Centre Pompidou, Cité internationale des arts, Palais de Tokyo
Programme of screenings
Autumn 2022​
For 2022, the Association Portes Ouvertes sur l'Art is proposing a programme of artists' films in various Parisian institutions.
As part of the Prospectif cinéma cycle at the Centre Pompidou on the 29th of September 2022, at the Cité internationale des arts on the 8th of November 2022, and in echo to the exhibition "Shéhérazade, la nuit" at the Palais de Tokyo, with a looped screening from the 15th December 2022 to the 8th January 2023.
This programme, conceived by Stéphanie Cottin, reveals artists who were mostly born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Caught up in the flux of a post-colonial history that led them into exile, these artists distance themselves from media clichés to reformulate their stories or those of their parents, which are often ignored.
They film as close to reality as possible, attentive to the gestures and words of a daily life that is both tiny and large. The intimacy they maintain with their subjects reveals the complexity of the situations, but also the humanity and strength of those who do not let doubt destroy their dream.
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Ce qui nous pousse, 2021
Courtesy Anaïs-Tohé Commaret
Ce qui nous pousse
29 septembre 2022 - 19h-21h, Cinema 1
Centre Pompidou, as part of Prospectif cinéma 2022
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*For your information, most of the films are only subtitled in English
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By evoking the contemporary crises that throw more and more men, women and children onto the roads, the artists underline the incredible inner strength they need to resist, to move forward and simply to exist in such situations. They put the individual back at the heart of these migratory occurrences, its fragility and tenacity, its nightmares and dreams, its suffered or chosen invisibility, its resilience, its freedom.
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The works draw up portraits of men, women and children caught up in an eminently political daily life. They evoke the reasons for a departure, the tribulations of a journey or the difficult adaptation to a new identity. Inhabited by their forced uprooting or haunted by that of their parents or grandparents, the artists conjure up political assignments and give flesh to an experience that its over-mediatisation has transformed into a cliché and emptied of reality.
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Some inscribe their subjects in a geography and a temporality, leaving it to the succession of sequence shots to reveal lives in waiting. Others challenge cinematic grammar to better translate the constraints that weigh on shaken lives and the inner strength needed to break free. They plunge their characters into the instability of fragmentary framing and skin-deep editing, with no beginning or end, which refer to violence, broken dreams and daily difficulties. The camera is their best ally, like an alter ego. Situated at a good distance, horizontal and tender, it records the voices and gestures with simplicity, understanding and sometimes humour.
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Anaïs-Tohé Commaret, Ce qui nous pousse (2021, 22 min 28 s)
Majd Abdel Hamid, Double Sheet (2021, 5 min 51 s)
Fadi Idris, La Veine de la vie (2018, 9 min 44 s)
Sara Kontar, A wave (2021, 3 min 30 s). 3350 km (2022, 8 min 50 s)
Mykola Ridnyi, NO, NO, NO (2017, 22 min)
Zoya Laktionova, Diorama (2018, 11 min 18 s)
Screening followed by a conversation between the artists, Stéphanie Cottin, curator and Alicia Knock, curator at the Centre Pompidou