ecopolis

WALTZ WITH BASHIR

One night at a bar, an old friend tells director Ari Folman about a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. Every night, the same number of beasts. The two men conclude that there’s a connection to their Israeli Army mission in the first Lebanon War of the early eighties. Ari is surprised that he can’t remember a thing anymore about that period of his life.
Intrigued by this riddle, he decides to meet and interview old friends and comrades around the world. He needs to discover the truth about that time and about himself. As Ari delves deeper and deeper into the mystery, his memory begins to creep up in surreal images …

In Madrid, from the 5th to the 14th of May, 2008

In 2007, the Rencontres Internationales, which initially took place in Paris and Berlin, opened up to a third city: Madrid. This event now constitutes a unique artistic and cultural platform in Europe for artists, professional networks and different audiences.

The Rencontres Internationales reflects the specificities and convergences of art practices between new cinema and contemporary art, explores emerging art practices and their critical purposes and allows this necessary time when points of view meet and are exchanged.

The event wish to contribute to a reflection on our contemporary culture of image via a demanding program open to everyone.

Download Programme 2008

L’AGE D’OR (The Golden Age)

France, 1930

Director: Luis Buñuel

Production: Black and white, 35mm; running time: 60 minutes (some French sources list 80 minutes). Released 28 November 1930, Paris. Filmed in Studios Billancourt-Epinay, France. Producer: Charles Vicomte de Noailles; screenplay: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí; photography: Albert Duverger; editor: Luis Buñuel; production designer: Pierre Schilzneck; original music: Van Parys, montage of extracts from Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Debussy, and Wagner.
Cast: Lya Lys (The Woman); Gaston Modot (The Man); Max Ernst (Bandit Chief); Pierre Prévert (Péman, a Bandit); Caridad de Labaerdesque; Madame Noizet; Liorens Artigas; Duchange Ibanez; Lionel Salem; Pancho Cossio; Valentine Hugo; Marie Berthe Ernst; Jacques B. Brunius; Simone Cottance; Paul Eluard; Manuel Angeles Ortiz; Juan Esplandio; Pedro Flores; Juan Castañe; Joaquin Roa; Pruna; Xaume de Maravilles.

The Retrospective of the 58th Berlin International Film Festival will honor Spanish director Luis Buñuel, who died in 1983, by presenting a comprehensive program of his works.

Luis Buñuel Retrospective will commence and conclude at the Volksbühne with two special presentations focusing on Buñuel’s famous directorial debut: his silent film Un chien andalou (France 1929) is to be screened four times, and each time it will be accompanied live by different works of contemporary music.

On February 9, 2008, Un chien andalou will be shown alongside another masterpiece of surrealistic film, Jean Epstein’s La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher, France 1928), on which Buñuel worked as assistant director. Both films will be presented in restored versions and accompanied live by Dutch musicians Maud Nelissen, Merima Kljuco and Frido ter Beek. With their improvisation, they will provide the proper acoustic environment for the intense and poetic cinematic worlds of Buñuel and Epstein.

On February 17, 2008, the Berlinale Kinotag, the 21 musicians of the Spanish Grup Instrumental BCN216 will approach Buñuel’s debut film in three successive screenings of Un chien andalou at the Volksbühne. Under the programmatic title 3 chiens, each composition has its own conception: Clonic Mutations by Catalan musician Sergio López, an acoustic “demystification” of Buñuel’s classic work, full of black humor; Szénario by Mauricio Kagel, a composition for the film from 1981/82; and Las siete vidas de un gato by Martín Matalón, a free association of images and sounds.

In addition to Buñuel’s 32 directorial works, the Retrospective will present a program of eight films to introduce his contributions as assistant director, producer and screenwriter. Buñuel worked for the first time as assistant director on Epstein’s film Mauprat (France 1926), in which he also played two small roles – a monk and a guardsman.

After the Berlinale, the programme will go on tour: partners in this cooperation are the Österreichisches Filmmmuseum Wien, which will present the program immediately following the Festival; and the Filmmuseum München, which will begin screening the films in March 2008.
From February 7 onwards, 3sat will augment the Retrospective with the film series “Der Zauber des Surrealen. Luis Buñuel und die Folgen”.

