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Join us for a post-screening discussion with filmmakers Kamila Kuc and Sylvia Schedelbauer, in person.
A special program of five recent short films by international, award-winning women artists, curated by the National Gallery’s film programmer Joanna Raczynska. From the heart of the earth through various emblematic and mythical sites, with powerful voices and memories culminating in the brilliance of the sun, this program forms a feminist passage of collectivity, unity and power.
Program
Singing in Oblivion begins within the Jewish cemetery in Währing, Austria. Black and white images of overgrown, untended graves lead to scans of found glass slides of anonymous faces from the past, as optically printed photograms, and bird song mark time. (Eve Heller, Austria, 2021, 35mm, 13 minutes)
Song for the New World is a powerful and mournful experimental short told in the first person. Following the disappearance of a man in Scotland, his daughter recalls his final words. (Miryam Charles, Haiti/Canada, 2021, 9 minutes)
The Time that Separates Us circles an ancient salt-rock formation overlooking the Dead Sea, near Ghor Al-Safi, Jordan. In the process, this Pillar of Salt becomes a portal through which to face the Jordan River Valley with its heavily militarized border and complex infrastructures of tourism. Stigmatized realms of desire, sexuality, and gender are encoded within a highly mediated landscape and its related sites of mythology. (Parastoo Anoushahpour, Lebanon, 2022, digital, 34 minutes)
Her Plot of Blue Sky features a group of women who reside in a care home in a small market town of Sefrou, Morocco. The film is a record of the day when Amazigh women inhabitants of the care home decided to use the cameras themselves. Woven into their narratives is Rachida Madani’s mournful poem, Tales of a Severed Head, published in 2012. (Kamila Kuc, UK/Poland, 2023, digital, 22 minutes)
In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun, incorporating Japanese writer Hiratsuka Raicho’s poem of the same title, is a personal homage to Japanese suffragettes and feminists, to the light and energy of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and to the sun that shines within. (Sylvia Schedelbauer, Germany/Japan, 2022, digital, 18 minutes) Caution: strobe effects are used within this flicker film.
