KOROPA – Laura HennoCourtesy : Galerie Les filles du calvaire - Production: Spectre
KOROPA – Laura Henno
Courtesy : Galerie Les filles du calvaire - Production: Spectre
 

MK2 Grand Palais


Film and video cycle

 

SUNDAY, NOV 12

1PM

MON ONCLE D’AMERIQUE - Alain Resnais - 125” - 1980 With: Gérard Depardieu, Nicole Garcia, Roger Pierre
VO : French

4PM: Frontière(s)

KOROPA - Laura Henno - 19" - 2016
Courtesy : Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire
Production: Spectre

Ben is a pilot and repairman of kwassa-kwassa, traditional fishing boats of the Comoros, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean divided by a violent border inherited from colonisation.
Like in the Mediterranean, many risk their lives in the attempted crossing from Anjouan to Mayotte, the archipelago’s only island that remains French today. To escape misery, Ben abandoned fishing to become a people smuggler. In this shadowy enterprise, he does his best to stick to his ethics and ensure his passengers’ safety. This is the trade he is passing on, in the dead of night, to Patron. To escape a conviction, Ben has no other choice than to make of this child a “commander”, as he is too young to be put in prison.
Koropa plays out this silent rite of passage, this solemn apprenticeship, the transmission of a know-how that owes as much to deceit as to the art of piloting a hostile ocean.With its short and radical form, its abstract space, Koropa escapes the documentary form to produce a classical drama in which two silent figures, those of father and son, two bodies share a perilous journey on the brink of the land of the dead, navigating a ghost-haunted ocean. A crossing that awakens memories of many others, in a world where seas arise as borders and tombs.
(Olivier Marboeuf)

LANDSCAPE AT NOON - Roy Samaha (co-scripted with Masha Refka) - 66'' – 2014-2017
Courtesy : Orjouane Productions et Galerie Tanit
Copyright : Roy Samaha

Nasri, a young film-maker is working on his latest movie, The Last Portrait, set during the Lebanese civil war. He feels that all his reconstructed scenes look fake, he is unable to represent death. In spite of researching in archives, watching videos of events from the time, he is obsessed with the idea that there is an element of truth missing and lacking a certain tension of reality. Feeling at a loss, Nasri decides to take a research trip to Cyprus. There, a buffer zone reminiscent of the one that divided East from West Beirut, is still present; he thinks that situating himself where this kind of geopolitical tension is still explicit, might help him with his film. But once he crosses the buffer zone to the Turkish side, his initial purpose is forgotten. He takes a sightseeing tour on his own. While walking in the port, he is approached by a stranger whoupon seeing him taking pictures, strikes a conversation with him. Nasri, for some reason, presents himself as a retired war photographer. The stranger offers to hire him to take one last portrait of a recently deceased old British expat aristocrat, "as such is our custom", he informs him. Nasri accepts. Embarking on what is supposed to be a short trip, he will find himself wandering into a nightmarish' journey, that has the outward appearance of a summer vacation in sunny Mediterranean landscapes, between Cyprus, Greece and Turkey."

6PM

KAILI BLUES - Alain Resnais - 125” - 1980 With: Gérard Depardieu, Nicole Garcia, Roger Pierre
VO : Chinese – Subtitles : FR

Movies at 4pm are screened in the original language with English subtitles