Program 5

Short film program consisting of:

BLACK STRANGERS
A ÁROVRE
THAT DAY, ON THE RIVER

Total running time approx. 68 min.

Black Strangers

An intimate filmic conversation on belonging: After seeing him mentioned on a Bishop’s Transcript held in Gloucestershire Archives, Dan goes for a walk in the woods in search of Daniel, a man buried in Nympsfield on December 31, 1719 and described on the document as “a black stranger”. Whilst walking Dan talks directly to Daniel, speculating about the potential parallels between him and his namesake, from walking routes and speeds to shoe sizes and foot lumps, and opening up to Daniel about how he’s also been made to feel like a black stranger in Gloucestershire after his involvement in a contested heritage debate in his hometown of Stroud. Dan then goes on to wrestle aloud with the problems that come with trying to read the archive at face value and fill in its gaps before trying to think up a fitting way to celebrate the departed Daniel.

A árvore

In October of 2018, a year of overwhelming political, personal, and existential transformations, I decided to start filming a diary. I wanted to free myself from cinematographic practice as a constant exercise of projection and representation, and find a living cinema that would reflect the extraordinary quotidian side of life, with everything that usually remains on the sidelines, on the edges of a film. Without scripts, without projections, the camera would become an accomplice to some moments of life that would remain stored on celluloid until the day they would be revealed—a kind of metabolism of the image, where the practice of filming would be nothing more than a vital metabolic exercise. The images would thus become a mere capture of energies—spectral, historical, emotional—in the form of visual representations.
A ÁROVRE is a ritual-film about my father—the artist, musician, and mystic of the forest—Guilherme Vaz, a man who lived and reflected on the frontier, on the fatal advance of modernity over the peoples of the earth, a man who wrote music instinctively, who thought of cinema as his “spiritual father” and, above all, whose lived life was his greatest work. (Ana Vaz)

That Day, on the River

In Lei Lei’s THAT DAY, ON THE RIVER, newspaper clippings, historical photographs, and a film about a female basketball player serve as the source material for an exploration of his father’s childhood in provincial China.
“‘In fact, I’ve been doing well in school since I was a child,’ my father smiled. In 2016, my father and I traveled to Ningdu by bus to do preliminary research for my animated feature film SILVER BIRD AND RAINBOW FISH. We did the field recording and looked for the house where he lived as a boy and the bridge he walked on to the school. During the trip, we talked about his childhood memories and things he wasn’t good at.” Lei Lei