of sight and interpretation of language and signs that were dictated by early knowledge regimes and become more complex systems of othering.
Image Description: A group of indigenous people in different ages stand again a hut, looking straight at the camera. Colourful streaks, like a river flow, distort the image, changing the colours from green, blue to red hues.
Apiyemiyeki? Ana Vaz , 28’, Brazil, 2019
Why did Kamña (“the civilized”) killed Kiña (Waimiri-Atraori)? Apiyemiyekî? (Why?) was the most common question asked by the Waimiri-Attoari, people native to the Brazilian Amazon, during their first literacy experience. The drawings found in the archive of Brazilian educator and indigenous rights militant Egydio Schwade, that filmmaker Vaz animates and transposes to the landscape, construct a collective visual memory, while attesting to a series of violent attacks the Waimiri-Atroari were submitted to during the Military Dictatorship. In the ghostly cry, the archival drawings echo the recurrent question Apiyemiyekî? (Why?), trusting that memory is a necessary engine to build a common future.
The screening is accompanied by the immersive sound installation from Sākśi Bisou titled Promised Land.
Sākśi Bisou is the collaboration between creators Elisabeth Gunawan and Jack Parris, who met during their time at RADA and have since come together to create visceral and immersive theatrical experiences that focus on our most intimate senses.
Promised Land begins with a childless couple, she was a computer engineer and he was a musician. Unable to bear a child of flesh and blood, they create a child made out of their imagination: a piece of artificial intelligence named Rose. At the end of the world, all that is left is Rose's lonely voice lifting up these poems and songs. Promised Land is an immersive experience that questions the things we have destroyed and created as a human race, and the things that grow after ruin.