THE ABDUCTION OF THE IMAGE
The gesture of abducting an image reveals an absence; it points to that which circumscribes it. Often, we are also the ones who surround the images, the ones that make up the films and ask for our gaze, the image that has disappeared wanders like a ghost, without adherence. The image that has disappeared wanders like a ghost, without adherence. What do we expect from images today, and from cinema as an art of the moving image?
The abduction of the image is a film cycle based on a local event: the abduction of the Virgin of Nuria, which took place in 1967 as a protest action. However, the programme is extrapolated to other geographies, with a dialogue between films from different periods and contexts, which are grouped together to question the appropriation of images, colonial despoilment, conservation policy, the museum space and the iconology and iconoclasm of cinema.
Friday, 23rd August
Inaugural event – Cinema Catalunya – 17:30h
Free session
3_Eras
María Virginia Jaua y Roberto Riquelme
2020. 24′. Spain. VOE. Digital.
3_eras is a film essay based on Las tres eras de la imagen (Akal, 2010) by the Spanish theorist and critic José Luis Brea. Divided into three major phases, those of the image-matter, the filmic image and the e-image or electronic image, it analyses how different technical forms lead to differentiated means of production, distribution and reception of images.
The film essay, written by María Virginia Jaua and Roberto Riquelme, has sought to transfer the Spanish thinker’s theoretical work, which crystallises in what could be considered his last and best book, to the language of the image-movement. It is an unusual and unpublished work in a broad sense of the word. Not only as a work with images and dialogue with writing, art and cinema, but also as a “film essay”. That is to say, with value for artistic research and the archive, and with which we finally seek to complete and expand the theoretical reflection through the same images that are subject and object of the same “work”.
*Pel·lícula basada en el text 3_eras (2019) de José Luis Brea.
Inaugural Session- Cinema Catalunya – 22:00h
Ticket sales at the box office
La Quimera
Alice Rohrwacher
2023. 130’. Italy, France, Switzerland. VOSE. 35 mm, 16 mm, Super-16 to digital.
We all have a chimera, something we want to do, to have, but never find. For the gang of “tombaroli”, the thieves of ancient tombs and archaeological sites, the chimera is to dream of giving up work and becoming rich without effort. For Arthur, the chimera resembles Benjamina, the woman he lost. To find her, Arthur will confront the invisible, he will search everywhere, he will penetrate the earth, determined to find the door that leads to the Beyond of which the myths speak. On his daring journey between the living and the dead, forests and cities, feasts and solitudes, the destinies of the characters are created, all in the search for their chimera.
Saturday, 24th August
Double Session (101′) – Cinema Catalunya – 17:30h
Ticket sales at the box office
Todxs queremos un lugar al que llamar nuestro
We all want someplace to call it our place
Daniela Delgado
2022. 13′. Ecuador, Spain. VOE. 16 mm to digital.
A hairdresser in Madrid receives many people who come to see and touch a replica of the Virgin of Quinche. A priest recommends placing the statue in a church in the old quarter. The story continues when the replica of the Virgin is returned to the hairdresser.
Otro sol
Other Sun
Francisco Rodríguez
2023. 88’. Belgium, Chile, France. VOE. 16 mm to digital.
Otro Sol is a group of real and invented characters trapped in a film. It is also a purgatory of retired thieves set on the coast of the Atacama Desert. The film is circular and seeks to invent and verify the myth of Alberto Candia, a Chilean international thief who robbed the Cathedral of Cadiz in Andalusia in the late 1980s.
Cinema Catalunya – 20:00h
Ticket sales at the box office
Tótem
Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico
2022. 65′. Chile, Mexico. VOE. Digital.
As the numbers of missing persons in Mexico continue to rise, Tótem explores the particularities and deeper roots of this kind of violence, and imagines new forms of resistance and community in the movements that have arisen against it. The story of two archaeologists searching in vain for the ancient Olmec chief in an obscure ritual appears at recurring intervals, questioning the very act of documenting the absent and the invisible.
Sunday, 25th August
Shortfilms session (61′) – Cinema Catalunya – 17:30h
Ticket sales at the box office
Gardien
Guardian
Varvara Mashanskaya
2024. 28’. Switzerland. VOSE. Digital. Spanish Premiere.
Tatum, a young man in his forties suffering from deep depression, is hired as a museum guard. Tasked with guarding a sculpture that exerts a mysterious fascination on the public, he gradually falls under its sway himself.
Et les chiens se taisaient-D’Aimé Césaire
And the dogs were silent, by Aimé Césaire
Sarah Maldoror
1978. 13’. France. VOSE. 16 mm to digital.
This film takes us through two spaces that bear the stigmata of slave colonialism: the reserves of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and the placid landscapes of Martinique. Leading a group of young students through the museum’s archives, the “rebel” confronts African masks and sculptures, and delivers a powerful critique of slavery and injustice. His voice resonates and is projected in the vision of a new world, liberated from the oppressive clutches of the colonial capitalist regime. This short film reflects Maldoror’s commitment to education, culture and social change. It appropriates the museum and subverts it, transforming it into a potential space for cultural decolonisation.
A so-called archive
A so-called archive
Onyeka Igwe
2020. 20′. United Kingdom. VOSE. Digital.
