Cycle of short film screenings

Francis Alÿs
The Silence of Ani
Armenia, Turkey I 2015

13 minutes

Filmed in an ancient Armenian town on the Turkish border, The Silence of Ani (2015) is set in the ruins of a city whose quietude is broken only by birdsong. In a landscape as strange as it is breathtaking, a group of children play the duduk (a traditional double-reed wooden flute) as a game of hide-and-seek unfolds. Their repeated calls become a ballad for the future – or an elegy for the past.

Jonathas de Andrade
O Peixe (The Fish)
Brazil I 2016
23 minutes

On the northeast coast of Brazil, a village of fishermen engage in a ritual of embracing the fish they catch. These affectionate gestures mark the passage from life to death and depict an ambiguous relationship between species, imbued with tenderness, violence and domination. Between fiction and reality, documentation and fantasy, O Peixe recalls the roots of this relationship: the constant exercise of force, power and devotion.

Elouan Le Bars
PEAK PERFORMANCE
France, 2024
28 minutes

Drawing its narrative from corporate games, PEAK PERFORMANCE (2024) is a documentary fairy tale set in a space in perpetual motion, evoking both an exhibition space and a meeting room. The film features seven of the director’s friends playing versions of themselves as they participate in team-building activities and share stories from their professional lives, between authenticity and performance.

Caroline Mesquita
Noctambules
United States I 2021
10 minutes

Noctambules plunges us into a dreamlike cinematic encounter between a sleeping artist – Caroline Mesquita – and her own sculptures. This baroque fantasy imagines the actions and desires of works of art if they had the power to reverse the course of creation and re-sculpt their creator. As the artifacts turn against their creator, it becomes increasingly difficult to know which dream we’re in, or whether the objects’ intentions are adorned with vengeance or, on the contrary, a desire for intimacy.

Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Somniloquies
France I 2016
1h15

Somniloquies is a descent into the dream world of our unconscious. A city of dwarfs for rent, an alien invasion, an exorcism séance, a far-fetched military maneuver, a wild, burlesque and fetishistic spectacle, a surgical procedure gone horribly wrong, an impromptu orgy, cold-blooded murder, mass drowning, a sex contest, sudden depressurization causing nail polish to fly off… these were the subjects of nocturnal speculations by the most illustrious and voluble of sleep-talkers, Dion McGregor. An American lyricist and homosexual who dreamed in vain of Broadway, his dreams were recorded by his New York roommate for seven years in the 1970s.

Jean-Baptiste Perret
Le Sorbier des oiseleurs
France I 2018
5 minutes

A man makes a birdcall and calls out into the fog. By focusing on this craft, Le Sorbier des oiseleurs poetically explores the traditional methods of communication deployed in the Massif Central: shepherds, leading their flocks through the thick fog, would reassure the farms below by producing clearly identifiable whistles. Drawing on this heritage, the film also recounts the atmosphere of these cold lands, where the solitude of human beings is constantly confronted by the power of the landscape and the might of animals.

Ben Russell
River Rites

United States, Surinam I 2011
11 minutes

Filmed in sequence on a sacred river in Upper Suriname, the daily secrets of a Saramacan animist are revealed as time itself unravels. A swim, a fisherman pulls his net out of the water, a young girl washes clothes on a stone. This is the duration of a single take, a reel of Super 16 film.

Carolee Schneemann
Meat Joy
United States I 1964
6 minutes

Meat Joy is a performance conceived by Carolee Schneemann and presented for the first time in 1964 at the American Center in Paris, before being filmed and photographed. Facing the camera, eight performers dressed in dark underwear are given the rules of the game devised by the artist. They must interact with pieces of meat and fish brought by a ninth person, but these cannot touch the ground: each must keep them on his or her body or pass them on to another protagonist. Carolee Schneemann describes Meat Joy as an erotic, excessive rite, a celebration of flesh as material.