How to be Collective?

Vrijdag 22 april: Collectif Faire Part

Collectif Faire-part is een ensemble van Belgische & Congolese filmmakers, dat nieuwe verhalen wil vertellen over Kinshasa, over Brussel, en de vele relaties tussen beide.
 

17:00 – film: Traverser

Joël Richmond Mathieu Akafou
Frankrijk, Burkina Faso, België, 2020, 77’
 
De Ivoriaan Inza heeft een lange weg afgelegd, van Ivoorkust via Libië en de Middellandse Zee naar Italië. Nu zit hij daar vast met zijn vriendin, haar kind en enkele andere vluchtelingen. Hij probeert de bergen over te steken, per trein en te voet, om in Frankrijk te komen, waar een vriend en een andere vrouw op hem wachten. 

Joël Richmond Mathieu Akafou blijft heel dicht bij zijn protagonist en volgt hem overal waar hij gaat. Abstracte begrippen als veilige-derde-landenregeling, avondklok en verblijfsstatus worden hier op een zeer persoonlijke wijze concreet gemaakt. We volgen ontroerende gesprekken over ontsnapping, identiteit en de nood aan verbinding.

19:30 – film: Aire

Collectif Faire-part
België, 2022, 14’
 
In 2019 reizen filmmakers Paul Shemisi en Nizar Saleh van Democratische Republiek Congo naar Duitsland voor een vertoning van hun nieuwe film. Tijdens een tussenstop in Angola komen ze echter vast te zitten op de luchthaven omdat de luchtvaartmaatschappij hun papieren niet vertrouwt. Wanneer ze denken naar een hotel geleid te worden waar ze zouden verblijven tot hun terugvlucht naar huis, komen ze in een illegaal detentiecentrum terecht.

Terwijl de kortfilm adembenemende vergezichten vanuit een vliegtuigraam toont, getuigen twee filmmakers over de de onmogelijkheid voor Congolese artiesten om probleemloos en veilig te reizen.

19:45 – film: Chance 
 
Effi & Amir
België, 2020, 75’

In deze docu-fictie volgen we vier Soedanese jongeren die zich verschansen op een snelwegparking in een vrachtwagen. Ze willen koste wat kost Engeland bereiken, en zouden er alles voor doen. Het is een nacht als zo vele andere. Een nieuwe poging, een nieuwe kans.

In de loop van één nacht herbeleven deze vier jongeren, tussen de vier muren van een rijdende rechthoek, hun dagelijkse realiteit. 

21:00 – Talk

Talk met Collectif Faire-part; Paul Shemisi (DRC), Nizar Saleh (DCR), Rob Jacobs (BE), Anne Reijniers (BE) & artiestenduo Effi & Amir.
 
Effi & Amir zijn beeldende kunstenaars. Ze wonen in Brussel en werken sinds 1999 als duo. Hun werk omvat vooral video, performance en participatieve strategieën en richt zich op collectieve identiteiten, de manier waarop ze worden geconstrueerd en hun relatie tot concrete plaatsen en symbolische systemen. Naast het voeren van hun eigen praktijk werken ze samen met andere kunstenaars zoals redacteuren, cameramensen en effectenontwerpers. Ze geven cursussen en videoworkshops aan een divers publiek

Zaterdag 23 april: Subversive Film
 
 For this programme Subversive Film has chosen to enter into a conversation with filmmakers, friends and organisations who have generously agreed to show their work in order to pose questions on how we distribute film work. Outside of the structural distribution frameworks set by the film industry and the institutions of the art world, what are the other networks and routes that  
are being built, generated and nurtured in order in order to circulate film, knowledge and relationships otherwise? 
 
 
13:00 - Film: A HUNDRED FACES FOR A SINGLE DAY, 

Christian Ghazi
Lebanon, 1971, Arabic
English subtitles
64 min

Christian’s Ghazi only film for a very long time following the devastation of his archive and works in Beirut in the 1970’s, “A Hundred Day for a Single Day” has distributed and cared for by Nadi Lekol El Nas, an organization committed to safeguarding, archiving and transmitting cinematographic, musical, and literary productions of the Levant from the 1930s onwards. 
 
The film itself is an icon of the avant-garde filmmaking of its time. Ghazi employs both documentary and staged sequences, both of them often abstracted through experimental editing and sound work, to forcefully attack the bourgeois decadence of Beirut’s political elite. The episodic structure, heavily manipulated sound and daring storytelling testify to Ghazi’s fearless commitment to employing film as a revolutionary medium. 

 
14:30 - Screening: OUT ON THE STREET

Jasmina Metwaly, Philip Rizk
2015, Arabic
English subtitles
71 min
 
Out on the Street is a film about a group of workers from one of Egypt’s working class neighborhoods, Helwan. In the film ten working-class men participate in an acting workshop. Through the rehearsals, stories emerge of factory injustice, police brutality, courts that fabricate criminal charges, and countless tales of corruption and exploitation by their capitalist employers. On a rooftop studio overlooking the heart of Cairo – presented as a space between fact and fiction – the participants move in and out of character as they shape the performance that engages their daily realities. Out in the Street interweaves scenes from the workshop, fictional performances, and mobile phone footage shot by a worker intended as evidence for the courts to stop the destruction of his workplace. This hybrid approach aims to engage a collective imaginary, situating the participants and spectators within a broader social struggle.
 

