Programme PFF 2019

03/05 (Friday), 12:30-14:30
Intro: Philosophy for children and the exploration of worlds
– Dr. Johanna Hawken from France
Educational programme
Faculty of Philosophy, University “Ss. Cyril and Methodius” – Skopje

 

 

Introductory lecture by  Dr. Johanna Hawken on Philosophy for Children, and sharing the experience from the introduction of this philosophical practice in France (focus: Maison de la Philo).

The lecture and visit of Johanna Hawken is realized with the support of the French Institute in Skopje.

 

03/05 (Friday), 19:30 –21:00
Projection of a French documentary film about the practice of philosophy with children
JUST A BEGINNING (Ce n’est qu’un debut, 2010)
dir. Jean-Pierre Pozzi &  Pierre Barougier (FR), 97’
Educational Program
French Institute in  Skopje 

 

 

 

JUST A BEGINNING follows a nursery school class for a period of two years. But this is a very unusual class as the children, aged three to five study… philosophy! Seated in a circle around a ritually lit candle, the children, in a fresh, funny and sometimes merciless manner, approach the universal subjects of love, power, difference, growing up, death etc. Little by little the philosophy workshop becomes a privileged moment where each child reflects on the words of the other, learns how to listen and to build a discourse. From now on they will be able to think for themselves! With their emotions, their unusual expressions and their contradictions, the children of this nursery school deliver a single testimony on an innovative experiment. “Just A Beginning” is the fabulous true story of a school with an eye on the future.

For the full programme of the segment “Filmosophy for children” from the Educational programme of PFF, see here.

09/05 (Thursday), 19:00
WINGS OF DESIRE  (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987)
dir. Wim Wenders (DE/FR), 128’
Special Screenings: Film meets Philosophy
Topic: Wim Wenders: Travelling as a Quest for Our Own Identity
– Marjan Vujovich (Director of the Museum of Yugoslav Cinematheque)
Official Opening of the 9. Philosophical Film Festival

What is it that people know, but angels don’t know? Wenders’s timeless film about seeing doesn’t have people as the protagonists, but angels, whose peaceful gaze along with the one of the camera shows a different perspective (or possibility) for seeing the world. The angels in WINGS OF DESIRE are good, invisible creatures overlooking the world, listening to the thoughts of mortals while trying to offer them consolation. One of them, Damiel (Bruno Ganz), wishes to become human and “to enter the history of the world” when he falls in love with the beautiful trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin). Peter Falk, playing himself, helps him during his transformation, introducing him to the small pleasures of life and to “what it is to be a human”. WINGS OF DESIRE marked the coming of Wenders back to Germany, being his first German film after spending eight years in the United States. Shot two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the film is an homage to the “divided” city from a unique perspective, that of the angels. The film whose co-writer is Peter Handke (Als das Kind Kind war…), won the Best Director Award in Cannes (1987) and the European Film Awards (1988) and since then it has earned its cult status.

After the film follows a talk and discussion with Marjan Vujovic, Head of the Museum of the Yugoslavian Cinematheque in Belgrade, Serbia (in Serbian)

10/05 (Friday), 18:30
ON BODY AND SOUL (Teströl és lélekröl, 2017)
dir. Ildikó Enyedi (HU), 116’
Special Screenings: Film meets Philosophy
Topic: The Intimate Communication between the Body and the Soul
– academic Katica Kulavkova (МASA)

 

In this unconventional love story two introverts, both employees in a meat factory, unexpectedly discover that they share the same dream every night. At the beginning, both are confused and find it hard to believe that such a thing is possible at all. How is it possible to share the same dream with someone else? And, if it is possible, what if you meet that other person – what would you feel, fear or happiness? After a while, as they begin to accept this odd coincidence, Maria and Andre will try to recreate what happens in their shared subconscious into the real world.
ON BODY AND SOUL is a great comeback of the Hungarian director and screenwriter Ildikó Enyedi, winner of the Golden Camera on Cannes in 1989 for her first feature film “My 20th century” (Az én XX. Századom). ON BODY AND SOUL is a film in which “the dream is a setting for a metaphysical encounter between Maria and Andre and (…) represents a form of metaphysical existence without which reality would be too profane” – says academic Katica Kulavkova. The eternal philosophical problem of the body and the soul in Enyedi’s film obtains a poetical and oneiric artistic form. The film has won the Golden Bear on the Berlinale in 2017 and was Hungary’s nominee for Best Foreign Language Film for the Oscars in 2018.

