The Cinematheque@TheLab program for the month of February explores a series of animated films that deal with memory and revisit history from a personal perspective. Within the varying animation techniques explored in these films, memories become objects of visual documentation intertwined with fictional and artistic elements, with each reel of animated images becoming a testimonial archive to the stories and memories they present.
Through poetic and dreamy sequences, the Russian classic Tale of Tales attempts to structure itself as a human memory as the story unfolds. The American film It’s Such a Beautiful Day, which took six years to produce, is a trilogy that retells through memories the life events, struggles, illness, and eventual death of the film’s main character.
Finally, the film This Magnificent Cake! takes us back to colonial Africa in the late 19th century where the stories of five different characters intersect in a world of realism, surrealism, and absurdity, despite their separate ambitions, dreams, and failures.
Films are screened in their original language with English subtitles. Each screening will be followed by a discussion session. Participants are expected to attend all sessions.
Wednesday 15 February: Tale of Tales (1979, Yuri Norstein, 29 min)
Wednesday 22 February: It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012, Don Hertzfeldt, 62 min)
Wednesday 1 March: This Magnificent Cake! (2018, Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels, 44 min)
Cinematheque@TheLab is a film program that consists of private screenings coupled with critical discussions, assembled and led by groups of Arab film researchers and curators. The program centers around a large archive of Arab and international films that is constantly growing and developing as part of a collective effort. The project aims to function as a meeting point for film researchers and writers as well as film critics by inviting them to organize regular events of film programs, discussion sessions, workshops, and various screenings. Our mission is to provide a common space for an exchange of cultural knowledge related to the art of the moving image and to delve into the intersections between film as medium and other forms of artistic expression.