The State of the World

A fluorescent tube illuminates an empty playground in the evening. Nearby a flash of light is projected on a makeshift screen. This outdoor movie is a portrait of a village repeatedly struck by lightning. As night falls, the silhouette figures of young men emerge, they are playing with a football raging with fire. They take turns kicking the ball which leaves illuminated trails in the grass. The lightning on the screen flickers amid the fire and the smoke rising from the ground. The game intensifies with each kick that sends the fireball soaring into the air. Finally the teens burn the screen and crowd around it to witness the blazing canvas, behind which is revealed the ghostly white beam of a projector. Phantoms of Nabua is part of the multi-platform Primitive project which focuses on a concept of remembrance and extinction and is set in the northeast of Thailand.

0116643225059 is an early experimental film by Weerasethakul made during his time at SAIC. The work is about a long-distance telephone conversation between the filmmaker and his beloved mother in Khon Kaen, Thailand. Weerasethakul superimposed a photograph of his mother in her youth alongside his own image and his apartment in Chicago. It renders a strong bond between the artist and his family.

Taking the recent tsunami in Asia as its starting point, the filmmakers have used the idea of a ghost seen wandering along the rocky coastline of a Thai island and, in a life-affirming gesture, they have invited some local children to direct the film for them, suggesting and filming the movements of the actor-ghost.

Created in celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this short essay centres on a monologue delivered by a reincarnation of the philosopher in twenty-first century Thailand.

The work is part of the Memoria Project, the first major series of work that is set outside of Weerasethakul’s home country. Given his affinity for the Amazon, of which Thai jungle tales were originally inspired, Weerasethakul has started to explore South America - and since 2017, has been developing a film based in Colombia. He is drawn to its topography, where active volcanoes and landslides ceaselessly transform natural landscapes. The Memoria Project presents both personal and collective memories, while retaining the artist’s fascination with illumination. A vital part of the video and photographic works is the presence of a lone protagonist on the beach. Weerasethakul worked with Canadian actor Connor Jessup who visited him during the filming of a documentary at Nuquí area in Chocó Department, western Colombia. Here, the actor is a spirit that contemplates the artist’s journey, his dream of both real and imaginary films.

Petch, one of the young men of Nabua, composes and plays this song about his village. One evening, he sang a song to Weerasethakul’s film crew regarding an August event when the former members of the Communist Party of Thailand gathered to commemorate the first shoot out in the field more than 45 years ago. Weerasethakul layers Petch’s song with an image of his friend, Kamgiang, whose grandfather was killed by the soldiers in the field not far from his home.

Invisibility displays Weerasethakul’s continued interest in the issue of perception and memory. The installation takes threads from his recent films, Cemetery of Splendor and Fever Room, both of which feature the same actors. Here, he takes them deeper into an imaginary world and ponders the future of shared consciousness. The videos depict a landscape where the protagonists are confined to a room, along with the viewers. With no way out, they infiltrate each other’s dreams. Invisibility mirrors the troubled state of Thailand’s politics. It proposes a decayed vision of the future where one needs to constantly evade reality. The viewing experience shifts between seeing and not seeing, fact and fiction, space and void.

For a Fiery Monkey Year.

In this video diary, Weerasethakul documents the set of Primitive Project in Nabua, Thailand, particularly the scene when teenagers are hypnotized and sleep inside a time machine.

Cactus River is a diary of the time Apichatpong Weerasethakul visited a newlywed couple near the Mekong River.

Presented in 2 parts, this 83 minute piece documents Wieder-Atherton's idea to do a set of pieces from across central and eastern Europe, including Russia. Some weren't originally written for cello, but she had them transcribed. Some were songs for voices, which goes with Wieder-Atherton saying in an earlier film she made with Chantal Akerman that she aspires to play the cello in a way that it carries the specificity of emotion of the human voice. She explains at the beginning of both parts how she feels each country in the region has it's own personality expressed in its music, coming from its individual history and culture, but that each land in the area is also 'impregnated' as she puts it, by the others, so there are certain elements that run throughout.