After the film follows a talk by academic Katica Kulavkova from the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences (in Macedonian).

 

10/05 (Friday), 21:30
NAMME, 2017
dir.  Zaza Khalvashi (GE/LT), 91′
Official Selection of Feature Films

 

 

Ali’s family has inherited a mission – taking care of a local healing water and treating sick fellow villagers with it. Three sons are skeptical about the water, only the young daughter Namme stays as the guardian of family traditions. A hydropower plant is being constructed nearby, which might be a cause of environmental changes. One day the spring water starts to disappear and the father remembers the old tradition, according to which the water will not return unless a sacrifice is being made…

NAMME, Georgia’s bid for 2019 Oscars, treats the ties between the traditional and the modern with a certain mystical tension. Water is at the heart of many philosophical, religious and mythological belief systems, and in Khalvashi’s film, it is at the core of this lyrical story. “NAMME is a hymn to the majestic mountain landscapes and pagan folk traditions of southwest Georgia (…) ” whose “rarefied beauty and transcendent tone should appeal to fans of the post-Tarkovsky school of meditative mysticism ” – says Stephen Dalton from the Hollywood Reporter. The world premiere of the film was in the selection of the 30. Tokyo Film Festival and the European premiere was on Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia.

 

10/05 (Friday), 23:15
POST GLOBAL TRIO – PHILOSOPHICAL MEDITATIONS
Audiovisual Performance
Additional Programme
Cinematheque of N. Macedonia

Post Global Trio is an experience. An experience that you can feel on the journey through distant lands. Inside or outside thyself. Image of clear and subtle soundscapes and landscapes. Enter into the woods. Leave the city behind the horizon. Forget about it… Now enter more deeply. In thyself. And find yourself. The way you were before you have long forgotten. The project is created as a continuity of communication, collaboration, the necessity of developing a certain scene. Sound picture of long-term mutual philosophical meditations.

Post Global Trio is a project between Toni Dimitrov, Dimitar Dodovski and Martin Georgievski.

 

11/05 (Sunday), 18:30
IDA, 2013
dir. Paweł Pawlikowski (PL/DK), 82’
Special Screenings: Film meets Philosophy
Topic: Ida: An Attempt for a Cross-Cultural Reading
– Naum Trajanovski, PhD candidate (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)

Poland, 1962. Anna is a beautiful eighteen-year-old woman who is preparing to become a nun in the monastery where she lived since a child as an orphan. When she learns she has a living relative, her mother’s sister Wanda, she must visit her before taking her vows and learn some more about the roots of her long lost family. Together, the two women embark on a voyage of discovery of each other and discover the mysterious past of their family. Anna finds out that her aunt is not only a former hard-line Communist state prosecutor but also a Jew.
Who is Anna/Ida now and where will her path take her? Divided between her religious life and the future in the monastery, from one side, and the possibility of a life outside the monastery, a life she never believed it was possible until now, she has to put her decision to a test. This poignant and intimate drama of Pawlikovski which deals with the questions of identity, family, faith, the feeling of belonging and history has won the European Film Award for Best Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language in 2014. The film has also won the 2015 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.

After the film follows a talk on the topic “Ida: An Attempt for a Cross-Cultural Reading” by Naum Trajanovski, MA (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw) (in Macedonian)

 

11/05 (Saturday), 21:30
BREATHING INTO MARBLE (Kvėpavimas į marmurą, 2018)
dir. Giedrė Beinoriūtė (LT/LV/HR), 97’
Official Selection of Feature Films

 

 

Beinoriūtė states: “BREATHING INTO MARBLE is about an attempt to warm up a stone. It may be impossible, but it’s worth trying.”
Izabelė and Liudas are a typical middle-class couple, living in their rural house with their son Gailius, who suffers from epilepsy. One day, Isabele talks her husband into adopting six-year-old Ilja, a headstrong yet withdrawn little boy from a children’s home. (“I cannot explain, I just feel,” says Izabelė about her decision to adopt Ilja). But with the arrival of the new edition, family life starts to change drastically for all of them and it soon becomes clear that Ilja doesn’t fit into this new world. As their marriage starts crumbling, they make a decision which will affect both their lives in the years to come.
This psychological drama, Beinoriute’s feature debut, examines the relationships between the people, the invisible threads linking their lives, their responsibility for each other, guilt, as well as the attempt to forgive and to love. The film is based on the novel “Breathing Into marble” by Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature in 2009 and had its international premiere on Karlovy Vary IFF, in the East of the West programme.