Michel Gondry, picks his favorite YouTube videos at the Sundance Film Festival

Sundance Institute

Founded by Robert Redford in 1981, Sundance Institute is dedicated to the development of artists of independent vision and to the exhibition of their work. The Sundance Film Festival, a major program of Sundance Institute held each January, is considered the premier showcase for American and international independent film. The Documentary Film Program provides year-round support to nonfiction filmmakers through the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund and programs that nurture growth and innovation in documentary storytelling. The Film Music Program supports and nurtures emerging film composers and inspires new ways for independent filmmakers to approach music in their films. The Institute maintains The Sundance Collection at UCLA, a unique archive of independent film.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is a mesmerizing new thriller from filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, based on the acclaimed novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning American master, Cormac McCarthy.
The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. Featuring a cast that includes Academy Award®-winner Tommy Lee Jones (“The Fugitive,” “Men in Black”), Josh Brolin (“Grindhouse”), Academy Award®-nominee Javier Bardem (“The Sea Inside”), Academy Award®-nominee Woody Harrelson (“The People Vs. Larry Flynt”) and Kelly Macdonald (“Trainspotting”), NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is written for the screen and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, produced by Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, and executive produced by Robert Graf and Mark Roybal.
The story begins when Llewelyn Moss (BROLIN) finds a pickup truck surrounded by a sentry of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back.
When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law – in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell (JONES) – can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers – in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives (BARDEM) – the film simultaneously strips down the American crime drama and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible, and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.

At the heart of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN are its characters – men and women who inhabit a rapidly changing West – a place where lawlessness has led to a brave new world of international drug running and where the old rules no longer seem to apply. Against this backdrop, Sheriff Bell becomes a main lynchpin of the story – a stoic, philosophical law man with a dry-as-bone sense of humor and a rock-solid moral foundation who is bedeviled by the advent of the drug trade’s new breed of criminal and the violence it has brought to the land that he loves. Astonished by his new reality, Sheriff Bell represents an acute, heartbroken yearning for the more honorable way things used to be.
“The movie is, no surprise given the title of the book, in part about Sheriff Bell’s perspective on time going by, on aging and on things changing,” says Joel Coen.

Brian De Palma (1940, Newark, New Jersey) is an American film director, best known for directing the Al Pacino classic Scarface, and the Academy Award-winning film The Untouchables. Brian De Palma’s Redacted, a prizewinner in Venice and a polarizing selection at film festivals in Telluride, Toronto and New York opens today in New York and selected cities.

What De Palma has done is what is called a “mockumentary”, a fictional film done in a rage and fear documentary style. Not much a traditional plot, the film fictionalizes and dramatizes the Al-Mahmudiyah killings that took place outside Baghdad in March 2006, where five U.S. soldiers gang-raped and murdered a 14 year old girl, after first killing her parents and younger sister.

“Redacted” means to select or adapt (as by obscuring or removing sensitive information) for publication or release. Mr. De Palma’s premise, implicit in his choice of title and stated in many interviews and public pronouncements, is that the truth about Iraq has been edited and obscured, kept away from (not only) the American public.

Starting with the HD video diary of PFC Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), the view shifts soon to his platoon: Their mission is to guard the check points. The film ends with photos of the carnage in Iraq, just to get the point across the crime of supporting a country that in the last 24 months killed 2,000 Iraqis, and few were proven to be insurgents.

An unrivaled master of cinematic reality, De Palma’s film remixes raw images and videos culled from surveillance cameras, cellphones and Web sites. As he would like to say that the media environment is the real battlefield of contemporary, where everyone is, at least potentially, a fighter.

Written and directed by Brian De Palma; with: Izzy Diaz (Angel Salazar), Daniel Stewart Sherman (B. B. Rush), Patrick Carroll (Reno Flake), Mike Figueroa (Sgt. Jim Ross), Ty Jones (Master Sgt. Sweet), Rob Devaney (Lawyer McCoy), Kel O’Neill (Gabe Blix), Zahara Al Zubaidi (Farah) and Bridget Barkan (Judy McCoy). HDNet Films and Magnolia Pictures.

Quick talk with Chris Paine, writer and director of the film-documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car“, where he investigates about the launch and the next removal of the battery electric vehicle from the market, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the 1990.

LB: can you tell in few words the story of “Who Killed the Electric Car”?
CP: California regulators force car companies to make thousands of very cool electric cars cars. Despite their many advantages and technological success, cars are taken back and destroyed after five years on the road. FIlm investigates what happened as a ‘murder mystery’ to explore the challenges of change especially with the oil industry and the car industry used to making money with non-electric cars.

LB: how can green movement can win if politics is supported by corporations?
CP: Green movement depends on people power (whether motivated by ideals or fear) and simple economic facts of green being more efficient especially as oil runs out. Corporate power must be challenged and ultimately people run them so people to people contacdt is key.

LB: What about Cinemambiente, did you like it? Which documentary did stranged you more?
I liked China Blue. Cinemambiente was terrific.

LB: I know that you’ve been many years to Burning Man, can you describe the experience?
CP: A place for creative and radical self expression, experimentation, and community. My artistic “new year” and a lot of fun.

What crosses your mind when you hear someone talking about prostitution?

Prostitutes in the Bolivian city of El Alto sewed their lips together as part of a hunger strike to demand that the mayor reopen brothels and bars ordered closed after violent protests by residents last week. “We are fighting for the right to work and for our families’ survival,” Lily Cortez, leader of the El Alto Association of Nighttime Workers, told local television via Reuters.

