Vintage political paranoia from Belgium, Eisenstein&rsquo;s posthumous outing as a homosexual, a mountain of mutilated female bodies and a Brazilian family album. On the psychology of collecting and the dangerous tendency to also categorise people.

Deep Focus

Regained

Family of Man

IFFR 2017

Endless scenes of men staring at female corpses. From beyond the grave an off-screen voice testifies about the forensic fetishisation of her body.

What Happened to Her

A procession of cheap snapshots, most likely assembled from discarded family albums. Voices reminisce about childhood, while the camera  explores the fading colours.

Ghost Children

In 1920s and 1930s Milan, Piero Portaluppi became a successful architect, as well as an enthusiastic filmmaker. His collection of amateur films not only illustrates his career but also gives an impression of a society increasingly under the spell of Mussolini.

L' amatore

Images on celluloid eventually deteriorate. In fact, a loss of colour is already noticeable in this poetic collage of recycled, predominantly magenta fragments.

Answer Print

As a teenager, Eisenstein always signed his drawings 'Sir Gay'. The waggish essayist Rappaport sees clear signs of his sexual orientation throughout the Russian director’s film oeuvre.

SERGEI/SIR GAY

Footage from the 1950s evokes memories of both modernist euphoria and the Cold War. The soundtrack however refers to 1980s Belgian paranoia.

Conseil d'Etat

Essayist Georg Wasner used fragments from three films to breathe new life into a text from 1909. This was the year that Norman Angell published his manifesto <em>Europe’s Optical Illusion</em>, in which he warns of violent reactions to globalisation, which even then was in the air.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025

Family of Man

In this combined programme

Answer Print

Conseil d'Etat

Ghost Children

SERGEI/SIR GAY

What Happened to Her

Regained

Accelerando

L' amatore

Answer Print