 

12/05 (Sunday), 16:00
BADIOU, 2018
dir. Gorav & Rohan Kalyan (US), 83’
Additional Programme
Topic: The Symptom Badiou (in Macedonian)
– Dr. Marija Todoroska (independent researcher in Philosophy)
Cinematheque of N. Macedonia

Nietzsche wrote that any philosophy is always a biography of the thinker. Alain Badiou’s life suggests that the opposite can also be true. From his birth in Morocco to the events of May 1968 in Paris, to his twilight years as a nomadic public intellectual, philosopher Alain Badiou’s own biography is perhaps his most complex and thought-provoking work yet.
With intimate access, filmmakers Gorav and Rohan Kalyan have produced the first feature-length documentary about one of the world’s great living philosophers. By addressing the contradictions in Badiou’s life through cinema, the filmmakers confront the inherent contradictions of cinema itself: thought and action, interiority and exteriority, presence and absence. In order to bring a sense of empathy, clarity, and critique to their complex subject, they must ask a question as old as the medium itself: “Can cinema think?”
The film was a part of the Official selection of Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic (2018) and CPH:DOX in Denmark (2019).

12/05 (Sunday), 18:30
10 MINUTES OLDER (Vecāks par 10 minūtēm, 1978)
dir. Herz Frank (LV), 10’
Special Screenings: Film meets Philosophy
PFF DOC. – THE BALTIC NEW WAVE AND THE POETIC DOCUMENTARY FILM

 

10 MINUTES OLDER is one of the most influential short films in the history of cinema. A representative of the Baltic New Wave, the film contains no words; it just observes some children watching a puppet show. In ten intense minutes most of the human feelings live in the open faces of children – joy, fear, pity, terror and happiness. In just one take – for 10 minutes – the face of the child reflects the eternal battle between good and evil, becoming a “mirror” of the invisible human soul.
Herz Frank, one of the most famous documentary filmmakers of Latvia who at the beginning of the ’60s was among the first to establish the so-called Riga poetic documentary school – said: “I have not filmed anything extraordinary. All my films are about life, love, and death”, and on his filmmaking he says that apparently his method is also as “simple as that” enabling to make shattering films that leave their impact not with a sensational plot but by posing ethical questions with harsh and existential edge. Inspired by this simple, but extraordinary idea, 15 international directors, film auteurs from Europe and USA, among which Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, Claire Denis, and Aki Kaurismäki – have made their own versions of the film – 10 MINUTES OLDER: TRUMPET and 10 MINUTES OLDER: CHELLO (2002) which had their premiere on Cannes IFF in 2002.

 

12/05 (Sunday), 18:30
BRIDGES OF TIME (Laika tilti, 2018)
dir. Audrys Stonys & Kristīne Briede (LV/LT/EE), 78’
Special Screenings: Film meets Philosophy
Q&A with the director Kristīne Briede

PFF DOC. – THE BALTIC NEW WAVE AND THE POETIC DOCUMENTARY FILM

 

“Is there a meaning to filmmaking?” Or, what is it that we are doing in documentary cinema? This new documentary by Audrius Stonys and Kristīne Briede is a meditative journey which leads us to (re)discover the Grand Masters of the Baltic poetic documentary – Herz Frank, Uldis Brauns, Ivars Seleckis, Mark Soosaar, Andress Sööt, Robertas Verba, Henrikas Šablevičius and Aivars Freimanis and their poetic treatment of the ontology of documentary creation making up the unique phenomenon in the history of cinema – the Baltic school of poetic documentary.
With their captivating black & white images of man and nature, they “film the Earth, but remember that Heaven is above us” (Frank), filming the substance, the reality, but also showing us the ideal and the spiritual contained in the material. It is films which are humane, meaningful, and poetic, showing us a new way of looking at the world and reconsidering the very nature of documentary cinema as an art form. The film of Audrius Stonys and Kristīne Briede, through a creative building of bridges of time with this unique collection of archives, is promising a discovery of a new wave in the history of cinema – the Baltic New Wave of poetic documentary and its less-remembered generation of cinema poets from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

