It Is Better to Be than to Obey

— With a presentation by Narimane Mari and screening with live music from Cosmic Neman, Quentin Rollet and Lori Schenberg

In this film the narration is at once elementary and complex: a man digs his own grave to bury himself in but in the act animals and elements try to stop him. Life and death, contained within a hypnotic, circular visual poem with mystical influences, reminds us that humanity was never at the centre of nature and that other gazes are possible. Mari explores a post-humanist cinema plagued with uncertainty and mystery, one which dies and is reborn elemental and dispossessed, reincarnated in free thinking between images, beings and situations which, rather than a philosophy of images, is a new way of sensing.

— With a presentation by Narimane Mari and live music by Cosmic Neman, Lori Schenberg and Quentin Rollet in the first session

Narimane Mari’s first feature, awarded the Jury Prize at the Marseille International Film Festival (FID Marseille) and the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX). This original film on the Algerian War of Independence, made on its fiftieth anniversary, invokes the real from fiction: a group of children play on the beach while they express dissatisfaction over their diet based solely on red beans and the flatulence it causes. As the film progresses, with no historical setting and only through language, we find ourselves at the height of French occupation in 1960s Algeria. Unable to remain indifferent to the violence of the occupiers, the group attack the house of a vicious colonist wearing a pig mask. In disguise, they desecrate a Christian cemetery and kidnap one of the French soldiers. Once on the beach, they subject him to the torture of eating the red beans they have been forced to consume since the occupation. A playful and political fantasy with a spirit akin to Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933), and with wonderful acting performances by the child protagonists.

— With a presentation by and talk with Narimane Mari in the first session

Mari´s personal story of her relationship with Michel Hass (1934–2019), a poet, performer, abstract painter and the film-maker’s late partner. The film is a soulful portrait sketched from the images of their life together and interspersed with fragments of Hass’s work, while the editing works as a concise declaration of a beautiful and poignant loving memory. Film as experience serves as the basis for intimacy treated poetically, where illness does not overshadow the person, but instead helps us understand the experience of life and death in their length and breadth.

The international premiere of the film-maker’s most recent work, made in cooperation with Emma Bontron, Lucie Taffin, Tigran Avédikian, Antonin Boischot, Antoine Morin, Olivier Boischot and with the special collaboration of Gertrude Stein, Ghérasim Luca, Daniel Johnston and Alan Vega, among others. The assembly and editing in this film are all-important because it is about, as Mari puts it, “the history of the repetitions of our repetitions. A staging as a never-ending exercise is also a never-ending story of how much we love one another because we gaze at one another. With film everything can be shown that little bit closer”. The premiere will be followed by an accordion concert by Lucie Taffin and a fresh screening of Holy Days.

Produced by documenta 14, this contemporary epic poem on the history and tenacity of colonialism, ways of living freely in a community and the cracks inside the system of consumption forges a socio-political essay structured in three acts. The first act shows us the military exercises and teachings in the military barracks of former French President Charles de Gaulle in Algeria, whereby soldiers follow a drill to out-of-sync voiceovers and texts extracted from late nineteenth-century colonial literature. In the second act, a community wanders around the Greek island of Cythera in an alternative future and between activities of communal living, exploring how to live together. The third observes conversations between anti-system militants and activists Heval Mazlum and Annie Paparousou in the Prosfygika squat. A fragmentary experience which explores the epistemology of displacement while it practices renewed citizen identities.