A So-Called Archive documents a building that has long since been empty of its contents, with desolate rooms filled with dust, cobwebs, clocks standing in mouldy celluloid film canisters and defeats. The materials found in this building are difficult to see, not only because of their nature, but also perhaps because people don’t want to see them. Meanwhile, at the Bristol Temple Meads, the former British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (2002-2009) had originally been located around the corner from one of the most famous railway layouts in Brunel’s Isambard Kingdom. The museum included photography, film, sound and collectables from across the early British Empire. Like the Nigerian Film United building, this building had also been emptied; the museum closed shortly after allegations were reported of several items from the collection being sold illegally. A So-Called Archive draws these early archives – along with their histories of advertisement, monetisation, documentation and now abandonment – as a metonymy for the enduring messes between the UK and its former colonies. They are and remain the purulent images of home that we cannot or will not or choose not to see (Mason Leaver-*Yap).
Double Session (110′) – Cinema Catalunya – 20:0h
Ticket sales at the box office
Twist Again
Twist Again
Andy Guérif.
2019 13’. France. VO. Digital.
The painting Descent from the Cross, painted by Rosso Fiorentino, comes to life. Christ is progressively lowered from the cross by the biblical figures, who surround him before disappearing from the field of vision.
Caravaggio
Derek Jarman.
1986. 97’. United Kingdom. VOSE. 35 mm to digital.
The painter Michelangelo Merisi, born Caravaggio, is dying far from home. On his deathbed he recalls the beginnings of his life as a painter. The boy Michelangelo left his native Caravaggio when he was orphaned and moved to Milan, where he started out as a painter in different workshops until he set up his own workshop in the Rome of the popes, winning the favour of the Church, which commissioned numerous works from him. Then came fame, money, homosexual love affairs, political and religious intrigues, envy and crime.
Monday, 26th August
Cinema Catalunya – 20:0h
Ticket sales at the box office
L’Hypothèse du Tableau Volé
The hypothesis of the stolen painting
Raúl Ruiz
1978 64′. France. VOSE. 35 mm to digital.
In his flat, an art collector guides the viewer through six works by an academic painter, Frédéric Tonnerre, reproduced as living paintings, to reveal the enigmatic scandal they caused in their time.
Tuesday, August 27
Cinema Catalunya – 20:0h
Ticket sales at the box office
El cielo está rojo
The sky is red
Francisca Carbonell
2020 75′. Chile. VOE. Digital
In 2010, 81 inmates died in a huge fire at San Miguel prison in Chile’s capital, Santiago. Inside, they were trapped behind bars; outside, dozens of family members waiting for visiting hours to begin watched helplessly as their loved ones cried out for help. The gates were locked. This reconstruction shines a light on the utter failure of the prison administration, which held twice as many prisoners as allowed.
Wednesday, August 28
Cinema Catalunya – 18:30h
Ticket sales at the box office
Paraula de mare
A mother’s word
Felip Solé
2001 60’.Catalonia. VOC. Digital.
*With the presence of Felip Solé (director).
*Gollut Lifetime Achievement Award.
*The ticket to the film includes the panel discussion “El abduction of Virgin Nuria.”
The history of the Vall de Nuria from its origins to the moment when Catalan nationalist activists kidnapped the image of the Virgin of Nuria in 1967 and returned it in 1971. The documentary explains how this action was carried out and also reconstructs the history of the sanctuary during the Civil War and the immediate postwar period with a careful selection of witnesses and documents from the 10th and 11th centuries deposited in the diocesan archives of La Seu d’Urgell, which illustrate the origins of the cult of Nuria up to the moment when the Generalitat de Catalunya took control.
Friday, August 30
ShortFilm Session (76′) – Cinema Catalunya – 19:30h
Ticket sales at the box office
Filme dos outros
Others Film
Lincoln Péricles
2014. 20′. Brazil. VOSE. Digital. Spanish Premiere.
In the tradition of found footage cinema, Filme dos outros (Film of Others) is an exercise in the re-appropriation of images that explores the ownership and theft of images in the digital age. From the position of moderator of the gaze of the other, Lincoln Pèricles articulates a narrative game based on images extracted from memory cards of devices stolen in upper-class neighbourhoods in the city of São Paulo.
Ozr El Wzzah
The excuse of the goose
Mahdy Abo Bahat and Abdo Zin Eldin
2023. 25′. Egypt, United Kingdom. VOSE. Digital.
In this work that transits dreams, taking us from the earthly to the eternal, the Egyptian audiovisual artists Abdo Zin Eldin and Mahdy Abo Bahat place the focus on a farmer and his goose, and from here they set out in search of the esoteric frequencies that inhabit their land. The Cairo necropolis and the Sayyida Nafisa Sufi festival drive the mystical ritual, surrounding us with a cinematic ecstasy enhanced by the precision of the framing and the accuracy of the editing. Will we ever solve the riddle of existence and its destiny? Obviously, we will never succeed, but Ozr lo Wezzah leads us in a virtuoso and luminous way into this unfathomable abyss.
Foyer
Ismaïl Bahri.
2016. 31′. Tunis, France. VOSE. Digital.
At first glance, Foyer appears to be a projection without film or only shows a white, pulsating screen. The voices accompanying this white come from people who have addressed the cameraman of the film while he is working to ask him about what he is doing. At the same time, the filmmaker is observed by an amateur photographer, a curious passer-by, a policeman or a group of young people. As they unfold, the conversations reveal to the viewer the beginnings of an ongoing filmic experience and, by it, the beginnings of the film they are watching. This experience intrigues, interrogates and transforms the camera into a foyer, a hearth (it has the image of a fire) around which they gather, talk and listen. Interested first in the camera, the words quickly unfold singular points of view and trace a kind of social and political landscape. They give a glimpse of the context in which the experience of a work that gropes for a way through which the world is shaken unfolds.