 

12/05 (Sunday), 21:30
GARDEN (Garten, 2018)
dir. Peter Schreiner (АТ), 136’
Official Selection of Feature Films

 

 

Drifting always between the fictional and the documentary, and through an unconventional dramaturgy, GARDEN tells of a love triangle between Awad, Herman, and Julia. Julia finds out she is suffering from a life-threatening disease. Awad, the film director, was kidnapped by the militia, kept imprisoned and tortured. Herman, the stage designer, is plagued by nightmares. The whole plot of the film is taking place in an unidentified garden and undefined mental spaces, through an atmosphere of the peculiar unclarity of the dream, the nightmare, the state of uncertainty… A film in which a garden becomes a scene for all the protagonists, heaven and hell or, maybe even a purgatory. GARDEN is a contemplative film by Peter Schreiner whose work gives an echo of the atmosphere in the films of Bela Tarr, and whose previous film LAMPEDUSA was a part of the Official Selection of PFF 2017. The Film had its premiere on Rotterdam IFF, as part of the Deep Focus programme.

 

13/05 (Monday), 18:30
Day 1 (133 min.)
Official Selection of Short Films

SPECIAL SCREENING:
THE MONK (2018), dir.  Zharko Ivanov (МК), 12’

1. THE REMAINS (Avashesh, 2018), dir. Manoj Babu Panta (NP), 16’
2. DUA2LITET (2018), dir. Rafael Montezuma (ES), 5’
3. NIGHT TALK WITH A HANGMAN (2018), dir. Yakov Sivchenko / Яков Сивченко (RU), 20’
4. FLOATING (Flutuar, 2018), dir. Artur Serra Araújo (PT), 13’
5. TEA (2018), dir. Shokir Kholikov (UZ), 15’
6. REALITY (Realität, 2017), dir. Gian Suhner (DE), 7’
7. A YOUNG GIRL (Een Jong Meisje, 2018), dir. Jeannice Adriaansens (BE), 16’
8. NIGHT PORTRAIT (밤의 조상 , 2017), dir. Jueon Woo (KR), 15’
9. HEILERIJK (2018), dir. Zoë Boogaerts (BE), 14’

 

13/05 (Monday), 21:30
8 MINUTES AND 19 SECONDS (8 минути и 19 секунди, 2018)
dir.  Petar Valchanov, Lyubomir Mladenov, Theodor Ushev, Nadejda Koseva, Vladimir Lyutskanov, Kristina Grozeva (BG), 85’
Official Selection of Feature Films

 

An anthology film composed of six short stories of the most translated contemporary Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, created and directed by 6 different crews from Bulgaria.
The minute you start watching this film, the Sun may already have gone out, but you won’t know it yet. 8’19”- that’s all the time we have until the news about the death of the Sun reaches us. That’s what it takes for the light to travel from there to here. And then the darkness comes… The theme of the Apocalypse does not necessarily have to be expressed through a global cataclysm, angels of death, fire, and destruction. The end of the world can be something very personal, intimate and an almost silent human experience.
The narrative mosaic of 8 MINUTES AND 19 SECONDS will introduce the focal point of this anthology: the sense of mortality, the moments before the very end, our feeble existence and the fear that comes with knowing all of that.

