Opening: 27.12.2014 @3pm
Location: Saigon Ranger
5/7 Nguyen Sieu Street,
District 1
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

This special screening will showcase two films by cinema greats of the ‘Third Cinema Movement’ a movement that began in Latin America in the 1960s/70s denouncing neocolonialism, the capitalist system and the Hollywood model of producing cinema for mere entertainment. Both Tahimik and Marker are considered pioneers of essay filmmaking – a film genre that takes the style of the documentary with oral commentary and composed with the signature style of the auteur. It often blends fiction and experimental narratives. These films, which do not separate political content from aesthetic enquiry, demonstrate an aesthetic in which editing is considered a political act.

3pm

‘Why is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow’ (174mins)

Kidlat Tahimik

Tahimik’s virtually unknown masterpiece chronicles Tahimik and his young son’s lives as they traverse the tumultuous 1980s and early 1990s in the Philippines—a great democratic revolution deposes a dictator; a massive volcanic eruption covers the world in ash—and asks how one might build a new and better future out of the disasters.

* Language: English

7pm

‘Far from Vietnam’ (115mins)

Chris Marker

This epic 1967 collaboration between cinema greats Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch and Alain Resnais was made in protest of American military involvement in Vietnam “to affirm, by the exercise of their craft, their solidarity with the Vietnamese people in struggle against aggression (Marker).” The film includes documentary footage; a fictional vignette and a monologue that dramatize the self-interrogation of European intellectuals; including interviews with Fidel Castro and Anne Morrison amongst others.

* Language: French with English subtitle

—

Kidlat Tahimik participates in ‘Encounter’, a lecture series which is part of a large artistic endeavour called ‘Conscious Realities’, initiated and organized by San Art in partnership with Prince Claus Fund.