BEAUTIFUL, STRANGE AND NEW
Dir.: Eluned Zoe Aiano, Petra Belc, Gwen Descamps
2015 | 7 min
Romania
A short visual meditation on the city of Bucharest, tradition as a descent into monstrousness and beauty and its history as inscribed in the city’s architecture and embodied through its traditions. The (contemporary) exterior and interior walls of Bucharest’s houses and buildings are treated like skin - the city’s tissue that remembers and separates its inhabitants from the outer world. The burden of the past is depicted through a process of monstrous transformation. The film was inspired by the folk tale “Youth without Age and Life without Death” and made collaboratively in a stream of consciousness fashion, incorporating found footage, locations and props.
In Romanian with English and Latvian subtitles.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the directors.
Eluned Zoë Aiano is a filmmaker, editor and translator with a background in Visual Anthropology and specialisation in Central and Eastern Europe. She is currently editing Flotacija, her first documentary feature, and is also a regular contributor to the East European Film Bulletin as a reviewer and essayist.
Petra Belc is a writer, researcher and independent cultural worker. She holds an MA in philosophy and comparative religion, degree in Women's studies and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb.
Gwen Descamps is a Marseille based visual artist. His expression media vary from film making to photography, graphic or performing art and installations and his current research concerns gender and identity.
UNITY: DRESS-SCAPES OF ACCRA
Dir.: Mara Lin Vasser
2016 | 36 min
Netherlands
Shooting location: Ghana
Unity: Dress-scapes of Accra is an ethnographic film about African fashion in the capital of Ghana. The comeback of African print seems to be emerging in the fashion system of Accra. While following Allan, a fashion designer and his wife Cynthia, this mosaic film shows the great diversity of tailor-made fashion and hybrid styles; the ways the African wear is used and the expression of culture by wearing the African prints.
The film gives an interesting overview of dress-scapes in Accra, but also highlights beautiful details by focusing on a few participants who show the mixture of different materials, cuts and styles in a creative and free atmosphere. In this way the film is not only observational, it gives people space to tell their story and show they are proud of the African wear. During de film the process of sowing a dress shows not only the marriage of fabric & design, tradition & creativity, but also of husband & wife.
In English, Gha and Twi with English and Latvian subtitles.
Mara Lin Visser is a visual anthropologist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam. For her MA in Visual Anthropology, Mara Lin went to Ghana for her fieldwork. Her research resulted in the film Unity: Dress-scapes of Accra (2016), which has been screened at several film festivals (RAI, Ethnofest and won Best Student Award at SVA). At the moment Mara Lin is doing different academic and cultural projects with audiovisual means and methods. She’s part of the collective ethnovision, which aims to bridge the knowledge-gap between the academics and a bigger audience using the power of audiovisual research methods.