Le fort des fous, first presented at Documenta 14, is a key work in the context of A History of Shadows' film programme. Not only in terms of its subject matter – the legacy of colonisation – or how it deals with the re-appropriation of history and memory, but also because Mari freely and playfully uses so many of cinema’s tools to deal with the past, to reflect on the present.
In three acts, we see re-enactments, improvisations and interviews performed and conducted with the inhabitants of Algiers (where Mari hails from), Kythira Island and the Prosfygika community in Athens. Departing from material records of the early colonial 'scientific expeditions' and 'taming campaigns' led by the French colonisers in North Africa, the story follows a community of young nomads and wanderers as they form an imagined utopian society in response to imperialist rule.
Programme
A series of films that shows the diverse and contemporary ways in which cinema revisits the past and re-evaluates the position of history’s losers.
Read more about this programmeThe maker, born in 1977, made this montage film about his endlessly fascinating year of birth. In Italy the streets were full of groups protesting, there were deaths during riots in Rome, Milan and Bologna, while armed movements attacked politicians and journalists. At the same time, there was a creative boom on many fronts, punk broke through and Elvis died.
127'
Italy
IFFR 2018
Tesa Arranz, a key figure in the 1980s Madrid scene and the lead singer of The Zombies, has painted over 500 portraits of outer-space creatures.
23'
Spain
IFFR 2018
The filmmaker, daughter from a forced marriage in a Khmer Rouge detention village, returns with her father to meet his former persecutors in the obscure intimacy of the village in which they lived together for four years. Between past and present, the forgotten spectres re-emerge and the story, face-to-face, is finally told.
71'
France
IFFR 2018