A film night with three filmmakers from Berlin
Three filmmakers - Shirin Sabahi, Zora Rux and Eliza Petkova - currently fellows at Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto, present their films. The filmmakers will be available for conversation afterwards.
| 15:45 |
doors open |
| 16:00 – ca.17:30 |
"SECOND THOUGHTS" Directed by Zora Rux |
| |
Exchange in Intermission (30 min) |
| 18:00 – ca.19:00 |
"BORROWED SCENERY"
"MOUTHFUL" Directed by Shirin Sabahi |
| |
Exchange in Intermission (30 min) |
| 19:30 – ca.21:00 |
"ZHALEIKA" Directed by Eliza Petkova |
| |
Exchange (30 min) |
16:00 – ca.17:30
SECOND THOUGHTS
Directed by Zora Rux, feature, 85 min.,
German with Japanese and English subtitles.
Completely overwhelmed when her boyfriend Julian proposes to her, Marie escapes to the countryside in order to collect her thoughts. But instead of finding peace, she is blindsided by her personified thoughts, her "thought people". Be it her mother listing baby names, a melancholic poetry-composing lady in a sari, or her ex-boyfriend climbing from trees – everyone is talking to her incessantly. Things get really complicated when Julian shows up - with his own "thought people" in tow. A surrealistic story that coherently and humorously explores the resilience of a relationship and the pursuit of the true self.
18:00 – ca.19:00
BORROWED SCENERY - 借景 Shakkei
Directed by Shirin Sabahi, documentary, 15 min., 2017,
Japanese/English with English subtitles.
MOUTHFUL
Directed by Shirin Sabahi, documentary, 36 min., 2018,
Persian/Japanese with English subtitles.
In 1977, the Japanese sculptor Noriyuki Haraguchi (1946—2020) was invited to install an iteration of his sculpture Matter and Mind—a rectangular steel basin filled with used engine oil—at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA), after having shown it in the same year in documenta 6 in Germany. Situated in the museum’s central rotunda, visitors have over the years turned the sculpture into an inadvertent wishing well, throwing coins and other things into it as they descend the building’s signature spiral ramp. The history and curious afterlife of Haraguchi’s minimalist sculpture are the subject of Shirin Sabahi’s films, who saw the sculpture in the museum while growing up in Tehran.
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Forty years on, Sabahi met Haraguchi at his studio in Iwate, Japan. Inspired by this encounter, BORROWED SCENERY (2017) is a quiet portrait of Haraguchi, discussing his aesthetic philosophy often aligned with the mono-ha art movement in Japan, his choice of materials, and the story of his commission for TMoCA. The film is named after shakkei (借景), an East Asian principle of integrating the surrounding landscape into the composition of a garden, a site-specificity integral to Haraguchi’s oil pools.
In MOUTHFUL (2018), Haraguchi, upon the invitation of Sabahi, returns to TMoCA to supervise the restoration of his work. Unobtrusively documenting the process, the film encloses the sculpture, which itself holds an ongoing assortment of keepsakes. Tapping into art’s potential to catalyze events otherwise deemed unnecessary or impossible, the film production became both the means and the end of the restoration project.
Together Sabahi’s films hint at the proximities of art to religion and other belief systems, and suggest how artistic research can engage with the work of another artist, the institutional and material history of a nation, and the internationalism that existed prior to the current conditions of globalization.
ZHALEIKA
Directed by Eliza Petkova, feature, 92 min., 2016,
Bulgarian with Japanese and English subtitles.
Lora, a 17 years old girl, has to deal with her father’s death. In the small Bulgarian village where time seems to stand still, her family and the villagers expect her to give herself over to grief. From now on, she must wear black, not listen to any music and observe various mourning rituals. However, Lora wants to keep on enjoying her youth but her desire to live a normal life is disrupted by the judgment of others, who force her to play the role of an orphan.
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