Afrique 50

René Vautier
,
FR
,
1950
,
16mm
,
b&w
,
17'

“L’Empire t’attend. Engage-toi dans la coloniale. Mali, Haute Volta, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso… terrains de chasse de l’Occident, champs expérimentaux des guerres coloniales, raciales et économiques. D’hier et d’aujourd’hui. Jusqu’à ce que les révoltes – voix isolées, pellicules volées, ou choeurs collectifs – brûlent l’arrogance des puissants, grondent et résonnent dans l’Histoire. D’hier. Et d’aujourd’hui.“ (SG)

“The Empire is waiting. Get involved in the colony. Mali, the High Volta, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Burkina Faso... hunting playgrounds for the West, experimental fields for colonial, racial and economical wars. From yesterday to today, and until the revolts – isolated voices, stolen films, collective choirs – burn the arrogance of the powerful, with a roar resonating in History.” (SG)

A caça

Manoel de Oliveira
,
PT
,
1964
,
16mm
,
b&w
,
21'

“Have the wolves ever howled ? 

On hunting, without fire weapons nor victims, and quicksand as conditions of common living.

Fear, destruction, the “everyone against everyone war”, mythical and dreadful nature, act here as conceptual lures, presenting the world as it doesn’t work: it’s always constructed. Men have to face themselves. 

Of a film facing dictatorship.

Of revolution as gesture.” (SG)

Prigionieri della guerra

Angela Ricci-Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian
,
IT
,
2004
,
colour
,
71'

“To resist. On the frontlines.

Soldier-men tracked down, hunted, prisoners, exhibited as trophy, deportations and working camps in Siberia and Austria, cities in ruins, scars, mass graves... Prigionieri della guerra is the first chapter of the “trilogy of war” devoted to the first world war as a “forgotten war”. Or how to wake up from the dream of an “European era”: industralised mass massacres, fascism, control societies, violence inflicted to nature, failure of classical humanism. 

On the burning becoming of memory.” (SG)