The March | I am Somebody | Street 66 | Terminal Norte | Scuola Sensa Fine
Listening as an affective activity that allows to hear differences, to welcome plurality and multiplicity. Listening as a premise for responding to what’s not yet known, instead of listening to reaffirm the same old stories. Assembled around this notion of listening, the films in this programme are all concerned with the fragile process of creating and maintaining communities, of building a social reality that enables difference and of developing pedagogies that make a difference. These various forms of caring resonate, echo, vibrate through a multitude of sound-images, through different histories and places, to remind us how things can change, even today.
6.30pm: Welcome + Introduction to
The March
6.45pm:
The March, Abraham Ravett, USA, 1999, 25 min
7.10pm: Introduction to the following films
7.30pm:
I am Somebody, Madeline Anderson, USA, 1970, 30 min
8.00pm:
Street 66, Ayo Akingbade, UK, 2018, 13 min
8.15pm:
Terminal Norte, Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2021, 37 min
8.55pm:
Scuola Senza Fine, Adriana Monti, Italy, 1983, 40 min
9.35pm: Discussion
Please scroll down for more information about the films.
We are pleased that throughout the festival, participants of the Waiting Times Project will share their responses and take part in our discussions about the films.
Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the
Waiting Times Project opens up the relationship between time and care, exploring how lived experiences, representations and histories of delayed and impeded time shape and create experiences of care, including healthcare.
Please note that we do not show any adverts and the programme will start on time. Start times throughout the programme may slightly shift. All films that are not in English are shown with English subtitles. You need just one ticket for the whole programme.
The March, Abraham Ravett, USA, 1999, 24 min
Persistent enquiries over thirteen years. Friendly insistence. The filmmaker as a son who questions his mother as a contemporary witness. May she remember. Details. The same history as a story, as memory, presented and told differently over the years. In the beginning of the film, Ravett quotes from The Holocaust by historian Martin Gilbert. Gilbert's attitude towards history resonates with the filmmaker's attitude. History needs to be produced in the present, again and again, as memory, retold. To value this as important, to find the time and the means for it, all of this is a labour of care. As a filmic fragment, a memory gap.
I am somebody, Madeline Anderson, USA, 1970, 30 min
“While I was there [as a staff editor at NET, National Education Television], the strike started in Charleston with about 400 Black women workers at the Medical College Hospital of the University of South Carolina. I thought to myself, “Oh, I have to make this film.” I did my regular thing of going to the networks, and they told me, “We have stringers who will be sending something in, but . . . it‘s not for a broad audience, we don‘t have the money...” But I started to research.
Then I got a call from the local 1199 [union]. They were looking for a filmmaker because they wanted to make a film about the strike. Someone had recommended me, and so, would I be interested? Yeah! I had already done so much research, and I knew what was available in the libraries. I was so overjoyed to do it. I would have done it for nothing, but this was the first time that I had a proper budget. They gave me money, time, everything that I needed to make this film. It was like the perfect storm. I looked at these women like they were my sisters because I‘d had the same experience of gender, race, and politics that they were having. When national and international attention was focused on these women, it was my story. There was no way that I was not going to make that film.” (Madeline Anderson in conversation with Ashley Clark, March 2017 for Metrograph, see link on the side of the page)
Street 66, Ayo Akingbade, UK 2018, 13 min
Dora Boatemah, who had immigrated from Ghana, led a 10-year battle with developers and local councillors, to secure the local community's right to have their say in the re-development of the Angell Town housing estate in Brixton. Artist Ayo Akingbade writes: 'I first stumbled across a black and white thumbnail picture of the late Ms. Theodora Boatemah MBE (also known as Dora) in an article about the estate in the Evening Standard newspaper whilst I was returning home from a shoot in Brockwell Park. I proclaimed: “In the future I will make a film about this woman” fast forward two years and I did just that! (...) I would say my art practice deals greatly with the everyday experience of people and their relationships with their environment. I am a big admirer of unspoken gems, those people who are able to rise against adversity and strife. I think as a young black woman, so many of the themes in the film such as displacement, gentrification, community action are issues that are universal. Who will tell our stories?' (https://www.newcontemporaries.org.uk/news/blog-post-ayo-akingbade)
Terminal Norte (North Terminal), Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2021, 37 min
A refuge in music, in sound, in the voice, in what is sung. To sing or rap about the violence that a society exerts on forms of life that deviate from the norms it has set. The sound level, music as a place of subsistence, as a line of flight, but also as a place of gathering. To regenerate. To find something in common amidst all the difference. Lucrecia Martel shows this other society in abstraction, by creating it. During the 2020 COVID-19 peak, Martel returned to her home in Salta, a province in the interior of Argentina, said to be the most conservative region. It’s where she started more than twenty years ago with
The Swamp (
La Cienaga),
The Holy Girl (
La niña santa) and
The Headless Women (
La mujer sin cabeza), forming “The Salta Trilogy.” With
Terminal Norte she leaves the crafted narrative behind, as if she allowed care to be a guide, trusting the potential of the characters to unfold their own narrative.
Scuola Senza Fine (School without an End), Adriana Monti, Italy, 1983, 40 min
In the audio track, an accordion begins, spreading an energetic vibe, and a rhythmic montage makes the first minutes of
Scuola Senza Fine look like the choreography of a party. Black and white images of women greeting, saying goodbye, embracing, kissing, giggling; in the background, as a sort of grey contrast, the apartment blocks of Affori, on the outskirts of Milan. The group had met in 1976/77 at one of the 150-hour adult education courses, a training programme for factory workers, housewives, peasants promoted by the trade unions throughout Italy in the mid-1970s. The women kept their meetings and advanced in studying after the official programme had come to an end.
"You walk into a classroom and you're in the middle of a lively discussion, twenty women debating urban planning." To talk, to discuss, and to have someone listen to you was the defining success of those late school years for the women. All their lives they had taken care of others, but hardly themselves. The filmmaker Adriana Monti joins them in this latter phase, via the feminist journalist and teacher Lea Melandri, whom she knew via the Libreria delle Donne in Milan. There is interest in a collective film project, Monti brings her camera to the meetings. Over time the interest evaporates. Monti leaves the material lying around for two years. Before she goes through it again, gives it a form, a structure. There is a great responsibility in this, how to keep alive through a film what has been lived together, what has been learned, and not to pin it down, to appropriate it. To take care of it, both the material, the form, and the people. What emerges is the potential of how care as an attitude interlock on different levels, and what power that can have.
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