Kran Film at BOZAR, June 22 and 23
BOZAR – Carte Blanche: KRAN FILM
22 and 23 June
Bozar – Brussels Centre for Fine Arts / Studio
Rue Ravenstein, Brussels 1ooo
Kran Film is presenting a selection of films by its members produced from 2010. Out of 9 short films we are screening 7 Belgian premiers by filmmakers from Lebanon, USA, Egypt, Belgium and Denmark. The programme which will be on screen at Bozar on 22 and 23 June is divided in two categories: documentary/narrative and art/experimental. Although different in approach, all the films in a critical way observe social, political and cultural actualities and their local expressions in Greenland, UK and Armenia, either in Alexandria, Brussels and Cairo, touching upon issue of memory, otherness, migration, art, economy and personal history.
Programme
I – 22.06. 2012, at 20pm
Total duration of the programme: 79min
1. Echoes (Belgian premiere) by Ivalo Frank
2010, color, sound, 24’, HD
Honorable mention at Los Angeles International Film Festival 2011
the Best Documentary – London Underground film festival 2011
English spoken, English subtitles
2. Side Walk by Binevsa Berivan
2011, color, sound, 17’
Kurdish and French spoken, English subtitles
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3. Fifth Column (Belgian premiere) by Vatche Boulghourjian
2010, color, sound, 22’
Cannes Film Festival competition 2010:
3rd award Prize by the Cinéfondation, La Sélection
Armenian spoken, English subtitles
4. Blue Dive (Belgian premiere) by Mostafa Youssef
2011, color, sound, 16’
Selection: Film Festival Rotterdam 2012
Arabic spoken, English subtitles
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II – 23. 06. 2012 at 20pm
Total duration of the programme: 65min
1. The Corridor (Brussels premiere) by Sarah Vanagt
2010, color, sound, HD, 6’45”
Award: 1st at the Courtisane Film Festival – Gent in 2011
english spoken
2. Sound from the Hallways (Belgian premiere) by Lasse Lau
2012, color, sound, 25’
no dialogue
3. Populus Tremula (Belgian premiere) by Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida
2010, 16mm, silent, 9’
Selection: Rotterdam Film Festival 2011
4. Rice city (Belgian premiere) by Sherif El Azma
2010, color, sound, 19’
Arabic spoken, English subtitles
5. Disco (Belgian premiere) by Raed Yassin
2010, color, 5’35”
no dialogue
Films
22.06. 2012, at 20pm
(79 min)
Echoes (Belgian premiere)
by Ivalo Frank
2010, color, sound, 24’, HD
Honorable mention at Los Angeles International Film Festival 2011
the Best Documentary – London Underground film festival 2011
ECHOES is a film about the American presence in Greenland, about abandoned airbases and radar stations from WWII. It’s also a love story about two people who have met in the stunning landscape of history, in the sounds of drum dance and music.
Echoes captured a kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of the vast and unnervingly beautiful east Greenlandic vista, with the decaying remnants of mankind’s greatest moral and ideological struggles – and utilizes the wonderfully unique visual and aural representations of Greenland as a canvas on which to paint the echoes of history and time.
Side Walk
by Berivan Binevsa
2011, color, sound, 17’
This is the story about Mémo, a Kurdish immigrant living with his wife in the basement of a Brussels house. To avoid eviction from Belgium, Mémo remains secluded in his basement, peeping on passers-by through the window and waiting for his wife to return.
In this dance of feet walking in front of his basement window, Mémo finds himself witness to stories and daily dramas without having the opportunity to take a stand.
Fifth Column (Belgian premiere)
by Vatche Boulghourjian
2010, color, sound, 22’
Cannes Film Festival competition 2010:
3rd award Prize by the Cinéfondation, La Sélection
Set in the Armenian quarter of Burj Hammoud, Fifth Column tells the story of a young boy, Hrag, and his unemployed father. A poignant scene of the film shows the boy begging an old shoemaker in a decrepit shop to give his father back his job. However, the old craft of making shoes is no longer in demand… The tools used for making shoes are contrasted with the gun the boy carries – instruments of creativity being replaced by the instrument of death.
