Speech for a Melting Statue
A poet anticipates the removal of a colonial statue, while anti-racist demonstrators occupy Brussels streets.
10'
Belgium
IFFR 2023
The title may evoke images of gleeful, destructive anarchism, but "smashing" here signals a relationship between people and official city statues that is friendly, jovial, even a little melancholic.
Five members of the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa (which directed this year’s controversial Documenta exhibition) each walk to a spot where a monument stands. Once glorious, these figures are now a little hidden, forgotten, unseen. Each one, from Pizza Man to the Welcome Monument, embodies a transformative moment in the nation’s political history, an index of its hopes and dreams. The artists stage conversations with these objects, within a repeated format suited to gallery installation as much as to film projection.
Argentine director Díaz Morales’ Smashing Monuments is many things: homespun performance art, social essay, and a pop-cultural study of Indonesian footwear.
– Adrian Martin
IFFR 2023
A poet anticipates the removal of a colonial statue, while anti-racist demonstrators occupy Brussels streets.
10'
Belgium
IFFR 2023
Programme IFFR 2023
Just as long as it takes. The Short & Mid-length film programme offers a unique showcase of films under 63 minutes.
Read more about this programmeAn affecting meditation on the pain experienced by refugees forced to live in limbo.
12'
United Kingdom
IFFR 2023
Timeless, silent film vignettes based on songs from Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe. A tribute to early film.
7'
Germany
IFFR 2023
Flowers are stuck down and covered by tape: a wry comment on 20th-century modernist art.
3'
United States
IFFR 2023