 

14/05 (Tuesday), 18:30
Day 2 (131 min.)
Official Selection of Short Films

 

 

1. VALLEY OF UNAWARENESS (Dolina Nieświadomości, 2018), dir. Mikołaj Borowy (PL), 15’
2. POEM 1 (2019), dir. Daniel Sauermilch (USA/PL/DE), 6’
3. ELENA (2017), dir. Ayerim Villanueva (CR/DO/PT/ES), 20’
4. IN DOG YEARS IM DEAD (2019), dir. Kenji Ouellet (DE), 13’
5. MONDAY (Segunda-Feira, 2018), dir. Sebastião Salgado (PT), 15’
6. SPRAIN (Entorse, 2018), Pierre-Louis Umdenstock (FR), 6’
7. THE BEGINNING (2018), dir. Agim Abdula (MK), 13’
8. DOLMEN (2018), dir. Oksana Belousova (RU), 11’
9. WHEN WE ARE GONE (Кога не нема, 2018), dir. Stefan Palitov (MK), 19’
10. AFTERNOON CLOUDS, (2017), dir. Payal Kapadia (IN), 13’

 

14/05 (Tuesday), 21:30
THE PIGEON THIEVES (Güvercin Hırsızları, 2018)
dir. Osman Nail Doğan (TR), 82’
Official Selection of Feature Films

 

 

16-year-old Mahmut’s life consists of feeding pigeons and making money from stealing others’ pigeons. His biggest dream is to have the best pigeons. One day, one of his pigeons escapes and does not return. When Mahmut finds a pigeon nesting on a roof, he meets Ismail, an 8-year-old living in that house. This meeting becomes one of the most important turning points that will affect both lives…
THE PIGEON THIEVES, the first feature film of the director which was part of the Official Selection of the 24. Sarajevo Film Festival is a film about growing, maturing and rising into life. A warm story about friendship and the passions of youth, seen through the specific prism of the culture of living in Anatolia. And as the director Doğan asks, speaking about the film, the dilemma is in front of us: “What is good, and what is bad? Can you be good behaving badly?“ Or, how can a person be good if life is ruthless and cruel, people are heartless and selfish, and the world is foreign and cold?

 

15/05 (Wednesday), 11:00
Lecture: Film-Philosophy after Jacques Derrida – Dr. David Sorfa (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Amphitheater 4, Philosophical Faculty – Skopje
Additional Programme

The work and influence of Derrida has been rather overlooked in contemporary film theory and film-philosophy. Sorfa will present an argument for the importance of Derrida for the future of Film Studies.

In collaboration with the Faculty of Philosophy (UKIM)

 

15/05 (Wednesday), 18:30
CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)
dir. Alfonso Cuarón (UK/US), 110’
Special Screenings: Film meets Philosophy
Topic: Children of Men: Anthropocene’s ‘Père-version’; Patriarchy’s Demise
– Dr. Gabriella Calchi Novati (C.G. Jung Institut, Zürich)

 

London, 2027. The youngest person in the world dies at the age of 18 and humanity is faced with the danger of its own extinction. In this dystopia in which women for almost two decades are infertile, the world is on the brink of collapse, and all humanity and morality start eroding. Great Britain is the only country in which most immigrants are trying to find asylum, but very quickly turns into a police state resembling Orwell’s 1984. When among the refugees a miraculously pregnant woman shows up, a former activist will try to revive the last hope for the survival and the future of humanity on Earth. CHILDREN OF MEN is a British-American dystopian thriller directed and co-written by the Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón. One of the most prominent films today, the film can be seen as an artistic representation of the so-called Anthropocene (the period of time during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the Earth regarded as constituting a distinct geological age). The screenplay is based on the book “Children of Men” by Phyllis Dorothy James (1992), and in 2016 was selected by BBC Culture’s poll as 13th among 100 greatest films of the 21st century by 177 international critics. What would happen in a future, in which man is not the “center” and the “measure” of the world? A world in which some kind of future is possible without him?

After the film follows a talk on the topic Children of Men: Anthropocene’s “Père-version”; Patriarchy’s Demise by Dr. Gabriella Calchi Novati (visiting professor on Trinity College Dublin and a psychoanalyst in training at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich) (in English)

 

15/05 (Wednesday), 21:30
STYX (2018)
dir. Wolfgang Fischer (DE/AT), 94’
Official Selection of Feature Films

 

