Thank you to the UAW for trusting me with your lives. These are very personal, painful, intimate details and stories of everything they are still going through right now. It is an honor to show my work to serve the United Auto Workers in this country. — LaToya Ruby Frazier*
I think the desire to make films has always been in me… [But] more than making a film, it was to make an artistic gesture that was important to me. I wanted to create images, a story, and a tone that resembled myself…
I was 15 and it was the summer before starting high school. Even though I was happy at school, with my friends and my family, I felt a certain melancholy. I decided to write about it; about this certain age when you are not totally a child anymore, but not really an adult yet. I feel this feeling is universal and I was living it while writing the movie. To me, being sincere was the only thing that mattered. — Suzanne Lindon
SPRING BLOSSOM / SEIZE PRINTEMPS—Lindon’s directorial debut—is a Paris fantasia about a young, awkward, intelligent adolescent (played by the director) transitioning out of childhood. Bored with the vapid banalities of her peers, she prefers to get lost in books by Boris Vian and dream of musical interludes on the streets of Montmartre. She is struck in particular by the milieu surrounding the Théâtre del’Atelier, and falls in love with a disengaged actor in his thirties (Arnaud Valois)—or at least in love with the idea of him.
The film is now streaming as part of the virtual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema program, presented by Film at Lincoln Center. See link below for details.
FAITHFUL—a swift, heartfelt procédurale based on Joseph Andras’ debut novel De nos frères blessés (Of Our WoundedBrothers, 2016)—tells the story of Fernand Iveton (played by Vincent Lacoste), a French national in 1950s Algeria. Atypical for Europeans of his time—he was a member of the local Communist Party and a supporter of the FLN—he numbered Arabs among his closest friends and abhorred the murderous racism of the occupying French forces.* Perhaps too much of a humanist to be a true revolutionary, Iveton participated in a 1956 plot to destroy a power station.
As filmed by Hélier Cisterne, FAITHFUL jumps between Iveton’s first Parisian encounters with his wife Hélène (Vicky Krieps), his life in Algiers with fellow activist and childhood friend Henri Maillot (Yoann Zimmer), and his trial for treason, subsequent imprisonment, and ultimate fate.
As part of this year’s virtual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema festival, FAITHFUL is streaming nationwide. See link below for details.
*During the period of the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), the FLN—Front de libérationnationale—was the nationalist movement advocating for the removal of the French colonizers.
Jessica Emmanuel presents ‘kwirē/, a new solo, multimedia dance work that “considers a dystopian world where the majority of historical and ancestral information has been destroyed.”
The wealthy have left the planet and few humans survived. A dance and sound retrieval system has been created to help us restore our connection to our memories and the history that is stored in our DNA. Guided by Emmanuel’s ancestors, she gathers and collects information, nurtures the soil and roots that are used to restore the earth for those left behind.*
Filmed on the REDCAT stage and available to watch this week online, the work takes place in a sculptural installation created in collaboration between Emmanuel and Trulee Hall.
From top: Jessica Emmanuel, ‘kwirē/; Emmanuel in Reflections of the Vastness Within at TheChronicles of LA: Chapter 2:Self, 2018; Emmanuel in Trilogy: Witnessing Her + Decolonize That Mind + Proliferation of Joy, Teatr Studio, Warsaw, 2018; Emmanuel in Poor Dog Group, Dionysia (aka Satyr Atlas), Getty Villa, 2011.
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