When her mother moves in, the life of a writer gets crowded.

Maniac Summer consists of images and sounds recorded in Paris in the summer of 2009. It is a sprawling triptych without a beginning or end and with no specific subject or topic. The camera is positioned in front of a window and left running. It observes movements, registers noises coming from the street or nearby park, captures Chantal Akerman going about her business in her apartment: smoking, working, talking on the telephone. Fragments from the artist’s everyday life are featured in the installation’s central video, while the adjoining panels are more symbolically charged; in them, various images from the former have been isolated, modified and repeated. These abstract afterimages act as a kind of memory, looking back to the images in the installation’s centrepiece as so many shadows of its reality.

Made out of the last sequence of the film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975 Seven monitors (in sync) video installation, color, sound
. The monitors are placed on pedestals and displayed in a circle
.

Documentary about humans dealing with changing technology, the basic concepts of communication, cinema, and Akerman's mother, seen in her Brussels apartment.

Furniture and clutter of one small apartment room become the subject of a moving still life—with Akerman herself staring back. This breakthrough formal experiment is Akerman's first film made in New York.

A lonely widowed housewife does her daily chores, takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. Slowly, her ritualized daily routines begin to fall apart.

Anna is a film director whose job takes her all over western Europe. In each place she either already has some intimate connection, or readily makes one. People seem drawn to her, but inevitably insist on sharing their inmost secrets and discontents with her, despite her obvious and profound lack of interest in these revelations. This does not deter Anna from continuing to meet people, and she genuinely connects with them occasionally, as when she sees her mother briefly in Brussels.

“My mother laughs prelude” is a performance from the book that Chantal made about her mother. In 2013, Akerman’s mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn’t talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. "My Mother Laughs" is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

A participant in a coup d'état by young commissioned officers, Ventura loses his way within the woods. Eventually, Ventura is admitted into a mental hospital where he has conversations with "ghosts" of the past in the hospital's elevator.

Pedro Costa's segment from the Jeonju film "Memories".

Four voices and their visions of Guimarães, cradle city of the Portuguese nation and European Capital of Culture in 2012.

Previously focused on Asian directors, “Jeonju Digital Project 2007” takes a look at Europe. The Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, and the French filmmaker Eugène Green participated in this project.

Undaunted by a commission to make a film about his mentors and aesthetic exemplars, the filmmaking team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Costa records with great sensitivity and insight the exacting process by which the two re-edit their film Sicilia!, discussing and arguing over each cut and its effect. Incorporating comments about the influence of figures as diverse as Chaplin and Eisenstein, about the ethical and aesthetic implications of film technique and such matters as rhythm, sound mixing, and acting. The film becomes a tour de force, immersing us in the mysteries of cinema as practiced by some of its greatest creators. Costa calls the film both his first comedy and his first love story.

Pedro Costa's segment from "O Estado do Mundo".

An unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but taking as main focus the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte.

Pedro Costa's first short film.

A short film showing a rehearsal and live performance by Jeanne Balibar. Costa would go on to make a feature-length documentary with the same title and subject matter in 2009.

A short contemporary story about the crew of a small Brazilian fishing boat. Part of the anthology The State of the World.

Documentary about antique cars in Cuba and their relation with the Cuban revolution.

Contemporary film critics regard the epic film I Am Cuba as a modern masterpiece. The 1964 Cuban/Soviet coproduction marked a watershed moment of cultural collaboration between two nations. Yet the film never found a mass audience, languishing for decades until its reintroduction as a "classic" in the 1990s. Vicente Ferraz explores the strange history of this cinematic tour de force, and the deeper meaning for those who participated in its creation.

