Video parcours

3>11/10 – 12:00>22:00 – Kaaitheater

Liu Wei (CN), Wangque De Yitian (A Day to Remember)
video | 2005 | 13 min. | Chinese spoken | English subtitles

On 4th June 2005 the film-maker Liu Wei took his camera to Beijing University and the Square of Heavenly Peace. He asked students and other young people what day it was. Many answered that it was the 16th anniversary of the student uprising, but they refused to answer any more questions. A serene documentary about a stubborn taboo.

Shelly Silver (US), Former East/Former West
video | 1994 | 62 min. | German & English spoken | English subtitles | courtesy Argos (Brussels)

The New York film-maker Shelly Silver (1957) did hundreds of interviews in the streets of Berlin two years after the reunification of Germany. For 45 years, people on opposite sides of the wall had led a life that was radically different not only in ideology but also in the nature of their everyday lives. What does this do to a person? A surprising, lively and on occasion confusing document.

Jayce Salloum (CA), Untitled part 2: Beauty and the East
video | 1999-2003 | 50 min. | English spoken | courtesy Argos (Brussels)

The Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) is a central theme in the work of the Canadian-Lebanese Jayce Salloum (1958). Beauty and the East addresses issues of nationalism and the nation state, alienation, the refusal and construction of political identities, ethno-fascism, and so on. Salloum has been filming while leaving home in Vancouver, and arriving in and travelling around the former Yugoslavia shortly after the NATO bombing.

Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica (DE), Videograms of a Revolution
video | 1993 | 107 min.

Bucharest, 1989: the people rise up against the Ceaucescu regime. Harun Farocki (1944) and Andrei Ujica (1951) reconstruct the ten-day uprising on the basis of 125 hours of film shot by amateurs and professionals. The film switches from television presenters to stirring images of demonstrators and street fighting against the forces of law and order. A live revolution, with the Romanians in the leading part.

Richard Gordon & Carma Hinton (US), The gate of heavenly peace
Video | 1995 | 180’

Gordon and Hinton, with more than a dozen Chinese students, analyse the violent end of the peaceful six-week student protest on the Square of Heavenly Peace in 1989. The Chinese government tried in vain to make it impossible to show this film.

Rabih Mroué (LB), I, the Undersigned
video | 2007 | 4 min. | Arabic spoken | English subtitles

After the end of the civil war in Lebanon, the theatre-maker Rabih Mroué and with him many other Lebanese citizens, waited in vain for official apologies from those who had been responsible for what occurred during the war. No apologies were forthcoming, however. So Mroué decided to offer apologies of his own. His video installation I, the Undersigned is officially the very first public apology to the Lebanese people. ‘The time has come to proclaim my apologies to you, brothers and sisters, friends, comrades, companions and enemies.’

8-11/10 – before & after the performances – Kaaistudio's

Deimantas Narkevicius (LT), Once in the XX Century

video | 2004 | 7 min. | courtesy Jan Mot Gallery (Brussels)

The Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius (1964) sees his films as digital sculptures. They examine our perception of history and how it is coloured by ideologies and utopias. In Once in the XX Century he re-edits television images of a statue of Lenin being pulled down, making it seem as if the communist leader were being put on a pedestal.