SCREENING PROGRAMME BY PASCALE CASSAGNAU
"The territory of documentaries reveals a working process common to artists and film-makers – the fact that they set up film elements in a non-linear way and outside purely narrative structures. In that regard, the relationships between documentaries and reality or narration are always critical and ambiguous,” says Pascale Cassagnau. A theory borne-out by the Paris-based art critic’s choices for this screening. They include Dora Garcia's ‘Zimmer’ (2006), in which the director relates the encounter between a Stasi officer and a female civilian informer in an anonymous flat in Leipzig without explicitly outlining the setting and historical context; 'L’Amour du Peuple' (2005) by Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan deals with the memories of a former Stasi officer and is based upon documents, archives and films from authentic Stasi film archives and fragments of movies made by East German dissidents who imitated the surveillance and monitoring techniques used by officers of the political police; Clemens Von Wedemeyer's 'Report on China' (2006), is a film shot in Shanghai, underlining links between Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ and the reality of Chinese urban spaces to show the analogies existing between two eras of a political, urban utopia.