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Event
SILVERED WATER, SYRIA SELF-PORTRAIT
look at first-hand video accounts of violence in modern-day Syria as filmed by activists in the besieged city of Homs.
"Introducing an essential dialectical element to the film, Mohammeds powerful found footage essay is gradually woven into new footage shot on the ground during the siege of Homs by co-director Wiam Simav Bedirxan, a woman whose Kurdish name gives the film its title. She and Mohammed begin a correspondence, one of words but also presumably of video, he from afar in Paris and she walking the besieged streets in Syria, wandering among exploding buildings, deserted streets, and with young children in revolutionary schoolrooms. Her footage, more solitary, high-definition, less violent and more diary-like than than the piecemeal shotgun blast of images from Mohammeds collection, feels like a direct extension of her sight, sensations and thoughts. Less pointed (and loaded) then the key sequences of the Mohammeds montage, nevertheless Bedirxans images, when alongside or feathered into the found footage, speaks of filming as living, the camera seen as a weapon by the regime.
Her footage is not of protests or bloody deaths but of the interiors, city corners, injured street cats, and young children that make up her daily, isolated life, images, she says, that flee into my small camera. Mohammed, despite some desperate-feeling footage shot in Paris, fundamentally seems to have no camera, only eyes and videos. The two, Bedirxan and Mohammed, trade longings and self-doubts, each somewhat talking to themselves, images as monologues. But when placed next to or within the work of the other, the film forms a kind of larger scale correspondence between the two, of exile and besieged, man and woman, Syrian and Kurd. He speaks of different kinds of cinema, cinema of realism, of the marvelous, of murder, the poetic, and of fantasy. He speaks of cinema of murderers, and of cinema of victims. Implicitly, what he speaks of and what he and Bedirxan have made is a cinema of witnessing and of experiencing, of nearness and distance, and of exile and of homeland." - Daniel Kasman, MUBI
Official Selection: Toronto Film Festival, Cannes Special Screening, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Busan Film Festival, London Film Festival, Vienna Film Festival, CPH: DOX Copenhagen Film Festival and Torino Film Festival
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LocationSPECTACLE THEATER (View)
124 South 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY 11249
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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