Auguste Orts

Persona turns a cinematic gaze on Écran Somnambule (2012), a performance by Latifa Laâbissi, that is in turn based on the film “Mary Wigman tanzt” (1930), an excerpt of her “Hexentanz” (1926). In the film, a physical experience of the disruptive power of the masked figure is conveyed in a circumscribing camera movement.

Kinshasa and its inhabitants are in darkness. They wait and struggle to get access to light. Between hope, disappointment and religious faith, Tongo Saa is a subtle and fragmented portrait of a population that, despite the challenges, is sublimated by the beauty of Kinshasa's nights.

Resonating Surfaces is triple portrait, of a city, a woman and an attitude to life. For the personal story of Suely Rolnik, who is a Brazilian psychoanalyst currently living in São Paulo, involves the Brazilian dictatorship of the sixties as well as the Parisian intellectual climate surrounding Deleuze and Guattari in the seventies. The film is woven through by different themes: the other and the relation to otherness, the connection between body and power, the voice and, ultimately, the micropolitics of desire and of resistance.

The road, the house, the key, the animals, Bamssi. Images with the urgency of an Instagram story create a dialogue within the family across the sea: Mourad and Fairuz, Tunisia and abroad. You have to go to the roof to see something of the surroundings: the railway behind the house. Away from the house, away from home. Street dogs and cats in front of the house. Without a house, without a home. The sound of the train carries a disturbing longing. The image of the sea opens up a dangerous desire. To stay. To dream. Time passes both slowly and quickly when the possibility of new life disrupts the routine.

Literature and psychoanalysis are summoned here around a mythical figure of the intellectual, artistic and psychoanalytical history of pre-dictatorship Argentina: Oscar Masotta. Having introduced Lacan’s thought in Latin America as well as structuralism, having taken action in defense of Pop art, and having himself initiated legendary performances, Masotta is at the heart of that wonderful Fifties and Seventies effervescence. But for as distinct a character as this one, Dora Garcia neither films the biopic, nor does she merely deliver the servile reconstruction of an anthology of his « actions ». Better still, and through an impure mix of both, with other elements at the forefront, she proposes floating evocation, much like psychoanalytical listening.

The town of Fungurume is situated in the province of Katanga (D.R. Congo) and the hills and mountains surrounding Fungurume form one of the world’s largest copper and cobalt deposits. In pre-colonial times the area was already a major centre in the copper trading network that ran across Central Africa. Today the mountains have become the property of the American Tenke Fungurume Mining consortium (TFM). From 2009 onward, TFM’s mining activities have been in full swing, causing the resettlement of thousands of local Sanga inhabitants. Pungulume focuses on Sanga chief Mpala and his court elders while they are rendering the oral history of the Sanga people, against the backdrop of the industrial destruction of the landscape that anchors Sanga memory and identity.

An Experiment in Leisure explores the link between free time and creativity, between leisure and the kind of imaginative contemplation it facilitates.

A documentary by Wendelien van Oldenborgh.