16:30 - Screening:BLACK BACH ARTSAKH

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri
2021, Armenian
English subtitles
150 min
 
Black Bach Artsakh is the name of a world. It lives in and as a film. Those who view it not only inhabit it, but also care for it, keep it alive by keeping watch over it. In this way, it is not a film which so much resists the makers of war and those who deny and continue to justify genocide: it is a film which outlives them.
 
If film is a document, then it bears witness to a place and a time. For example: This film re-members events from a place called Artsakh in the year 2007—a middle point—exactly 13 years after the 1994 cessation of hostilities in the struggle for liberation and self-determination by Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian inhabitants, and 13 years before the 2020 invasion by Azerbaijan’s dictator, who enlisted Turkey’s military and several thousand mercenaries from Syria to conquer those same lands as his country’s sovereign domain.
 
Then film as a testament, which this film claims affinity with, is what unsettles the domain or reign of any sovereign or sovereignty. It inhabits a time, which is neither the linear one of history nor the make-believe one of fiction: but what some refer to as that of the eternal. For this, and rightly so, Johann Sebastian Bach has been assigned as its honorary composer.
 
Black Bach Artsakh is also an integral element of an ongoing Conference in Shards. 
 

19:30 – 21:00- Conversation
Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, Jasmina Metwaly, Philip Rizq, and Subversive Film will use this brief opportunity to reflect on and question how films are made collectively, not only in the sense of authorship, but in how they are formulated, who participates in the making process, and furthermore in their circulation, distribution and care. 
 
 

Zondag 24 april: La voix des sans papiers (o.l.v. Mierien Coppens & Elie Maissin) + Sofia Dati & Maxime Jean Baptiste
 
Vanaf 14u: Vertoning van 5 kortfilms.

Film: Carry On 

Mieriën Coppens
Belgium, 2017, 12'

Individuals wait, silence is heard, a microscopic attention trough a tired mass. If the film is almost mute, it is because it focuses on silent figures, although their struggle is deafening.

Film: We are stubborn

Mieriën Coppens,
Belgium, 2022, 17’

We Are Stubborn is an extension of On se sauve made in 2018. People run in the confines of a stairwell. Time has come to move again from one house to another, the tenth or the eleventh. Their restlessness is carefully organized. There are those who already make up their beds.

Film: Almost at rest

Mieriën Coppens & Elie Maissin
Belgium, 2019, 20’

A chain of small rooms forms the setting for an interaction between different characters who are involved in a card game or a discussion.

Film: This house 

Mieriën Coppens & Elie Maissin
Belgium, 2019, 25’

If the house is merely a dormitory, just a place to eat and sleep, then this is no longer the embodiment of our struggle.

Film: Caught in the rain 

Elie Maissin & Mieriën Coppens
Belgium, 2021, 21’

Three men are working on a construction site.The work has been interrupted by five months of imprisonment. The rain suddenly falls like the silence that precedes an eviction.

Vanaf 18u: Maxime Jean Baptiste and Sofia Dati - Afterthought

How to reconsider the representation of Black bodies through moving images? How to deconstruct the racial stereotypes conveyed by dominant cinema, and confront the invisibilization of Black people in the production and distribution of experimental film? Who is remembered and how we remember are the questions that accompanied the whole process of weaving together Black Archive, a decolonial approach to experimental cinema, a film program conceived by Maxime Jean-Baptiste and Stéphane Gérard and presented at Beursschouwburg and Cinematek in September 2021. At the occasion of the partnership between Argos and MOOOV Film Festival, Maxime Jean-Baptiste, filmmaker, and Sofia Dati, curator at Beursschouwburg, will present an afterthought of that process. Through a selection of films from the program and open discussions, they propose to reflect upon some of the tools and strategies that emerged from that experience as ways of (re)thinking the presence of Black bodies and Black filmmakers in the archive, challenging of the very notion/practice of archiving. The polyphonic, glitching experience of that shared reflection is what we propose to ponder about here.

Program: 

-       Introduction + Discussion around the program
-       Screening of "Elle" (2021, 5') by Galdys Bukolo
-       Screening of ΜΑΛΘΑ: The Thrice Burnt Archives of Unreliable Prophecies" by Maria Christoforidou (2021, 15')
-       Discussion
-       Break
-       Screening of "Plowing the Stars" (2020, 16') by Wally Fall
-       Sscreening of I Ran from It and I Was Still In It, Darol Olu Kae (USA, 11')
-       Discussion & conclusion
-       Screening of Lazara’s images during the workshop
-       Q&A