| Theatre Cinema: December 2013 |
 4, 8 December 2013 Cinema Room Admission free Wed 4 December, 7pm The River Ran RedDocumentary, directed by Jakob Michael Hagopian, USA, 2009, 60’ The River Ran Red is the epic search for survivors of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 along the Euphrates River. From his archives of 400 testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses, award-winning filmmaker J. Michael Hagopian weaves a compelling story of terrifying intensity, taking the viewer from the highland waters of the river to the burning deserts of Syria... and to the final resting place of those whose blood ran red in the waters of the Euphrates. The Witnesses Trilogy is a series of three documentary films written, directed and produced by J. Michael Hagopian and based on his filmed interviews of 400 survivors of and eyewitnesses to the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Hagopian chronicles the near extinction of the Armenian people against the sweeping canvas of the lack of human rights and the absence of democratic traditions and principles in the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The films document the Turkish leaders’ actions as an organized and systematic program of annihilation of the Armenian homeland in the Turkish Ottoman Empire, with transportation of Armenian deportees by rail to the far reaches of the Deir ez-Zor desert and massacres and ethnic cleansing operations along the Euphrates River. Film as part of VoicEncounters, practical seminar Sun 8 December, 5pm Wielopole, WielopoleDocumentary of Teatr Cricot 2, directed by Andrzej Sapija, Poland 2005, 29’ A screening to mark the 23rd anniversary of Tadeusz Kantor’s death. Film in Polish with English subtitles The 'Wielopole' of the title is Kantor's hometown. The characters have been given the names of his real relatives, which does not by any means indicate that he is staging his own upbringing. The space of onstage action (...) is an open child's room, which the mechanisms of memory try in vain to furnish. (...) The field of the action is marked off by a plain wooden wardrobe in the background and to the left (The Uncles hung their clothes there, the whole family hid there). Ahead of it stand the iron bed where Uncle Józef, the Priest, died – and also the doors through which Uncle Olek entered. To the right are a lonely window outside which, according to Uncle Olek, 'it was twilight or dawn', a plain wooden table with several chairs (the place where the whole family gathered), and the small heap of real earth with a cross and cemetery spade driven into it. (...) At the rear is the one (movable) wall, made of plain boards nailed together: through this wall occurs the ambiguos procedure of populating this 'dead world'. (…) Pictures summoned up according to the precise plan disintegrate into meaningless, grotesque exchanges of sentences and continually repeated gestures (…). Krzysztof Ple¶niarowicz, The Dead Memory Machine. Tadeusz Kantor's Theatre of Death, transl. by W. Brand, Black Mountain Press, Aberystwyth 2004, pp. 232–239. |