Rike is a 30 year old woman and a successful doctor in the ER. When she sails out with her boat towards Gibraltar, after a strong storm, she comes across a sinking ship of refugees. At the beginning she tries to call for help following the maritime laws exercising her civic duty, but besides all cries for help, her calls are left unanswered. Rike is faced with a decision to make and see if she tries to act by herself and save whatever she could save…
An allegory of the cold and careless world, Wolfgang Fischer’s nautical thriller is a film about the survival and the death threats which migrants who travel towards Europe face. Depicting a society in which the benevolence of the individual has drowned in the cruelty of others, the film illustrates the moral dilemma between the world of the real and the world of the ideal and it puts on test the individual responsibility versus the collective responsibility. Adhering to strict minimalism in its aesthetics, STYX sends out an urgent call for awaking the world that is falling deeper and deeper into indifference and lack of empathy. The film opened the Panorama section of the 68. Berlin Film Festival and it was one of the tree LUX Prize finalists of the European Parliament in 2018.

 

16/05 (Thursday), 19:00
SLACK BAY (Ma Loute, 2016)
dir. Bruno Dumont (FR/DE), 122’
Special Screenings: Film meets Philosophy
Topic: What Are We Laughing At? Skepticism as a Joke in Film-Philosophy
– Dr. David Sorfa
Official Closing of the Festival and Awards Ceremony 
(Jazz night with SILENT SPRING QUARTET after the screening)

 

During the summer of 1910, several tourists have vanished while relaxing on the beautiful beaches of the Channel Coast. Infamous inspectors Machin and Malfoy soon gather that the epicenter of these mysterious disappearances must be Slack Bay, a site where a small community of fishermen and other oyster farmers live. Among them evolves a curious family, the Brufort, lead by the father nicknamed “The Eternal” and his son Ma Loute. On the other side, towering high above the bay stands the Typhonium, the magnificent mansion of the van Peteghems’, an eccentric bourgeois family which spends every summer on the bay…
This unusual comedy with elements of slapstick and burlesque, and with one of the most peculiar roles of Juliette Binoche on the big screen, was nominated for the “Golden Palm” on the Cannes International Film Festival in 2016. The beginning of the 20th century marks the growth of the bourgeoisie, industry, capitalism and, therefore, the rising class struggle, and Dumont’s film is exactly about this founding narrative, a primitive film about our age. For the director, cinema is “another and perhaps funnier way to do philosophy” – a discipline which he pondered for a long time in university when he studied Aesthetics in Cinema and wrote his thesis “Philosophy and Aesthetic of the Underground Cinema.”

After the film follows a talk on the topic What Are We Laughing At? Skepticism as a Joke in Film-Philosophy by Dr. David Sorfa (Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh and editor-in-chief of the journal Film-Philosophy) (in English)

 

16/05 (Thursday), 22:30
JAZZ NIGHT with SILENT SPRING QUАRTET
Cafe bar Martini – Leptokarija (behind the Cinematheque of N. Macedonia)
Additional Programme

The musical landscapes of Silent Spring Quartet are moving in the spaces between experimental, improvisational and ambiental musical expression. In spontaneous improvisations and in the act of “live composing” are reflected the musical experiences of Deni Omeragik (double bass), Ninoslav Spirovski (clarinet, tenor, saxophone), Martin Georgievski (electronics, guitar) and Vladimir Martinovski (tambourine, kaval, percussions). In the course of 2019 Silent Spring Quartet is planning to record their first album.

 

27/05 (Monday), 20:00
TOKYO-GA (1985)
A loving look, or the Camera as the beholder
dir. Wim Wenders (DE/USA), 92’
Retrospective Wim Wenders

 

 

Inspired by the film legacy of the Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu, Wim Wenders travels to Japan seeking for Tokyo from the films of Ozu. In this documentary film, the award-winning director and producer combines inserts from one of his favorite directors through the images of Tokyo 30 year later – now a noisy metropolis full of trafic and bustle – in the attempt to discover where the real world and the world of film (maybe) intersect. Wenders interviews Ozu’s regular cinematographer – Yûharu Atsuta and one of his favorite actors who plays in most of Ozu’s films – Chishû Ryû.
And while trying to rediscover Tokyo through the eyes and through the camera of Ozu, Wenders discovers a new Tokyo through the pachinko, the golfers on city roofs, the neon lights in Ginza, baseball games in a cemetery and the wax-overed food in the restaurant windows of this Tokyo from the ‘80s. Two “Tokyo Stories”, by two directors who get to know each other by pointing their look/camera towards the same city. TOKYO-GA was shown in the “Un certain Regard“ programme on the Cannes Film Festival in 1985.

