Film

Amsterdam Art Weekend at IDFA: Tracking Traces

30 November - Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam
17.00 - Free for members

November is slowly coming to an end. Leaves are whirling down and more time is spent indoors. Just before December hits us, there’ll be a final ray of light beaming in: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. IDFA provides an independent and inspiring meeting place for audiences and professionals, offering the experience of more than 300 documentary films from November 20 to December 1. On November 30, Amsterdam Art Weekend presents: Tracking Traces. A program loaded with art documentaries by Rebecca Digne, Basir Mahmood and (Subbacultcha favourite) Dick – ‘El Demasiado’ – Verdult. Scroll down and reserve your tickets fast. Not-to-be-missed.

Sad to tell you, but all spots for this screening have been taken! <3 

Metodo dei Loci

Eye Cinema 2
Rebecca Digne / Italy, 2019 /4 min / World Premier

Rebecca Digne portrays the method of loci by having an elephant walk through a garden. With its proverbially infallible memory, the animal paces along the the garden paths—calmly, but with purposeful determination. The gardens are at the Villa Medici in Rome, where the French Academy has been established since 1804, a time of renewed interest in the ideas of Cicero. It’s an oasis of tranquility in the otherwise busy city, a refuge as our inner selves can be when life threatens to become too chaotic. Digne’s visual haiku looks surreal, but it has an unmistakably philosophical slant.

Good Ended Happily

Eye Cinema 2
Basir Mahmood / Netherlands & Pakistan, 2019 / 13 min / World Premiere

Visual artist Basir Mahmood is curious to see what happens if he leaves the filming to others. In Monument of Arrival and Return, he kept away from the film set, and sent his instructions to a local crew remotely. This time, for Good Ended Happily, he merely sketched a framework within which his work was to be executed by an independent crew from the film industry in Lahore, Pakistan—known as “Lollywood.” All he told them was that they had to reconstruct the U.S. Special Forces operation in which the Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed.

The artist left the realization of the film entirely to the imagination of the crew, who thus had the space to portray the military operation according to their own ideas. This new reality, partly filmed in first-person perspective, lies somewhere between the actual events and a fictional story. It has deliberately become an imperfect reconstruction, located in the exciting realm between the intention of the artist and the interpretation of the film crew.

Viva Matanzas

Eye Cinema 2
Dick Verdult / Netherlands / 2018 / 50 min / European Premiere

Dutch Admiral Piet Hein’s conquest of the Spanish treasure fleet in 1628 still speaks to the imagination. He took advantage of the lack of wind to lure the Spanish fleet—with its precious cargo of South American silver destined to finance mercenary armies in Europe—into Cuba’s Bay of Matanzas, where the ships ran aground on sandbanks. After firing a salvo of shots across the bow, the Dutch boarded and the Spanish surrendered, without a single fatality. The booty included 177,000 pounds of silver, 66 pounds of gold, 1,000 pearls, 37,375 animal hides, 361 cases of sugar, and 3,000 sacks of indigo and carmine dyes.

Villagers in Aragon, Spain commemorate this naval battle with a masked dance. Artist Dick Verdult films this ritual as an over-the-top costume drama, accompanied by electronic music, lending a comical tone to this tale of strategic deceit and ignoble loss. Praise is heaped upon both the winning and the losing party in this violence-free conflict, which eventually freed two continents from war.

Ready to consider the documentary genre differently? Save your November 30th! In collaboration with Amsterdam Art Weekend and Eye Filmmuseum.