Wednesday, January 15, 2025
FAMILY ALBUMS
Cinéma Moderne
| 7:00 PM: | Lost Chapters |
| (8:20 PM): | Merman |
| (9:45 PM): | UNDR |
Cinema, more than just a landscape of dreams, stands tall as a landmark to memory. In this program, three films imagine the archive in different ways. What constitutes a history? Is it merely visible through first person documents, or can it be measured in the realm of the unseen, through dreams? What about environments? Can the outline of a mountain tell us about the people who live and have lived on that land? What happens to our memories when archives are burned or bombed? What happens to the people? Three radically different approaches ask the audience to imagine different ways of remembering history and the role archives play in constructing the world.
- The screening will be followed by a debate moderated by Dennis Vetter (film critic, co-founder and programmer at Berlin’s Critic Week) with film critics Elijah Baron and Alice Michaud-Lapointe, filmmaker and archivist Chantal Partamian and interdisciplinary artist Rémi Belliveau.
TRIPLE BILL
Lost Chapters
Lorena Alvarado
67 minutes, Venezuela / United States, 2024
Spanish, with English subtitles
North American Premiere
After years living abroad, Ena returns to Venezuela with a fragmented sense of self. At home, she finds her grandmother losing her grasp of reality. Meanwhile, her father spends his days looking for rare books in an attempt to safeguard the country’s literary past. When Ena discovers a mysterious postcard inside a book, she embarks on a search across Caracas to uncover a forgotten writer, in this familial stroll and remarkable debut reminiscent at once of the intimacy of Akerman and the labyrinthine qualities of Borges.
With Ena Alvarado, Ignacio Alvarado, Adela Rodríguez
Festivals: Locarno 2024, FIDMarseille 2024
Merman
Ana Lungu
85 minutes, Romania, 2024
Romanian, with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A female voice haunts a male gaze in this archival documentary about three men who capture images of women, in Romania, from WWII until the Revolution: an engineer filming his daughter, a music professor documenting his family and an aristocrat capturing the summer spent with his wife during wartime. Through an obsessively researched portrait of obsessive people, Merman paints a picture of a country in the era of totalitarianism as inextricable from the gaze of men, and the everyday gestures of people seeking to escape from both.
Festivals: FIDMarseille 2024
UNDR
Kamal Aljafari
15 minutes, Palestine / Germany, 2024
No dialogue
Canadian Premiere
In Kamal Aljafari’s companion piece to A Fidai Film, archival footage show a landscape at once modern and ancient, imagined but painfully real, where toiling farmers and playful children are interrupted by dynamite blasts meant to reshape the territory and appropriate Palestinian history.
Festivals: IFFR 2024, Karlovy Vary 2024, BFI London 2024