Introduction on Wenders and Ozu by professor Stefan Sidovski

 

28/05 (Tuesday), 20:00
THE SALT OF THE EARTH (2014)
Enduring images, or the Art of Seeing
dir. Wim Wenders & Juliano Ribeiro Salgado (FR), 109′
Retrospective Wim Wenders

For the last 40 years, the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado has been travelling through more than 120 countries all over the world, in the footsteps of an ever-changing humanity, documenting the dark side of the human condition in the hidden corners of the world. He has witnessed some of the major events of our recent history; international conflicts, starvation and exodus. After many years spent transmiting these images to the other end of the world, he is now embarking on the discovery of pristine territories, of wild fauna and flora, and of grandiose landscapes as part of a huge photographic project, which is a tribute to the planet’s beauty – the project “Genesis”.
Sebastião Salgado’s life and work are revealed to us by his son, Juliano, who went with him during his last travels, and by Wim Wenders, himself a photographer. THE SALTH OF THE EARTH has won the Special Prize in the „Un certain Regard“ programme on Cannes IFF in 2014 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. Timeless film for anyone who loves photography and who believes that “the act of seeing” is not a given, but the enduring images – in order to be found, first need to be sought for.

 

29/05 (Wednesday), 20:00
ROOM 666 (Chambre 666, 1982)
The Future of Cinema
dir. Wim Wenders (DE/USA), 45’
Retrospective Wim Wenders

 

 

During the 35th Cannes International Film Festival in 1982, Wim Wenders invites a group of 15 international directors to answer few questions about the future of cinema, each one at a time, in the same hotel room (Room no. 666, hotel Martinez). The main question that his colleagues needed to answer was: “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” Each director is given one 16 mm real, or 11 minutes to answer the questions, so that any differences in the answers can be correctly interpreted as reflecting differences between persons rather than differences in the process that produced the answer.
ROOM 666 included European auteurs as well as Hollywood directors, direvtors with narrative and experimental approaches, men and women filmmakers who work in the film industry and that are presenting their films or they are simply present at the 35th Cannes Film Festival. The directors came from France, Italy, Brazil, Lebanon, Germany, Turkey, Philippines and the USA, and among them were Antonioni, Herzog, Fassbinder, Godard…The film which was presented at the Cannes IFF in 2006 presents us with an interesting reflection on the future of cinema by some of the greatest filmmakers of our time.

 

30/05 (Thursday), 20:00
PINA (2011)
Which future of seeing?
dir. Wim Wenders (DE), 106’
Retrospective Wim Wenders

 

 

Pina Bausch is an icon of contemporary dance. Famous as Isadora Duncan or Martha Graham, she revolutionized the language of dance. Created to instigate emotions in the spectator, the unique multimedia creations of Pina offer incomparable visual experiences. The idea of Wenders, conceived together with Bausch, was to make a film about dance as we have never seen before, a film that could borrow the best from the new 3D technology (which Wenders eagerly anticipated) so it could give dance its “third dimension” on the big screen. The film was interrupted by Pina’s sudden death in 2009. After some hesitation, Wenders decided to continue with the project together with Pina’s assemble Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, and to make a film which was, not only a film-homage about one of the biggest choreographers of our time, but also a film which, through the language of cinema and through a certain film perspective, could “revive” the world of dance. At the time when on 3D technology was seen mainly from a commercial standpoint, Wenders poses a different question: In which way could technology serve seeing and, if there is a difference between “looking” and “seeing”, which future of seeing will we decide on?

TICKET PRICES:

Single ticket: 100 den.
Reduced single ticket: 50 den.
– price of a ticket for any projection for students and retired people; short films (13 & 14 May)
Daily ticket: 150 den. (for all events in the day)
Daily reduced ticket: 100 den.
– price of a daily ticket for students and retired people; daily ticket for 13 & 14 May

 

* The tickets can be found on the caisse in the Cinematheque of N. Macedonia immediately before every projection (no reservations) and the events in the Retrospective Wenders and the PFF Caravan are for free.