Fifth Column stands out for its haunting portrayal of cultural and economic desolation and hopelessness. It explores the problem of a new generation that can no longer understand the importance of heritage; it explores the meaning of culture as it impacts both individuals and the community to which they belong.
Blue Dive (Belgian premiere)
by Mostafa Youssef
2011, color, sound, 16’
Selection: Film Festival Rotterdam 2012
As Selim, a diver bewitched by the sea, dies on a hospital bed, and as Mokhtar, a failed painter, contemplates on the color of death, Dalia, a nearby nurse, remembers her father’s drowning. Set in the Mediterranean Alexandria, this is a story of a brief encounter which compares death to the sea and life in contemporary Egypt.
* * *
23.06. 2012, at 20pm
( 64,78 min)
The Corridor (Brussels premiere)
by Sarah Vanagt
2010, color, sound, HD, 6’45”
Award: 1st at the Courtisane Film Festival – Gent in 2011
For 5 days Sarah Vanagt followed a donkey during its weekly visits to old people in nursing homes in England. From home to home, from room to room. Time and again the donkey was welcomed warmly, with greetings, songs, strokes, childhood stories, poems, and laughter, until the donkey entered the room of Norbert, a man who lost his ability to speak.
Even though Vanagt initially followed the donkey‘s steps in search of reminiscences brought about by the animal’s mute presence, she came home with an altogether different film. While editing, the film became shorter and shorter, as if the words that had accompanied the donkey’s visits got in the way. What is left is perhaps a bas-relief disguised as a painting, disguised as a film.
The donkey visits to residential homes are an initiative of The Donkey Sanctuary in Sidmouth, England.
Sound from the Hallways (Belgian premiere)
by Lasse Lau
2012, color, sound, 25’
With his latest film Lasse Lau revisits history at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and challenges concepts of historicism and museology from a time of the early 20th century when history was still seen as universal, and man believed in its abundant truth, to times where several histories challenge each other for the semblance of reality. The film in addition documents the atmosphere in one of the must classic and visually dense and unique museums in the world before it becomes history.
“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”
(From Walter Benjamin “On the concept of history”)
Populus Tremula (Belgian première)
By Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida
2010, 16mm transferred on DVD, silent, 9’
Selection: Rotterdam Film Festival 2011
Populus Tremula originates from artistic research into Swedish “Match King” Ivar Kreuger (1880–1932), whom The Economist in 2007 called “the world’s greatest financial swindler” and who was the founder of Svenska Tändsticksaktiebolaget (the Swedish Matchstick Corporation), today called Swedish Match. Both factory locations have been active since the 19th century, and while the manufacturing process is now almost fully automated, beyond the removal of human labor, it has changed little since the early 20th century.
While the film follows the linear progression of match manufacture from timber to shrink-wrapped package ready for export, a series of superimposed textual interventions point to the ability of both capital and the nation-state to legislate and assert the monopoly capitalist’s desire to not only exploit natural resources but to appear to surpass the power of nature through myth.
Rice city (Belgian premiere)
by Sherif El Azma
2010, 19’
In an old-fashioned apartment, in an atmosphere of tension and unease, located somewhere between the real, the uncanny and a state of dream-like delirium, suggestive symbolism and insinuations fester in dark corners of rooms where Rice City unfolds. A self-conscious young woman, anxious, haunts the corridors; we encroach on a young black man lounging in his bed, building a city from blocks; an older man played by Count Federico de Wardal, recounts a story of selling rice to his friend, who appears as a ghost. A tight lipped scene around a dinner table, with its ripples of tension spilling beyond the bounds of this exquisitely shot film noir featuring an equally beautiful soundtrack, transfixing, full of suspense.
Disco (Belgian premiere)
By Raed Yassin
2010, 5’30”, VHS, silent
“Disco tells the story of the artists’ father, a disco-addict and a fashion designer who leaves his family to find work abroad, eventually becoming a film star in the Egyptian horror industry. This quickly spirals into a fiction, however, in which the father becomes Egyptian film star Mahmoud Yassin (who shares the director’s family name). The interplay of image and text explores a generation’s fascination with celebrity, forging a story about abandonment, voyage, longing, and stardom.”
