Now in its second year, Queensland Film Festival seeks to re-energise local film culture by providing a stimulating environment for thinking and talking about the best contemporary international cinema.
As a prelude to the full program (15 – 24 July 2016), QFF and IMA have partnered again in 2016 to present a free screening on Saturday 9 July at 3pm, featuring three films.
A Distant Episode
Ben Rivers | 2015, 18 minutes, HD Courtesy of LUX
A meditation on the illusion of filmmaking, shot behind-the-scenes on a film being made on the otherworldly beaches of Sidi Ifni, Morocco. The film depicts strange activities, with no commentary or dialogue; it appears as a fragment of film, dug up in a distant future – a hazy, black and white, hallucinogenic world.
Towards the Possible Film
Shezad Dawood | 2014, 20 minutes, HD Courtesy of LUX
Towards the Possible Film is a study in parallel universes – and the sparks that fly when worlds collide. As much of a projection into a far-off future as a flashback to a long-forgotten past, Dawood’s vivid 20-minute tableau combines the resonance of a mythic fable with the hallucinatory haziness of a waking dream. A slow, tense standoff evokes those pivotal moments in colonial history when isolated civilisations first make contact – as well as other alien encounters beloved of science fiction.
Sector IX B
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc | France and Senegal 2015, 42 minutes
Betty (Betty Tchomanga) is a young anthropologist who is working on the Dakar- Djibouti mission, her research taking her from the IFAN Museum in Dakar to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Seeking to push the limits of her discipline, she reconstructs the medical prescription box given to the original expedition members and takes the drugs herself. In the grip of the narcotics’ psychedelic side effects, Betty becomes haunted by a recently discovered family archive.
Taking inspiration from L’Afrique fantôme — the controversial diary by French surrealist writer Michel Leiris recounting his participation in the ambitious Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic expedition of the 1930s — Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s arresting first feature reflects on identity, cultural appropriation, and the transference of memory through objects.
Sector IX B will be introduced by Professor Susan Best, author of the forthcoming book Reparative Aesthetics (2016).
Space for this screening is limited; please email press@ima.org.au to confirm your attendance by Thursday 7 July.