During World War II, looking up the Mountain, in Italy, a Brazilian Expeditionary Force - FEB - mines weeping platoon is hit by a panic-attack that sets them running aimlessly right in the middle of 'no man's land'. Desperate cold and hungry, the ill-prepared soldiers have to choose between facing military court or delve deeper into enemy lines. After a tense discussion, they decide to save their faces with the Brazilian Army by tackling a daring military objective: to disarm the most feared minefield in Italy. On their way there, they end meeting two others deserters; a remorseful Italian soldier trying to join the Partigianos and German officer who is just simply tired of war. with unexpected help of their ex-enemy, the soldiers are set to accomplish a mission that so far had been deemed impossible.

The Ta'ang or Palaung people, an ethnic minority living in the mountainous area between Myanmar's Kokang region and China's Yunnan province, have historically suffered many forced migrations due to war. When their survival is threatened again in 2015, thousands of them flee across the border. Filmmaker Wang Bing accompanies them and becomes a privileged witness to a human story that is both a modern reportage and a mythical epic.

About the Chinese drivers who transport coal from the coal fields to the buyers.

Happy Valley is a village in the mountains of north-western Yunnan Province, altitude 10,000 feet. A few dozen Han families live there, mainly from potatoes and livestock.

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

In a fast growing city of East China, migrants have been arriving and living for a dream of a better life. But what they find there is little opportunities and poor living conditions that push people, even couples, into violent and oppressive relations. Xiao Min, Ling Ling and Lao Yeh are some of the characters of this bitter chronicle of today China.

Gao Ertai (1931) is an artist, teacher, philosopher who, in the 1950s, was imprisoned in the Jiabiangou Labour Camp. The film works as a diptych with Fengming, the confessional story of another victim of reprisals, and closes a vast film series on those who disappeared.

A powerful visual study of the site of the Jiabiangou forced labour camp in the Gobi desert.

A disjunctive montage of freckled 8mm home movies and jarring sounds of everyday life, You are Here conjures a day in the life of mid-century India. The film maps the fragility of its 8 mm material with the specters of India’s modernity—the array of shots of the world through windows of vehicles, moving trains, balloons in air, busy bridges, flowing water bodies, sites of worship, and ordinary people in their everyday activities.

Contemporary economic conditions in Nepal are examined with documentary images, interviews, and narration.

Straight 8 is an exploration of a collection of 8mm home movies of film enthusiast Tom D’aguiar, an Anglo-Indian who lived in Bangalore. Drawn from home movies made around the 1940s, we see scenes of everyday life around Tom’s house including amateur fictional thrillers shot with his friends and graceful dances of the renowned figure Ram Gopal. Instead of a nostalgic re-presentation of the past, the video creates montages of everyday personal life strung together with personal anecdotes that indicate a precision about the domesticated use of technology. Through its enigmatic grainy images, Straight 8 evokes an enticing realm of memory and imagination that governs the relations technology, creativity, and ordinary lives of people.

I Saw a God Dance has a serendipitous beginning that take us all the way back to 1938, when Tom D’aguiar filmed the Indian choreographer and dancer Ram Gopal in his youth, dancing on the terrace of his large bungalow in Bangalore. Abraham found this footage by accident in a plastic bag in D’aguiar’s house (on whom Abraham made her film Straight , and she revisits the deteriorating footage of Ram Gopal ten years later to embark on a different exploration of another man and his professional and personal quests. Bringing together the heavily blemished 8mm footage with photographs, documents, reviews, audio, and recent interviews with those who knew him, I Saw a God Dance conjures Ram Gopal’s life from disparate archival fragments.

En Route or of a Thousand Moons presents a speckled and staccato view of post colonial India’s visual histories. Removed from contexts of their time and space, these images acts as apparitions of India’s past that remain hidden in the obsolescence of their material life. The film puts us face to face with a private world of picnics, birthday parties, and interior lives, worlds that been hidden and preserved in deteriorating and aged film, offering a meditation of fragmented and alternative view of India’s histories.