“It’s not only us owners and the sex workers who are affected, there are thousands of waiters, cooks, bartenders, taxi drivers and street vendors who will be without income,” said Ramiro Orellana, spokesman for the business group. Prostitution in Bolivia is legal but pimping is outlawed.

Hunger strike in El Alto. REUTERS/David Mercado

The commercial exploitation of the human body is nothing new. Italian Politics stressed hypothesis to build a SexDrive Park. A sort of drive-through service, placed on fast and anonymous ways like Cristoforo Colombo in Rome, targeted at truckers and sex travelers. The government’s focus is looking at improving protection of prostitutes and clients, exclusion of uncontrolled activities of streetwalkers on city streets, places of cult, hospitals and publics places attended by underage.

Contrary to the urban picture of prostitution painted by the social recognition of sexual entertainment as sex work, the violence and the trafficking of human beings for sexual exploitation and slave labour have become two of the fastest growing worldwide problems in recent years. Victims do not agree to be trafficked or sold: they are tricked, lured by false promises, or forced into it in order to work.

The harm of prostitution is graphically evident in its health consequences. (Not only) women in prostitution suffer the same injuries that women subjected to other forms of violence against women endure, including bruises, broken bones, black eyes, concussions, and loss of consciousness. The reproductive health effects include a high incidence of unwanted pregnancies, miscarriage, multiple abortions and infertility. In addition to HIV/AIDS, chronic pelvic pain and pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) from sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are alarmingly high among women in prostitution.

In May, 1998, Sweden became one the of the first countries to prohibit the purchase of sexual services with punishments of fines or imprisonment (Swedish Government Offices, 1998). In so doing, Sweden has declared that prostitution is not a desirable economic and labor sector. Another example : Venezuela ruled that “prostitution cannot be considered work because it lacks the basic elements of dignity and social justice.”

Prostitution is a sign of economic marginalization and social inequality. Prostitution institutionalizes the buying and selling of (not only) women as commodities in the marketplace. For example, Second Life “Khannea” took her first client on her very first day in Second Life, and since then has been busy working. Khannea charges 750 Lindens (about $3 at current exchange rates) per half hour “of varied activity,” but clients generally tip more. On one occasion a man in game paid her 5,000 Lindens.

David LaChapelle, Lil’ Kim, Keep it Real, photograph for Atlantic Records, May 13th, 1999, C-print

While the most invisible part of the sex industry is the buyer and his role and responsibility in creating the demand for prostitution. Italy allowed brothels to operate legally until 1959. Italy now provides a certain amount of social protection and laws to stop pimps exploiting prostitutes. Giulio Amato recently purposed to serve legal papers in clients’ homes in order to shame them. The main problem is a socio-cultural censoring of women’s sexuality, and culture’s objectification of the fe-male body. Prostitution expresses the worth of all human bodies.

A recent example of Italian culture body censoring was the Nolita campaign. Shot by Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani, the image shows anorexic French actress Isabelle Caro, for Italian fashion label Nolita. The image was published in newspapers and featured on billboards during Milan fashion week. Then it was banned. Toscani called the ban “censorship” and said he was considering legal action. I call “censorship” the image itself: a pretty woman in a standard position, which witness an essential advertising technique to accomplish the (sex) industry based on the exploitation of a (female) body. The problem is (not only) the stigmatised body of the under-weight model. And the the solution is (not only) the medical certificates for under-weight models, attesting their good health from doctors with expertise in recognising eating disorders.

Sex industry and sex worker is also a way to neutralize the term prostitution. Of course legalization would create a whole regulatory framework: a whole regulatory set of systems for regulating who’s involved, how they are involved, health issues, access to healthcare, how to deal with the police, how to get services around sexual assault or domestic violence. As ministry Amato said “prostitution is a complexion to deal with in light of social security” un elemento complesso da gestire in un’ottica di sicurezza sociale”

Soon we will end up with prostitution as Social workers. You will need a license, certification, or registration. The rules for getting these things will depend on the State where the worker lives. This certification will make it easier to get some jobs. Pimps will become businessmen and the buyers simply customers. Soon we will end up in the perfect paradox: you will prostitute yourself to become a legal one. Let’s strike immediatly for your (social) rights.

Mamma Roma is a 1962 film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Prostitute Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani), tries to start a new life selling vegetables with her 16 year old son Ettore (Ettore Garofolo). When he later finds out she was a prostitute he succumbs to the dark side with petty crime and goes to prison. This project of self-gentrification and of “urbanizing” an illiterate provincial youth is doomed, not least by the reappearance of Mamma Roma’s old lover and pimp, Carmine—quite literally “a force from the Past”—who twice compels her to return to the streets she walked for thirty years.